A mind divided against itself cannot stand
As the title suggests, I had a fucked up dream last night. It was a psychological horror murder mystery. Apparently some of the dread from watching Higurashi came home to roost. The dream started innocently enough, with me attending a university that was sort of a cross between Western and Hogwarts, with elements of Arcadia thrown in. It starts to get scary when there are reports of a serial murderer stalking the area, as several people have turned up dead already. It gets disturbing when, in the course of wandering the campus and attending classes, I discover evidence, clues and various telltale signs of this murderer in out-of-the-way places, apparently left for me specifically to find. This evidence includes small objects, often electronic devices, apparently mementos of victims, as well as cryptic scribbled notes that hint at an amused calculated maliciousness. And the worst part: much of this evidence points directly at me as the culprit. In the dream I become (understandably) increasingly disturbed by what I find. I don't dare go to any authorities for fear of being accused, so I try to hide the things I find from everyone, dreading the next piece of evidence that turns up, possibly being discovered by someone else before I can get to it.
So now I am in the unenviable position of trying to discover and expose the real murderer without being accused myself. The stress starts to get to me, to the point where I'm becoming increasingly paranoid and beginning to hallucinate, jumping at shadows and not trusting anyone. I begin to feel a "presence" of some kind. I can feel it close by, I can feel its amusement as it watches me. Sometimes it is so close that I feel that I could turn around and it would be there, or just on the other side of a door, or pacing me on the other side of a wall when I'm walking down a hallway.
So when you're in a situation like that, what can you do? I went to see Prof. Snape. Yes, that's right, the dude from Harry Potter, although he seemed to have mellowed considerably since his time in the fantasy genre. At this point I was about a cat's sneeze away from going stark raving mad, so I told the guy that I'd been feeling a presence in the back of my mind, that followed me everywhere, watched me, occasionally inserted thoughts into my head, etc. Now this is the truly bizarre part of the dream: I got the feeling that my dream-self was talking about me, the dreamer. By now I'd sort of been fading in and out of consciousness, enough to know that I was dreaming but not enough to get out of the dream. Maybe when you have a dream that is so vivid and "real" a part of you accepts it as reality, while the tiny conscious part of your brain that stays on standby doesn't buy it, so here they were clashing. It seemed like I had partitioned off a part of my subconscious that retained most of its autonomy, despite my ability to occasionally embody it. And it was aware of me! As if the conscious part of me that recognized the fact that I was dreaming was an entirely separate entity! What a mess.
What I still don't know for certain was just who the murderer actually was. The best theory I can come up with is that my dream-self was the murderer, but when I embodied him (as opposed to watching in the third person) the combined "I" didn't know anything about it (because I didn't). So in this case there are actually three entities involved: the suspected murderer dream-self, the conscious "me" that knows I'm dreaming, and the combined entity who didn't know anything about the murders and felt shadowed by an outside presence.
I'm beginning to wonder about that alternate universe theory. Perhaps I'm catching a glimpse of different versions of myself in slightly different versions of the world. That would help explain why everthing feels wrong and different but at the same time right and familiar. If this is the case, though, it doesn't leave me with much hope for the multiverse. Apparently, every other world I've been to is just as fucked up as this one.
So now I am in the unenviable position of trying to discover and expose the real murderer without being accused myself. The stress starts to get to me, to the point where I'm becoming increasingly paranoid and beginning to hallucinate, jumping at shadows and not trusting anyone. I begin to feel a "presence" of some kind. I can feel it close by, I can feel its amusement as it watches me. Sometimes it is so close that I feel that I could turn around and it would be there, or just on the other side of a door, or pacing me on the other side of a wall when I'm walking down a hallway.
So when you're in a situation like that, what can you do? I went to see Prof. Snape. Yes, that's right, the dude from Harry Potter, although he seemed to have mellowed considerably since his time in the fantasy genre. At this point I was about a cat's sneeze away from going stark raving mad, so I told the guy that I'd been feeling a presence in the back of my mind, that followed me everywhere, watched me, occasionally inserted thoughts into my head, etc. Now this is the truly bizarre part of the dream: I got the feeling that my dream-self was talking about me, the dreamer. By now I'd sort of been fading in and out of consciousness, enough to know that I was dreaming but not enough to get out of the dream. Maybe when you have a dream that is so vivid and "real" a part of you accepts it as reality, while the tiny conscious part of your brain that stays on standby doesn't buy it, so here they were clashing. It seemed like I had partitioned off a part of my subconscious that retained most of its autonomy, despite my ability to occasionally embody it. And it was aware of me! As if the conscious part of me that recognized the fact that I was dreaming was an entirely separate entity! What a mess.
What I still don't know for certain was just who the murderer actually was. The best theory I can come up with is that my dream-self was the murderer, but when I embodied him (as opposed to watching in the third person) the combined "I" didn't know anything about it (because I didn't). So in this case there are actually three entities involved: the suspected murderer dream-self, the conscious "me" that knows I'm dreaming, and the combined entity who didn't know anything about the murders and felt shadowed by an outside presence.
I'm beginning to wonder about that alternate universe theory. Perhaps I'm catching a glimpse of different versions of myself in slightly different versions of the world. That would help explain why everthing feels wrong and different but at the same time right and familiar. If this is the case, though, it doesn't leave me with much hope for the multiverse. Apparently, every other world I've been to is just as fucked up as this one.