I had another little glimpse into hell tonight; thankfully the details of it are rapidly receding from my mind and falling back into the subconscious. Due to this my little dream (or rather nightmare) journal will grow increasingly distorted and novelized by the second, but this is something worth recording. This will also destroy me if it ever gets into any psychological evaluations, but I’ve made my peace with the fact that the NSA can end me at any time.

The sequence of events I am about to describe can best be categorized as an expansion of the infinite terror loop I may have described to you earlier, but much more mundane and much more perception shattering. Right now I’m just going to jog down the remains of what I can remember; later I’ll search myth and theories on the mind to give me some context of its twisted meaning. The worst part about it was that this “event” was the longest fucking dream within a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream within a …dream you’ll ever fucking meet, which means I have already lost crucial details on how the creeping madness could have reached such horrible heights.

I have already lost most of the first dream sequence; I can only remember snippets of something apocalyptic and ensnaring, like being swallowed by the icky and constricting black maw of hell. It must have gone on for awhile, for when I “awoke” I had already fallen into a panic. For the first time in more than a decade I truly and utterly feared the dark, and what seemed to leer at me in the blackness.

“JAAMESjamessJAmesJamesJAMES!” Schizophrenic whispers and pretenses floated in and out of my mind, the only thought i remember clearly being that a hidden fiend was lurking in the night. Eventually I gathered up the courage to go for the light switch in hopes of dispelling the unseen presence, humming nursery rhymes and Jesus Loves me all the while in an attempt to ignore how its shadow hovered a few feet over me as if in wait to bore down and snatch me in its undoubtedly sharpened claws. After cowering through the greatest flinch of all time I hit the switch: nothing happened. I tried again; the light was dead.

Trying not to freak out, I opened the bedroom door and hobbled out of the room. I tried light after light but nothing worked. Even my night vision was failing me, and it became increasingly difficult just to open my eyes. A gangrenous puss had started to encrust my face, and my panic began to mount.

As is expected from a man in the middle of his death throes, I cried out for my mother, who was conveniently lounging in the darkness of my living room.( Although now that I think about it I was never able to actually see her and I should have had no real reason to label whatever it was as my mom) I had become a child again- my body and mind had reverted to approximately around the time when I first got pinkeye. I begged my “mother” to help get rid me of the gunk, but either she was another ghoul come to torment me or I had also gone deaf because I couldn’t hear her response. The end of this dream sequence is muddled, but I believe that it just bled out as faint flashes and whispers of pandemonium surrounded the home.

The third sequence was just a mindfuck. At that point was lucid dreaming, and aware that I was trapped in a nightmare that I couldn’t wake up from. Sometimes I would be crawling in the darkness, other times would involve me fighting with advanced alzheimers and a dark dissolution of the self while my body remained chained to the bed that my mind was lost in. You know how sometimes you dream that you wake up and walk around the house? This happened to me again, and again, and again. At a certain point I assumed that I had tapped into what the mystics call ‘astral projection’, meaning that my soul got to wander but my body didn’t.

Add to this my vision continuing to go in and out of focus, the continued breakdown in my cognitive condition as a malevolent and primal figure just out of eyesight (and well within during my periods of blindness) continued to loiter and, worst of all, the utter repetition of it all and you can see why I lost it. Before things got real bad a piece of myself started to enjoy the trippiness.My predicament may have been ghoulish, but a part of me honestly preferred its novelty to the monotony of my dead end existence. Waiting tables and getting fat always seemed like just another hell that kept people from looking for salvation by pulling its punches five times out of ten. What came next made me realize how wrong I was.



The final dream within dream within a…was just voices: terrible, stupid voices. They seem to have started in the midst of me crawling through the hallway, but they only picked up when I was back to being trapped in my dreaming body. I seemed to have lost most of what was said, but I can vaguely remember flashes of cartoon characters like Bullwinkle, Princess Bubblegum and the Iceking, possible manifestations of whimsy, logic and the sweet escape of dementedness. The pivotal scene involved the voice of the Alchemist from The Venture Brothers, Dana Snyder. (come to think of it he was ranting like Master Shake, but more coherently) At first his levity was a welcome break from my paralyzed dread, but the voice soon started to tell me to do worse and worse things, and as I sat in my motionless body I began to dream these things into consciousness.

At first I thought the voice was offering me a way to buy my way to freedom, but now I think It was just having fun saying things like “wouldn’t it be great if you killed everyone you’ve loved in such and such way ha ha”. Me actively doing these things appeared in a dream bubble right over my head, and for one moment I actually enjoyed being the one who dished out torment.That moment passed. I realized that this was the gate of hell and made one last desperate attempt to break free. I woke up for what seemed like the hundredth time, and it’s taking awhile for me to accept that I’m finally awake. A little part of me still believes I’m asleep and have just been granted a few moments to enjoy turning on every room-light possible.



Fuck Sleep. Fuck sleep with a stick. You ever wonder how it feels to be stuck with Freddy Kruger? It feels like this times three. Having an adversary you can at least pin a location on gives you the benefit of knowing which way to run. Not this. I’m still afraid that this isn’t over, or worse, that it’ll happen until the end of time. I had another little glimpse into hell tonight. Thankfully, the details of it are rapidly receding from my mind and falling back into the subconscious.