Section 1 - Chapter 5 - Dreams of the Damned

Dreams are a very peculiar thing. They come from our mind when we are unconscious, using our experience and thoughts to fuel a torrent of images and experiences that do not truly happen. They tap into our emotions and our fears, play on our hopes and desires yet we never truly understand them. More often than not, we wake puzzled by the experiences our own subconscious fed to us in the most grandiose fashion. Did you dream of winning the lottery? Or maybe you felt the heart break of losing a loved one that doesn't actually exist in your waking world. They say that when you dream of people, even those who walk alongside you or past you on a city street overcast by towering sky scrapers, that those people are someone you've seen before in the waking world. Does that imply that our brains lack the ability to fabric original images, to invent people, places or things that do not exist? When you dream of traveling somewhere you've never been, is that your perception of what that place might be like? It could be the total sum of images, stories, and recounts that the brain has processed and has pieced every last part of the puzzle together so that you actually feel like you've been to Fiji. Perhaps, as some believe, you truly find yourself in those places, your being forced out of your physical confines and instantly arriving on a beach off the southern coast of Australia. 

 So explain to me the dreams that do not have a specific location? Those daunting dreams where you hold no physical form, in fact you may not even be a living being? You are an idea, or you are an emotion, aimlessly wandering through the depths of concepts. You experience hate as a location, or emptiness as one may visit a summer cottage, only to find that upon arrival it is the very last place you would like to be. Others explain the experience of night terrors, at least what they can recall. To observers it comes across as a terrifying panic of unknown origin or possibility. That the person living the shear agony of whatever their mind has trapped them in seems to be so enraged, so panic stricken that they lash out, verbally, physically, emotionally at nearly anything that they interact with. Could this be the physical manifestation of a deep rooted fear or stress inside the mind of the afflicted? 

 At an early age I was condemned to experience a series of reoccurring dreams. To this day, my nights are often plagued by the writhing and undefinable feelings that these dreams create in the center of all that I am. As a child I would sometimes exhibit similar patterns to what those call night terrors. Sleep walking, wreaking havoc on those stranded on the side lines watching me, being assaulted by the darkness that enveloped my mind and controlled my physical body. However I didn't always rise from my bed and wage an internal war that had the outward signs of someone possessed. In fact I no longer sleep walk, although a few times a week the dreams creep into my sleep. Sometimes I wake with physical reminders of these dreams. A bruise on my chest, a cut on my leg, something that tells my logical mind that I must have been sleep walking, I must of done these things to myself. Since I have grown, and no longer sleep in a bed by myself, I now know that I do not sleep walk, but still these mysterious injuries are occasionally present. These dreams, experiences that I have, follow a sequence. I always know when I will have them, right at the moment before I drift into unconsciousness. I have a sense, a physical marker that effects me right as it becomes to late to do anything about it. I hold on tight, fighting to keep awake in vain as my mind settles in for a night I will relive time and again. 

 To describe these dreams may prove to be impossible. There is no physical, "dark brown hair" or " Freddy Mercury style mustache" to give you. There isn't a location, at least not a location I have ever seen conscious, in the waking world. Truthfully, if the place existed from my dreams, I would most certainly never visit. So as I struggle to find the descriptors to convey my nightly torment, I ask of you one thing. Take my words as a rough sketch of your own personal world where the physics you know do not exist, as I walk you through the sequence, imagine an uncomfortable uneasiness pouring from your chest into your limbs and radiating outward only to have it bounce off of unseen factors and pummel you as it reverberates back through your entire being. 

 As sleep begins to creep into my overworked mind and I begin to allow my thoughts to drift into a lost rambling of inconsequential thoughts, trivial things really, it brings with this an uneasy year all to familiar feeling. I want to say that it is an old friend, something that I have had with me for as long as I can remember, probably the only thing in my life that has always been with me, even more consistent than I am. It silently flows from my chest, almost from where you would imagine your heart to be, but hidden deeper, perhaps it comes from somewhere that believers would call a soul, if in fact it resided in a specific location in your body. This feeling reverberates in pulses, never quite gone, but it ebbs and flows hitting harder and then easing as if it is coaxing me into some type of agreement that I am refuting. It beckons my physical senses and threatens the calmness of my upcoming slumber. It slowly spreads, first just my chest, then it lashes at my shoulders and my hips, slowly pulling itself out of the deepest crevices of my being and expanding until it holds my entire torso captive. It then proceeds to ooze its way down my limbs and into my neck. I often move my body during this time, which has always fascinated me because my adjustments, while a conscious effort to find some sort of comfort never truly wakes me. At this point, it has reached my hands, my feet and is sliding into my mind and my head. I get a a strange sense that my hands, my feet and my neck are as if balloons, slowly expanding in a never ending volume. As my head receives a final struggle, doing everything to avoid the unavoidable it begins to inflate, the shear expansion of my limbs is a mental struggle to rail against the reality that they are not intact expanding. The reverberation is still rattling my body, increasing as if its own heart beat. The balloon sensation begins to expand up my limbs, back towards the center of my chest, Throbbing, harder and then softer, my body is expanding and all that I am is becoming larger that my physical self can contain, and it doesn’t. Like a bubble popping on the surface of a calm lake, ripples of my mind, my body, my emotions are sent in every direction. I become everything with nothing, and nothing with everything all at once. I feel like I am trapped, yet I am able to touch the stars, feel the ocean on the pacific coast, the heat of the sun beats down on my back so painful as the filth of the squalor in a back alley of Turkey fills my nostrils. 

 Sometimes I can see places or people, if it is strong enough. I can touch the hatred of a small boy who watches a man jab a woman in her ribs. He sits among empty bottles and two liters diet coke on a crusted shag rug that might have been green once upon a time, but now is varying intensity of brown disgust and shame. I can smell the love, a woman looks at a man as they walk along a river, her chest moments from bursting as she cannot believe the overwhelming sense of irrational feeling for the man. I span the skies, the earth, and the oceans. I fill the void in space, connecting our planets, the stars, feeling the small existence of everything passing through my being, tearing me apart but making me whole. I try to flee from it, I struggle against it, trying to have a sense of self, who I am remembering what I am. I claw at this reality, trying to see myself, knowing that in truth, I lay in a bed, outside the city of Chicago, I don’t want this, I want to be in bed, awake and safe. 

Then, as if suddenly a rubber band snaps, everything is dark, I have fallen asleep.

When I say dark, it’s not correct. It’s a lack of anything, perhaps a blending of everything so that there is nothing that I can comprehend. My mind rending an overload of information as un-processable. It is lonesome here and I exist in the absence for a long time or maybe I don’t. Time doesn’t pass, time doesn’t exist. Everything I know is taken, my thoughts do not come, as soon as I begin to try to think it’s taken from me. I want to say it’s cold here, but thats from my waking perception as I attempt to recount this part of my dream. I’m falling so quickly that I never move a second. I try to leave, come or go, but how do you do that when you aren’t anywhere or everywhere. I know I am there, but even now as I type these words it remains a secret to my mind. I know it exists, I know this happens but it will always be chasing phantoms as I try to recreate the anything about this, just as i think I have it, it’s gone and my thought starts the searching again, like the time I had just spent trying to imagine it never existed, that I didn’t try, that I just thought about trying, over and over and over again, until I let it go, I give up and then it peaks at me again, taunting me to try and it starts again. If I let myself try I would do this for an eternity and never get there, never find it, see it experience… the absence of nothing.

Then, before instantly and after an eternity, there is something. It’s distant but also inside me, and next to me. It’s so quietly deafening or deafeningly quiet that it’s overtaking me and nowhere to be found all at the same time. It’s physically vibrating my thoughts. It’s the same reverberation that comes from inside me, so massive there is no room to exist in this infinite nothing. It slams into me pressing me, mangling me against the cold, hard, smooth and sharp edges of absence. I cannot breath as the gears of the sound chew and churn my, mind? My body? My emotion? My fear? It grinds my will through a series of steel gears you would find in a watch made of the wheels of armored tanks and the sounds of missiles falling to earth. I am being compressed into the smallest forms and stretched beyond the physical realms of the vastness of eternity. No sound comes from my screaming mouth, it opens and is gnashed and chewed as if it had been left untouched until I thought to use it, and then I have no mouth, forgotten in the web of all that once knew mangled inside my body which is again whole, buried under the weight of the worlds hate. This is hate, not your hate, not my hate, not even the worlds hate, it just is.

I can feel the hate on top of me, all around me. It cuts into my sides, my back, my mind. I begin to move, to push through it, clearing a way for myself to breath. For the first time I notice that there is something, and the more I move the deeper I fall into a ball pit you play in as a child made of hopelessness. I struggle to find a way out, I don’t know which way to go, I wave my arms to move in a single direction and I still move down. I panic, knowing that the last place i want to go is down, deeper in I slide as I frantically move. I cannot seem to make an impact, so I freeze, laying there. I don’t move, I don’t fall. The sense of loss around me begins to move, cutting, gashing at me. I hold no form, it is no longer dark, but I cannot see anything distinct. There is nothing to war against, although something is prying at me, pulling pieces away from me, ripping me apart. No action, no thought, no feeling changes this and I am devoured, existing only to feed this need around me, this urge. Hopelessness take me, pieces me apart and passes me down in part yet whole to what is chewing through everything at the bottom, I can feel its heat, it lashes my back over and over again even as I am pulled apart into smaller and smaller pieces. I relent, I let it take me, there is nothing left to hold onto, I lose myself to what has me. My final sense as I am lit aflame, falling into the emptiness that is consuming my body, surviving on my thoughts as it takes all of me, in pieces, despair.

I am alone. Nothing exists, I don’t exist. My surroundings are uncertain, and I have no thought, I am a thought, an idea. I have no sense of self, and no concept. I search for something, anything to tell me, to to hear me, to give birth to me, to make me, I am undone. I am not alone. I try to call out, it’s an urge but I don’t know how. I try to reach out but I have nothing to touch with. I want to cry, but I have no feeling. I sense movement, I have no eyes, no breath, my senses, a concept of not understanding. I am prey and I am death falling around the idea of intent and I have failed. I am being watched by nothing coming to feed on me, to exist because I did not. I am so very much alone that it becomes crowded and I can feel the breath of my demise. I am captured, I was never anything other than captive to my destructor. It’s dull teeth gnawing and gnashing and grating me to pieces. I push back, I rail against my assassin. I do this with no body as I am consumed. I a not being torn, I fold in, over and over like a piece of paper folded in half and then half again and then again, smaller and smaller between the teeth that wants me to be a part of it. I become insignificant, but still I am chewed between my fate. I fight, I push, I become, I am afraid and then I exist.

Its never ending. The glass of the ocean, the untouched beach, the sand, dense with saturation of the waves that crash onto it by the stilled ocean. It’s smooth, the water, the beach, the sun a perfectly smooth disc in the sky that is hues of blue, orange, red deep purple all blended into an mix that is seamless. nothing moves and nothing stirs, the air is stagnant, the water is lifeless and the sun and sky hold no heat. I am no longer hurting, The turmoil of what came before has faded and a sense of relief has washed over me. I am one with all that is around me. In every direction the water is calm, the sun, although lifeless appears 4 feet above the horizon. I am no longer assaulted by the things that have eaten me an infinite amount of ways. I move and everything follows in a still canvas. I reach out with what thought. Nothing, but there is something this time to greet me. This place, it’s untouched and I am reborn into it, whole. I am here and I have nowhere to go, as I exist with it so the sun holds nothing because it is me, the water is me, the sand each tiny grain is a part of me. I yearn for something, I am lacking the unknown and I am everything yet lost in a world of nothing but me. Time exists here, because I exist, it plods on without change, the part of me that is the sun never rises any higher, no wind to rush through my sky, no waves to crash against my back or pull away small kernels of my sands. I am uneasy. I am not assaulted, I am not eaten, devoured, picked at, prodded compressed, I am not anything. In terror I realize this is all because I am alone… Alone

I reach to the part of me that is the sun, for company, I search the skies only to find myself, looking back lost. I search the oceans, the part of me that sends tiny tendrils of anxiety through everything around me, inside me. I dive deeper the crystal calmness of the water is un-comforting, and the part of me that is the sun begins to fade. I swim through the water, searching for anything, hoping that a fish may swim by, or the rocky coral will hold some form of plant giving me a sign that there is life other than me. Am I alive? The idea perplexes me as I realize that living only exists in relation to anything else perceiving you alive. Again, I am a concept, I exist only in the idea that I am living because I can see the world around me, I interact with it but I do not affect it. My thoughts race through this concept, and out of my loneliness grows fear. I cannot see, the part of me that is the sun, though lacking rays bouncing through the water, it is far above the oceans surface and does not belong down here. I am lost and there is no direction I can go to find salvation. This is me and I hold no answer that will protect me. I close my eyes, there is no difference between having them open or shut. I can feel the pressure building around me, on top of me. An unimaginable amount of emptiness pushes on me, is trying to compress me into nothing. I concentrate, trying to feel the emptiness around me, trying to take the parts of me that are infinite and fight against this pressure. I feel it, it’s faint, but it’s there, it’s something! I reach to it, welcoming in something terrifying, but it is something other than me. And it comes, slowly at first, like a beaten animal being offered a treat. Its weariness, the mistrust is clear, I beckon for it again, this time it’s swift and rushes me, the reverberation rattles my teeth as it wraps around me like a body gloved coffin. It rattles my body, it rattles my mind, shaking me in the deep booms of bass, so low it rumbles the water, they sky, the sun the very earth that is me. It pummels me, slamming me back and forth, violently accosting me. It pushes on my body, like static feels, it is attacking me and oozing inside of me, of all that I am. It is now complete, part of the skies, the beach, even the ocean and the sun. It fills me and shakes me, tears at my insides. It envelopes me from within and everything is gone. I leave the stars, withdrawing, leaving the particles that make up everything remain. I am spread through the skies, hanging over cities, hearing the movement of life, and it grows larger. My reach lessens and I am no longer a part of each horizon, no longer a part of everything, I am returning to an observer of the world around me, the sound of all that exists is lessening. Deflating, I regain my limbs, my head and I can move my hands. I am done, I cannot move, exhausted I yearn to be free, and all becomes black.

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Typically, this is where I wake up. I find myself disoriented and cold. My body is usually covered in sweat as are my pillows, sheets and blanket. I am always exhausted as if rather than just going to sleep I ran miles and miles on a summer mid day. Sometimes I cry, I try to not let that happen anymore, but I don’t think anyone chooses to cry over anything. I lay there until I can move, sometimes this is immediate, sometimes it takes some time. I have learned that it is easier to not recount these dreams, it is always the same and I am not ever able to chase them around in my head. I have also learned that I need to now take a physical inventory of myself. I usually go to the bathroom, look in the mirror. Sometimes the moment I move I know, I have a bruise, a cut a significant injury I did not go to sleep with. I am usually bruised, not the, I have a black mark on my shoulder, bruise, but a the center of my chest, internally is aching and burning and for several days it is a constant reminder if I lift something, or move my arms in a way that crosses my chest. Sometimes there is blood to clean up from a gash on my hip, back or my rib cage. My mother used to wonder what I was doing as a child when she would have to change the sheets and there was 3 day old crusted blood. I started hiding it after she would suggest sleep walking. I can’t think of a single time that it wasn’t a commotion when I had walked through the house in my sleep.  So now you know, if you see me, my eyes bloodshot, bags of dark sleeplessness around my eyes, odds are my night did not find me much rest.