September 27, 2012

I had another of the Great Dreams tonight. It hit in the same place as before; same house, same room, same bed. But this dream was different. At times it felt diametrically opposed to the other great dream(1) , and at times it seemed the ying that held together the prior yang. The first event dealt with a breakdown in structure and the removal of stimulus; this one swirled around dreadful synergy and a torment of touch and sight.

In other words, the first terror was the beginnings of a hell of thought, whilst the second was a hell of experience.

I am usually not a man beholden to nightmares, and I usually can shake off the lurid fantasies that strike whence in slumber. But the Great Dreams are different; they are alive, and border the lines mortals draw between lucidity and madness2. Like the other Great Dream, this experience came with no warnings or proclamations. A sense of decipherment may arise as I write this, but for now I will leave dream interpretation for a later date.

Prior to this dream my mind enjoyed the bounties of a new stage in life. My dreams were filled with joyous and naïve things, things like traversing a child’s wonderland with long estranged family on a quest to beat a simulation of a Disney universe far beyond any of Walt’s productions3, becoming a shape shifter and soaring through a grand metropolis as the evolution of American music went on parade4 and laughing behind the scenes as a good natured simpleton version of myself bumbled through negotiating the creation of paradise as he slowly wised up to and defeated an encroaching mafia5. I lived comfortably in a semirural locale surrounded by people who loved me because of who I was, and refused to condemn me for what I was not.

But for spiteless and mundane reasons I will not go into I temporarily returned home, where I fell into ennui. I tried to kill time in whatever way I could until I eventually gave up, went into my old room (that had by then been purged of anything to do with me), took the pervert’s sleeping pill (masturbation) and went to bed. I only slept for a few hours, but after finally tearing myself awake I decided that I had slept enough in that room for a lifetime. (For the sake of the current occupant I may have to stay awhile and study his psyche to see whether certain… measures need to be taken.)

-2-

The second Great Dream began like most others, with a prelude of unimportant tidbits that have already faded from my memory. But even in those forgettable sequences of unnecessary trivia I was struck by two notions:

1) This was a recurring dream.

And

2) That the past had become the present. I was a child, and every fear, opinion and mental inconsistency of that period in my life came flooding back. This wasn’t even truly connected to recollections or the stimulus of returning to old surroundings, this was me literally becoming 12, and reconnecting to that stream of consciousness at the cost of everything I had won and lost since then.

After flashes of conversation and childish mediocrity, I walked into my old room, and began to awkwardly flirt with a childhood crush before realizing that something was wrong. The room was wrong; it was my room at 19, not my room at 12. I immediately became obsessed with setting the room right, and in my mania failed to question what the increasingly obscured presence was doing there with me until it was too late.

What happened (or happens) next is better expressed through dialog and narrative rather than the pure documentation I have been attempting:

“You don’t notice that?” I asked the girl (for the purposes of this story let’s call her Loraine) “Notice what?” Loraine cooed. “This isn’t right, this goes here, and this goes…” the scenery morphed with each rearrangement, eventually reaching the point where it felt like one image was being laid on top of another, and both were fading into each other to create something new. Seeing how this was a dream, I was able to pull building materials from nowhere, and reproduce long forgotten possessions with naught but my will to recreate.

I was muttering to myself, and barely aware of the person with me. “I’ve done this before, I know I have!” I said this in an increasingly hurried manner, in a voice not quite boy and not quite man. “It has?” The girl turning specter lullingly replied. (She was now completely out of sight, but her voice projected the aura of a seductive smile) “I can fix this…this goes here…or here…WHY IS IT WRONG!!!” The obsession was becoming a panic as I finished piecing together my old bunk bed.

The buildup was subtle, intense, and dependent on dream logic barely conveyable to those awake. Something was happening, I just didn’t know what. I finally realized what was off when I set the final board of the top bunk. It was in reverse. Everything was in reverse! The POV momentarily shifted from first to third, which allowed me to take in the transitioning image and the image that came before that failed to fade away. I finally knew what was going on, and I was afraid.

If you’ve ever seen “The Shining” you should remember Redrum. If you’ve ever seen the documentary “Room 237” you should understand what I’m describing.

I have to digress while witting this; I finally understand the cliché of a doomed man’s manuscript being cut off and covered in scribbling and blood before it can end. I don’t want to be alone. I I feel surrounded and exposed, and every corner hints at monsters just out of reach. My imagination mindlessly screams “they’re coming coming coming!” I know this is just paranoia.

“Room 237” devotes a segment to an unanticipated synchronization found through experimental cinematography. If you transpose the beginning and end of the Shining onto itself, you’ll watch something far too cohesive to be by mistake. When transposed on each other, scenes progressing from the beginning and end of the movie perfectly complement each other. Blood flows when the father begins to lose his mind; the child panics right as the old man is killed. Redrum is murder spelled backwards; most don’t realize this until the killer’s axe shows up in the mirror’s reflection.

I had had this dream before but it had been in reverse. Time had looped into itself. In my youth I had glimpsed and wrongly stared into this fate; now this dream (but by then I knew it was much more) was turning things upside down and full circle. I had stepped into my past to complete this picture. “There’s just one thing left” I thought as I climbed down the top bunk. “You mean this?” the triumphant viper smiled once she flicked my lighter, something which had been impossibly glimpsed so many years before.

IT IS COMPLETE!

This proclamation wordlessly exploded within me as everything dissolved into everything else. The room screamed, the world shook, and I fell back on the bed of the present, which impossibly existed impossibly fused into the bunk. As I write this a song about a time slip is playing on the radio. “Let’s do the time on the….” is the chorus. “Will you forget me not? I want you to remember ”comes after. The 80s are not helping.

I laid back overwhelmed and no longer in control. “Lorraine” snuggled close and wrapped herself around me as she melded into my awareness. I felt lucid but enslaved. A great wind came on which flew colors and objects past my perception, like a lava lamp or a music visualization program gone wrong.

-3-

I’ve almost run out of paper. I refuse to get up and search in the dark, lest I am taken. A ripped up notebook paper will have to do.

The sights are enveloping, endless, shifting and non Euclidean. (there is terror behind that phrase) Lights and shapes bleed into themselves as I superdie. I know I cannot ride this; I will be consumed. I mutter and cry to myself, reciting prayers and nursery rhymes ”I” know cannot save me in tones of despair and rage. I struggle to move but I am being held down by the viper that no longer hides herself or her accursed name. Lilin the second succubus has slithered onto me, and now calls me her forfeit. I struggle wildly, desperately, and fight for any means of escape amidst the sailing seas of madness that pass before me. The past breaks like a flash of lightning, the cacophony reaches a crescendo and my shoulder breaks free.

I wake up slowly and tentatively come out of the numbness of sleep I felt myself enter almost an eternity ago. My right arm, my marked arm of evil is the first to regain sensation; the rest of my body and mind soon follow. Night has fallen but the lights are on; someone must have turned them on while I slept. Thankful for this I walk into the living room and begin to write.

What I saw can’t really be expressed, at least by the likes of me. I experienced something naturally that many will foolishly spend their lives looking for with a plethora of ritual and hallucinogens. Visions were transposed in shifting orders, one after another, becoming fitted together with the cubist tact of a 8 year old Pablo Picasso. You have to experience what I’m talking about if you want to contemplate it. It was beyond sense. What I experienced was like smelling blue while chewing food that tastes like the number 8. You’ll never understand… at least I hope you won’t.

__________________



1. http://erraticallyinformed.tumblr.com/post/92635877157/the-great-dreams-part-1-another-little-glimpse

2. I wrote the dream synopsis down somewhere. Will edit in later.

3. I think i wrote the dream synopsis down somewhere. Will edit in later.