Neon Dreams - III
I used to be afraid of what would happen if these dreams never stopped. Now the only thing I’m scared of more is what will happen when they do.
Originally posted on Dream Discussion discussion board of TheDreamEncyclopedia.net forum by user [REDACTED], 11/17/2012 03:28:12 UTC
I’m sorry I haven’t replied to all the responses I’ve gotten. I want to thank you all for your insight and suggestions. I appreciate them all. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if any kind of assistance is going to matter much now. I know what I’m about to type is objectively insane. I know that I should probably just check myself into some sort of mental health facility and take whatever drugs they give me, even if it just chemically lobotomizes me. You don’t have to believe me. I don’t really care if you think this all some sort of joke or just someone trying to tell a scary story. Like I said. I don’t think it will matter soon anyways.
I called out sick from work and class. My brother would have noticed and stopped me but he left to go back to our parents for a few days. He didn’t feel comfortable leaving me alone, but I managed to pull it together long enough to convince him I was alright. I couldn’t have done it if he was around.
I didn’t sleep for three days. Three whole days. I couldn’t think of any other solution than to just not sleep. I thought maybe I could wait it all out. Have you ever not slept for over seventy-two hours? It’s a special kind of Hell.
I was wired on caffeine, energy drinks, I even bought nicotine gum and every other stimulant I could legally get my hands on short of an epinephrine pen to just shoot adrenaline straight into my bloodstream. I got so desperate I’d started scratching myself, pricking myself with razors, just pounding on my thighs with my fists so the pain would keep me awake. My arms and legs looks like I fell in barbed wire.
I started shaking uncontrollably. My mother called me and I was slurring my words so badly she thought I was drunk in the middle of the day. I’d get up to do something and just blank on what it was. More than once I walked into the kitchen to get coffee just to stop, walk back to my room, and stop when I saw that all the cups I’d stopped taking to the sink were empty and remember that’s what I’d gone to do. I even had hallucinations. Of every kind. Fingers brushing the back of my neck. Spiders crawling on my arms. I began to see flashes and flickers of light and hear a female voice call my name, deliberately, loudly, almost aggressively. I spent an entire night huddled in the corner of my room, afraid that whatever was tormenting me in my sleep had grown impatient for my return and was coming into the waking world to take me. All the stimulants in my system made me sick, but there was nothing in my system to purge. I spent so much time with my head in the toilet, retching so hard my muscles would cramp, spitting out nothing but saliva and bile. It got to the point my heart was beating so fast I felt certain it’d either explode or stop. I almost hoped it would. I found myself sitting there in the dead of night, staring at a cup of black coffee, wondering if it was worth it. I thought maybe I should just go to sleep and confront whatever waited for me since it couldn’t be worse than what I was feeling then.
It didn’t matter. You can’t not sleep. You just can’t. There comes a point where your body will just shut down, whether you want it to or not. I didn’t even know I’d passed out on the bathroom floor after another round of violent, painful dry heaving until I woke up ten hours later.
One second, I was curled up on the tile, naked, covered in a film of cold sweat, wracked with tremors, afraid my heart was about the stop. Then, I was there - the same place I’d been the last time I slept, laying on the cold stone floor of the balcony. It was like it had been waiting for me to come back. A movie that had paused and picked right back up where it stopped.
I could hear the running water of the fountain. I could smell the chlorine. Even the white dress was still damp from all my tears, as if I’d only been gone for seconds rather than days. I wasn’t as upset as you might think I would be, or even like I feel like I should have been. In a way, I was relieved. When the worst possible thing that can happen happens, you tend to feel better once it does, if only because it can't get worse. Or at least you think it can't get worse, for a moment.
I stood up and saw that the statues were gone. All the cruel, mocking different iterations of myself on the stone formation. Thankfully, so was the one in which I had my guts spilling out. The lights had changed. They were dim and red. The room had changed, too. The way I’d come in was gone, replaced by a solid wall. There was only the door on the balcony left. My only exit.
Behind me, the lights behind the door were as bright as they’d ever been. On the other side, I heard a voice. It was distant. Faint to the point I could barely hear it. I couldn’t understand what it was saying, but it sounded panicked. Like they were begging someone not to hurt them.
I took the handle. It turned, easily and smoothly, and the door opened when I pushed it.
I don’t know how to describe what was on the other side. I don’t know if I properly can.
It wasn’t a room. It wasn’t a chamber. I don’t know what it was but it was circular and it was huge. It would have taken an hour to walk from one end to the other. The walls were lined with pillars of marble that stretched impossibly high. Between them I could see… I don’t know.
It looked like an old computer screen when you put a magnet against it. A mess of neon pinks and blues and purples shifting and merging and churning in a hypnotic, kaleidoscopic way, interrupted by bursts of distortion and visual glitches that flashed like lightening in a storm cloud. I had the feeling that if I tried to walk into it, I’d be walking into oblivion. The kind of nothing where not even a memory of me would be left.
In the center of it all was a gigantic hole, and standing in it was another marble statue. A colossus if there ever was one. Something of such immense size that it could never exist in reality. I could have sat atop the tip of it’s nose comfortably. I could have laid down on its eye and still had room to stretch. I could only see it from the neck up. Even the top of it’s head rose above the ceiling. I could see that, below it and above it, there were multiple layers of floors, exactly the same as the one around me, like I was in a tower where this marble colossus stood in the center.
The statue itself was not of me. I don’t know who it was. It was a woman of ambiguous age. Her beauty was as breathtaking as the size and craftsmanship of the marble she’d been rendered in. I don’t think someone like her could ever exist. She was too perfect. That’s why I knew that, whoever the statue was supposed to be, I’d never seen her before. But there was still something familiar about her. It was disturbing - like I’d forgotten her and, now, I’d remembered I’d forgotten her, but couldn’t understand how I could ever forget someone like that.
Her head was tilted down, her eyes closed, her stone lips drawn in an inscrutable line that betrayed no emotion.
It was an awesome sight. Awesome in the biblical sense. She was as beautiful as she was terrifying. Impressive as she was formidable. It was the kind of thing that makes your knees weak and stomach tight and fills you with apprehension just to be in the presence of.
There was somebody in front of it. Someone in a long coat that looked like it was made from magenta leather, trimmed around the ends with black. There was a hat on her head with a wide, sagging brim and a tall crown that slumped to one side. It looked like it was made of the same material of her coat.
She was the one who I heard yelling. She was still shouting, her voice echoing across the wide, empty vault of space around us. Whatever she was saying, I couldn’t understand. She was speaking in a language I didn’t know and didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard, but it was clear that she was in distress. She flailed her arms wildly, paced back and forth, gestured frantically with her hands like she was pleading with the statue.
I thought that maybe we were in the same position. My mind was and is so frayed that I was willing to believe that this dream wasn’t a dream at all and rather the construct of something that had us both trapped in this neon hell. If there was a greater something at work, I knew it was that marble colossus lording over us. And if that was the case, this other person - she had to be another victim.
She didn’t even notice me approaching. I was right behind her, and she was completely ignorant. I reached out for her. All I did was brush my fingers against her shoulder. Whatever she had been preparing to shout caught in her throat with an ugly sound.
We stared at one another in silence for a long moment as we took in the other.
She was the statue at the top of the fountain. The one that had been laughing at first, then staring at me. It was her.
It was me.
Slightly older. Slightly taller. Longer hair, much longer and darker, too. Built in a different way entirely than I am. Her eyes were a striking and bright cerise and the skin around them stained the same color. But her face was my face. The similarity between us was more pronounced in the flesh than it was in marble. She was unmistakably me.
Both of us recoiled from one another as we suffered the same epiphany. I staggered back in stunned silence as she stumbled away in abject terror. She raised her arms as if she expected me to plunge a knife into her face. She yelped like an animal afraid for its life. I’ve never seen someone’s eyes go so wide.
I couldn’t understand the words coming from her mouth but I knew she was begging me to not just back away, but disappear entirely, like her continued existence depended on it.
Her voice began distort as she screeched. I thought it was her strained vocal chords beginning to crack, but the more she spoke the more pronounced the grain and fuzz clouding her voice became. An electric ripple ran down her body. The edges of her became indistinct and blurred. Blocks of her body warped with garishly colorful bursts of square pixels. A scratchy voice straining to be heard through a failing radio. A body like a dying television signal.
Her left foot flickered out and in of reality and she fell back with a sickening gasp of terror. I watched as she wrenched herself off the ground. Visual glitches flashed across her body. Bubbles in boiling water. A digital file rapidly decaying. All the cosmic data comprising her physical form corrupting in real time.
Her head wrenched back. She grasped at her face with fingers fraying into monocolor pixels like she was trying to pull it back into place. Nails tore gouges as she raked her hands down her pale face before her fingers hooked inside her lower lip. She pulled, and pulled, and pulled until it split right down the middle of her chin and peeled away like wrapping paper all the way down her throat with the oscillating, electric sound of a collapsing computer. Her eyes burst with liquid neon, spewing jets of the same molten, bubbling, angry incandescent pink bubbling and boiling from he throat. It all spattered and slopped on the floor around her while she made sounds like she was trying to scream and vomit through the digital sounds of a program in terminal agony. All at once, she was consumed by the distortions. Unrecognizable. Nothing but a sudden flash of blinking polychrome pixelation and static in a shape only vaguely human.
Then, she was whole again. Her arms fell to her side. She crumpled forward and tipped into the shallow pool of glowing fluid pooled around her. It still trickled from her empty eye-sockets and nostrils while a last few distortions flickered across her body.
I looked back up at the marble colossus. Her eyes were open. She tilted her head to the side and the carved marble hair around its head shifting and falling as naturally and smoothly as if it were real. Her chested rose and fell with breath. She blinked and when her lids retracted I found myself staring at human eyes set into the marble sockets. Pupils filled with television static and the sclera burning the same awful neon pink as the tears flowing free from my own eyes.
She seemed curious, the way she looked at me. I got the feeling she was waiting for me to do something. So, I did the first thing that came to my mind.
I asked her what she wanted.
The statue’s stone lips noiselessly curled into a warm smile as if this other me hadn’t just died in horrible agony in right front of her. As if my ears weren’t still ringing with her inhuman dying sounds.
Her eyes drifted down to the other me. Dead. Motionless. Bleeding. She looked back to me. I knew that she wanted me to do something with the body. I couldn’t just feel it, I knew it, like the idea had been put into my head by her. Hesitantly, I approached my own corpse, stopping just as my bare toes touched the pool of glowing blood.
It was the hat. She wanted me to take the hat. Accept it, like a gift. Something that had been mine for as long as I lived, waiting for me my entire life.
I couldn’t bring myself to bend down and take it. Not from myself. Not after watching myself suffer whatever had just happened to me. It felt wrong to take the blood-stained hat from my own head. It was mine, but at the same time, I knew it wasn’t mine.
This other me hadn’t been ready to let go of it. I wasn’t ready to take it.
It wasn’t about the hat itself. The hat was only a symbol. I knew that. It was about taking it. Accepting it and everything it represented, even if I didn’t know what that was. I could feel gravity of what was before me bearing down with a physical weight. I knew that the moment I put the hat on my head, still wet and dripping with neon blood, I’d be accepting something I knew on a fundamental level that I was not prepared to handle. I’d be opening a door that couldn’t be closed.
I looked back at her. She was waiting patiently, but expectantly.
I told her I couldn’t. I can’t.
She closed her eyes and, for a moment, she appeared sympathetic. Mournful, even. She told me without a voice that I had to.
Then I was looking at the bathroom wall. I was awake. Drenched in cold sweat. Shaking violently. Every part of me that hurt in the dream hurt worse.
I know tonight, when I inevitably pass out again, I won’t be back in the maze. I made my way out of it. I found the exit. I found what put me there. I know I’ll be right back in front of her again. My own corpse will still be there.
I used to be afraid of what would happen if these dreams never stopped. Now the only thing I’m scared of more is what will happen when they do.
I know what I have to do to end these dreams, now. The answer is obvious. But I don’t know what will happen when I accept it.
I don’t know how long I can continue to not do what I have to do. I don’t know how long I can wait for myself to be ready to open that door I have to open.
But I know she can wait a lot longer than I can’t sleep.
I should probably mention some of this is inspired by real dreams. I used to have a habit of eating right before I went to bed and it was never a problem, but you reach a certain point in your life where digesting while sleeping apparently causes you to see neon computer Hell when you dream.
Brilliant writing and fantastic images! Somehow it reminded me of AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS.
Yikes 😳. Another gloriously creepy addition! That’s so interesting that some of it was inspired by real dreams. I’m reminded of Dali’s art being inspired by dreams and the various methods he used to only sleep a little so he could mine his dreams for creative inspiration.