A Sucker with Legs
So it's Halloween. I'm back from Walmart. I still haven't eaten anything today. As I predicted, my tummy isn't doing so well.
Said issue-laden tummy really sent me on a pleasure cruise last night. After my last post I went back to sleep, only to wake up again two hours later, skull split open from a nightmare of truly epic proportions. This sucker truly had legs.
I usually don't do this kind of thing, but I think this one deserves some description. It was uniquely terrifying and enough of it remains to tell. It may be more boring than watching paint dry, but I'm going to do it to you anyway.
I am in the middle of a situation. I'm in Bloomington in restaurant with my aunts. This place is a total fabrication - it doesn't actually exist anywhere. As we are sitting to eat, I look at the TV bolted to the wall. On the screen is some hardcore pornography. The sound is turned off and the tracking is wobbly. It's an old busted VHS tape. We say nothing. We just wait to eat.
Then a bride comes into the room. Or at least she's got the headdress of a bride. She has a cheap dress on with a train stapled to it, and after sitting on my lap and making lewd overtures, in comes her husband with a tuxedo shirt and jacket with the sleeves ripped off. We are apparently in the restaurant when we shouldn't be - the restaurant is the site of a wedding reception, and what characters they are. For some reason they have Russian accents. They behave strangely, and before I know it I'm somewhere else.
Where am I? The after party, I guess. My aunts aren't with me. I am on a large rambling estate of some sort, though it's low-rent, overgrown, and nearly impossible to see clearly. My stomach feels light, and there are little tiki lights everywhere. The crowd is rowdy but I can't focus on any of them.
Things begin to detach. My eyes start to do strange things. Shadows begin to break apart, shapes shift and run into each other. The sounds of the voices become hopelessly garbled. I'm terrified that I feel reality slipping away. Again, gone.
Now I am in a tank. I'm piloting a tank through the estate. I'm howling like a madman, doing my best to crush everything I can, relishing the crumpling sounds. I'm firing rounds into houses, through trees. Tiki lights explode everywhere. I'm screaming now. I can't stop destroying everything.
Suddenly everything cuts out and I find myself on a hospital gurney. The light is bright green and sickly. I get out some words, "Where am I? What's happening to me?" when suddenly I'm back in the tank, then the restaurant, then the grounds of the estate.
It occurs to me that I am hallucinating, that I'm strapped to a bed surrounded by men with their faces covered, my wrists bound by thick gauze to the bedrails. I've been poisoned. There's something in my bloodstream. My stomach is floating in my body because there are mixed signals running up and down my spinal cord. I fear that if I can't bring myself back to the hospital bed I might be lost forever, might continue in this loop for the rest of my life: a life of confusion, terror, destruction, blind pain. The world is falling away and my brain is practically melting in its case.
"Wake me up," I say. "LET ME GO!" I yell. I say this over and over, trying to get to the doctors on the table, begging them to pull me out of it before I'm too far gone but only able to say those two things. "Wake me up, let me go, wake me up-"
As I'm saying these things I'm being approached on the estate from all sorts of people from my past, many of them actual but many I can't recognize. They're brandishing weapons, torches, unspeakable leers that are wheeling about in the flames. The words I'm saying - Wake me up, let me go - are now beginning to appear everywhere, etched in bright neon lights on every surface, wrapping around people, trees, tablecloths, the moon, the air, everything. The more I say it the more words pile up until everything shatters like glass around the spaces between all the letters, until the letters trace themselves backwards into emptiness. From there I'm in the hospital bed again, crying out in pain, trying to break free, until the whole things starts over again. Each time the scene changes I have to remember that I'm actually in a hospital bed somewhere and not where my eyes are telling me I am, as if I'm being held underwater and surfacing over and over again.
This goes on for what feels like an eternity when something even more sinister happens. In my dream I "wake up." I'm still dreaming, but there I am in my room thinking it's all over. I sit up in bed and try to catch my breath, thankful to be free, when slowly things begin to melt all around me. I realize that I'm still on the hospital bed. How awful is that?
It's impossible to say how long this dream was. When I finally actually awoke I was panting and covered in sweat. I stumbled to the bathroom, nearly expecting everything to fall apart. It took a few minutes for my head to settle, another half hour puttering the apartment, and then I went back to bed.
Horrible.
So that was my sleep last night.
Said issue-laden tummy really sent me on a pleasure cruise last night. After my last post I went back to sleep, only to wake up again two hours later, skull split open from a nightmare of truly epic proportions. This sucker truly had legs.
I usually don't do this kind of thing, but I think this one deserves some description. It was uniquely terrifying and enough of it remains to tell. It may be more boring than watching paint dry, but I'm going to do it to you anyway.
I am in the middle of a situation. I'm in Bloomington in restaurant with my aunts. This place is a total fabrication - it doesn't actually exist anywhere. As we are sitting to eat, I look at the TV bolted to the wall. On the screen is some hardcore pornography. The sound is turned off and the tracking is wobbly. It's an old busted VHS tape. We say nothing. We just wait to eat.
Then a bride comes into the room. Or at least she's got the headdress of a bride. She has a cheap dress on with a train stapled to it, and after sitting on my lap and making lewd overtures, in comes her husband with a tuxedo shirt and jacket with the sleeves ripped off. We are apparently in the restaurant when we shouldn't be - the restaurant is the site of a wedding reception, and what characters they are. For some reason they have Russian accents. They behave strangely, and before I know it I'm somewhere else.
Where am I? The after party, I guess. My aunts aren't with me. I am on a large rambling estate of some sort, though it's low-rent, overgrown, and nearly impossible to see clearly. My stomach feels light, and there are little tiki lights everywhere. The crowd is rowdy but I can't focus on any of them.
Things begin to detach. My eyes start to do strange things. Shadows begin to break apart, shapes shift and run into each other. The sounds of the voices become hopelessly garbled. I'm terrified that I feel reality slipping away. Again, gone.
Now I am in a tank. I'm piloting a tank through the estate. I'm howling like a madman, doing my best to crush everything I can, relishing the crumpling sounds. I'm firing rounds into houses, through trees. Tiki lights explode everywhere. I'm screaming now. I can't stop destroying everything.
Suddenly everything cuts out and I find myself on a hospital gurney. The light is bright green and sickly. I get out some words, "Where am I? What's happening to me?" when suddenly I'm back in the tank, then the restaurant, then the grounds of the estate.
It occurs to me that I am hallucinating, that I'm strapped to a bed surrounded by men with their faces covered, my wrists bound by thick gauze to the bedrails. I've been poisoned. There's something in my bloodstream. My stomach is floating in my body because there are mixed signals running up and down my spinal cord. I fear that if I can't bring myself back to the hospital bed I might be lost forever, might continue in this loop for the rest of my life: a life of confusion, terror, destruction, blind pain. The world is falling away and my brain is practically melting in its case.
"Wake me up," I say. "LET ME GO!" I yell. I say this over and over, trying to get to the doctors on the table, begging them to pull me out of it before I'm too far gone but only able to say those two things. "Wake me up, let me go, wake me up-"
As I'm saying these things I'm being approached on the estate from all sorts of people from my past, many of them actual but many I can't recognize. They're brandishing weapons, torches, unspeakable leers that are wheeling about in the flames. The words I'm saying - Wake me up, let me go - are now beginning to appear everywhere, etched in bright neon lights on every surface, wrapping around people, trees, tablecloths, the moon, the air, everything. The more I say it the more words pile up until everything shatters like glass around the spaces between all the letters, until the letters trace themselves backwards into emptiness. From there I'm in the hospital bed again, crying out in pain, trying to break free, until the whole things starts over again. Each time the scene changes I have to remember that I'm actually in a hospital bed somewhere and not where my eyes are telling me I am, as if I'm being held underwater and surfacing over and over again.
This goes on for what feels like an eternity when something even more sinister happens. In my dream I "wake up." I'm still dreaming, but there I am in my room thinking it's all over. I sit up in bed and try to catch my breath, thankful to be free, when slowly things begin to melt all around me. I realize that I'm still on the hospital bed. How awful is that?
It's impossible to say how long this dream was. When I finally actually awoke I was panting and covered in sweat. I stumbled to the bathroom, nearly expecting everything to fall apart. It took a few minutes for my head to settle, another half hour puttering the apartment, and then I went back to bed.
Horrible.
So that was my sleep last night.