Originally posted on Dream Discussion discussion board of TheDreamEncyclopedia.net forum by user [REDACTED], 11/11/2012 03:28:12 UTC
Thank you all for your suggestions and information. I’m going to try some of them, but I don’t know how much time I have left. I don’t have another four months to find a solution. I don’t know if I even have a week left in me. I need a solution and I need one now. I know that’s a lot to ask and I know that there might not even be one but I’ve gone from feeling as if I was running out of time to knowing it.
Two nights ago, the same day I made the original post, the nightmare changed. Drastically.
The distortions were worse than they’ve ever been. The whole thing seemed to be warping and changing around me. The walls would flash and suddenly change shape or direction or look or bend each time they flickered and the neon lights burned bright enough to hurt my eyes. They filled the twisting, shifting hallways with the deafening drone of the gas being burned in their glass tubes. Random geometric shapes and statues phased in and out of the walls, the floor, even the open air, popping into being and snapping out just as quick as they appeared with deafening bursts of television static. The statues all had terrified expressions, their hands outreached as if they were shouting at me and grabbing at me, silently pleading with me to save them as they blinked in and out of existence.
It was chaos. It was too much. I started running. I didn’t know where I was going or where there even was to go, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do other than run and try to escape the awful hissing in my ears and the visual anarchy as the very fabric of the nightmare seemed to be unraveling around me.
I felt like it was mad at me. The dream.
Like the nightmare itself or maybe whatever evil thing has been creating it was angry at me for having exposed it or told someone about it or even just express my desire to never see it again and it was lashing out at me as punishment for trying to escape before it does whatever it wants to do with me.
Statues laid in pieces of the ground. They were shattered. Some pulverized almost to gravel and scattered on the floor where the sharp, jagged edges bit into the soles of my bare feet. I didn’t look back but I could feel each wet step leave a bloody footprint behind me.
I ran until I came to a dead end in the first circular room I’d seen in the dream1.
Everything stopped all at once. The visual chaos went still. The hissing, the droning, the statues, it all just stopped. The smell of chlorine and a violent chill washed over me all at once. The room was wide and open and tall, lined with more neon lights that cast the room in competing shades of the violet and blue and pink that bled into an melancholy technicolor haze.
Built against the wall I saw a fountain that spanned the entire length of the room. Water spilled in white, frothing torrents from holes and cracks and crevices of what I can only call a craggy wall of chalk white stone, rushing over the rough rocks and down into the pool below. There were at least a dozen statues standing atop it - unfamiliar women that I’d never seen before. I can’t say why or how, but I recognized as alternate versions of myself. It’s hard to describe but, even if they didn’t look like me, I knew that they were, in some way. Like they were people I had been at some point. Or maybe people I could have been that never came to be.
Some had sneers carved into their faces, others had their lips curled back in disgust. The one at the top, higher than all the others, was laughing, pointing down at the same figure that they were all staring at. It was another statue, placed atop a column in the center of the pool. I saw myself. Me, as I am now, carved into marble. I was down on my knees, my head craned back, and cradling the entrails spilling from my open abdomen. Fluorescent white-pink blood poured from the wound. Neon tears trickled from stone eyes that dripped down off my face, into the pool where it mixed with the dark water.
I couldn’t look away from it. I had to look at it and take in every detail. It was equal parts awful and beautiful. My eyes began to sting with tears as I tried to imagine why I was seeing this. I knew I was dreaming and I couldn’t understand why my mind was so sick and damaged that it would subject me to such a scene or why it was doing this to me. I started crying as I thought that it might not even be a product of my imagination. I had suspected before that this was not just a dream but someone, something trying to tell me something. Who was it? What was it? And what was this?
I touched my face and my hands came away stained with the same glowing tears flowing from the eyes of my disemboweled stone double.
I blinked away the tears and when I opened my eyes I saw staircases of marble on either side of the fountain. I don’t know if they were there and I just hadn’t noticed them or if they’d just spawned while I wasn’t looking. They led up to a balcony that overlooked the fountain, baroque in style and carved from the same smooth, white material as the stairs. I noticed that there was a pair of doors behind it. The doors had windows, each of them glowing burning with an intense neon glow of eye-searing pink.
Where the doors went I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I knew they had to take me somewhere else and that’s all I wanted. I ran up the stairs and expected them to disappear beneath my feet at any moment. Even when I stepped on to the balcony, I braced myself for the moment it might vanish as inexplicably as it had appeared. I took hold of the handles and pushed and pulled and the doors wouldn’t move. They didn’t even shake.
I started sobbing. I kicked at the doors. I slammed my fists against them, I threw myself against them again and again and felt like I was ramming against solid stone, and the pain was every bit as visceral as it would be if I did it in real life. Still, I kept trying to force them open, screaming, choking on my tears, begging with whatever might be watching to please, please, please, let me go until I simply couldn’t anymore. My shoulder felt as if it was close to breaking. My hands were bruised. My throat was raw. My dress was wet and softly glowed from the neon tears that had fallen from my face. I put my back against the door and slid down until the floor stopped me, heaving and coughing and sputtering.
I could see the statue at the top of the rocks. The one that had been pointing and laughing. It had turned around. It was looking at me. It’s expression was ambiguous.
I asked it what it wanted.
It didn’t move. It didn’t reply.
I started shouting at it, demanding to know what it wanted, why it was doing this, what was even happening.
Silence.
I lost it. I thought I couldn’t cry anymore, but I was wrong. I took hold of my arms and dug my nails in as deep as I could and raked them across my skin as all the anger and frustration and fear poured out of me. All I could hear was my own sounds of misery reflected back at me, amplified as it echoed through the room.
I woke up to find my brother in my room, standing over my bed and holding on to my shoulders to keep me from thrashing. He woke up hearing me crying through the walls. He thought I was having a bad dream and didn’t do anything until I started screaming. He said I was screaming and shouting so frantically that he thought someone had broken into the apartment and was hurting me. He said he tried for minutes to wake me up and was about to call 911 when I did.
He knows I haven’t been myself. We share an apartment. There’s no way he couldn’t notice. He’s made passing comments about it before but now he must think I’m going insane. Maybe I am. He’s awake right now, sitting in the den and watching TV with his arms covered in bandages. When he tried to wake me up, I scratched him badly, the same way I’d been scratching myself in the dream. There was blood. Real blood that didn’t glow.
I can’t even type this without crying. I’m shaking so bad I can barely type. This has to stop. I’m afraid to sleep more than I’ve ever been. I’m afraid of what I’ll see. Now I’m afraid of what I’ll do.
There has to be an answer. There has to be a way out of this. That door has to open, and it has to go somewhere.
We’ve all been there. Some of us more than others.