My crazy, fucked up dreamsShare
 Thursday, March 12, 2009 at 1:49pm | Edit Note | Delete
So yeah. I've gotten like, NO sleep lately, and I've attributed it to the fact that my dreams, which were once beautiful, wonderful things, have recently been nothing but terrifying minimovies in my subconscious.

The first one I'm going to tell you about is one that I had the other day when I was sickish and sleeping on my couch. I don't remember a whole hell of a lot of it, but I'll tell you what I remember.

Pizza Hut

I'm at Pizza Hut. It's a maze, I get lost and sort of agitated. Finally I make it to the counter and order my pizza. I don't remember receiving said pizza. I run into an old friend, Lizzie, that I haven't seen in years, and then I say to her "How do I get the hell out of this place?" She laughs and says "Turn around." So I do, and the door is right behind me, like it's a normal restaurant all of the sudden.
I exit Pizza Hut and walk through the neighborhood. I notice a house off to my right smoking heavily from a vent or chimney and the smoke gets more and more intense until sparks start flying out of it, the house rumbles, and then collapses. One by one, the houses along the street start to follow suit, so I have to run to avoid being hit with debris. At a certain point, after passing twenty or so houses that just collapse seemingly out of nowhere, I come to an apartment building that has businesses at ground level (sort of like "The Knitting Shoppe" on the eastern side of Iowa City) and in the parking lot, I notice a goat. It's trying to stay standing as the ground rumbles, and I know that the building we're in front of is about to go. I try to pick the goat up, I can't. I try to get it to follow me, it won't. I yell at it, it won't run away. I wanted to save the goat, but I had to save my own life, so I ran. I was crying and running, and continued to do just that until a bit of debris flew toward me and I wake up.

The next dream I had came just last night, followed by another that I had and just woke up from. Needless to say, I've not been sleeping well.

The Twister

My sister Melinda and I were in a city and it started to get sort of stormy. We ran into a city government sort of building that was very Iowa City-esque but really tall. We went in and were in this room sort of high up and could see the storm just approaching really rapidly, with tornadoes forming all around. There were a ton of strangers around and everyone was either really scared or trying to calm everyone else down. At one point, this wall of clouds just hits the building and is amazingly beautiful and at the same time petrifying, and the building starts bouncing and then promptly falls over. Melinda and I miraculously survive, despite Melinda being hit by a big table and being somewhat crushed. We ran out into the street because for some reason that sounds safer than being in the fallen building and find rescue teams putting people into cars and the cars onto boats to exit the rapidly flooding city. Melinda says "We gotta go get my car so that we can get on a boat!" So we do. We're in the car, on the boat, discussing how worried we are about my mom and my other sister. We sit and cry and just wait to get out of the situation. All of the sudden, the boat hits something and tips all funky until it starts rolling, with the car strapped down on it, and the car is slowly filling up with water. Melinda and I are trying to get out via the windows and the sunroof, but we eventually succumb to our fear and the rising water and realize that we're going to die. I wake up.

This dream was the most disturbing of all of them. It was incredibly cinematic and futuristic and felt so, so very real.

Almost Like "Sunshine"

The Earth is slowly running out of oxygen. We have one crew, one hope, to save us. The people of Earth are rioting and panicking, and the ones that are wealthy enough fly out in search of other planets to inhabit and we don't know whether or not they're okay. For some reason, a bunch of people are with me in a hotel that I've holed up in waiting to hear whether or not I'm going to live. We wait and watch the news for days and days and days. Eddie is with me and he's dating Isabella. My father is with me. A bum is with me, and he had a name and I forget it. He was sane and valuable for the most part. Julie is with me. I am the only one that has a bedroom.
We get around to having conversations about how long electricity is going to last. My dad says something about how it probably won't just die out on us, but we probably have to keep it on because once we turn it off it won't come back. In the dream it made sense.
The news comes on. The crew died. We are all going to run out of oxygen and slowly suffocate.
Everyone is slowly going insane. A few times we have to flee for various reasons that I don't remember, but always end up back in the same hotel.

We are eating weird meals and drinking lots of soda. Me and Eddie are eating bananas dipped in ketchup. Julie is eating a hamburger. She all of the sudden notices that the hamburger is full of hair and freaks out. The bum hands me a VHS tape. "Psst, I made this for you." I go into my room which surprisingly, since it's the future, has a VCR and pop the tape in. The tape is a happy commercial-esque work. At the end of it, it goes through a series of snapshots of him smiling insanely and in each subsequent one he is holding up one, then two, then three, then four fingers. The voice over says "I stabbed your dad once, twice, three, four times in the kitchen." I realize that Julie had eaten my father. I wake up.

What the fuck is wrong with me?



-Some Genuinely Scary Stories-

In 1983, a team of deeply pious scientists conducted a radical experiment in an undisclosed facility. The scientists had theorized that a human without access to any senses or ways to perceive stimuli would be able to perceive the presence of God. They believed that the five senses clouded our awareness of eternity, and without them, a human could actually establish contact with God by thought. An elderly man who claimed to have “nothing to left to live for” was the only test subject to volunteer. To purge him of all his senses, the scientists performed a complex operation in which every sensory nerve connection to the brain was surgically severed. Although the test subject retained full muscular function, he could not see, hear, taste, smell, or feel. With no possible way to communicate with or even sense the outside world, he was alone with his thoughts.

Scientists monitored him as he spoke aloud about his state of mind in jumbled, slurred sentences that he couldn’t even hear. After four days, the man claimed to be hearing hushed, unintelligible voices in his head. Assuming it was an onset of psychosis, the scientists paid little attention to the man’s concerns.

Two days later, the man cried that he could hear his dead wife speaking with him, and even more, he could communicate back. The scientists were intrigued, but were not convinced until the subject started naming dead relatives of the scientists. He repeated personal information to the scientists that only their dead spouses and parents would have known. At this point, a sizable portion of scientists left the study.

After a week of conversing with the deceased through his thoughts, the subject became distressed, saying the voices were overwhelming. In every waking moment, his consciousness was bombarded by hundreds of voices that refused to leave him alone. He frequently threw himself against the wall, trying to elicit a pain response. He begged the scientists for sedatives, so he could escape the voices by sleeping. This tactic worked for three days, until he started having severe night terrors. The subject repeatedly said that he could see and hear the deceased in his dreams.

Only a day later, the subject began to scream and claw at his nonfunctional eyes, hoping to sense something in the physical world. The hysterical subject now said the voices of the dead were deafening and hostile, speaking of hell and the end of the world. At one point, he yelled “No heaven, no forgiveness” for five hours straight. He continually begged to be killed, but the scientists were convinced that he was close to establishing contact with God.

After another day, the subject could no longer form coherent sentences. Seemingly mad, he started to bite off chunks of flesh from his arm. The scientists rushed into the test chamber and restrained him to a table so he could not kill himself. After a few hours of being tied down, the subject halted his struggling and screaming. He stared blankly at the ceiling as teardrops silently streaked across his face. For two weeks, the subject had to be manually rehydrated due to the constant crying. Eventually, he turned his head and, despite his blindness, made focused eye contact with a scientist for the first time in the study. He whispered “I have spoken with God, and he has abandoned us” and his vital signs stopped. There was no apparent cause of death.
____________________________________________________________________________________

If you ever are in an area of absolute quiet, still your breathing and move not a muscle. After a few seconds, you will notice that the silence has a sort of "sound" of its own, a kind of empty ringing tone. This is nothing unique; everyone will hear this, given the proper setting. An informed person will tell you that your brain is trying to interpret the lack of stimuli to your hearing and so creates a bit of a filler sound. This ringing sound actually serves a more arcane purpose, covering up a noise we are not meant to hear. This noise is not impossible to hear, and if you are persistent you can effectively "break" the cover-up sound.

The next time you are silent and hear the ringing, shout at the top of your lungs for about half a minute, then be abruptly silent. It will be different for everyone. Some will hear nothing different for dozens of tries. Others might pick up soft murmuring. A special few auditory heroes might clearly make it out on the first attempt. What you will hear is a voice that relays an account of events about to happen in the immediate future. It's like a sportscaster relaying the events occurring 10 seconds into the future.

As time goes on, you will be able to make out this voice under increasingly noisy circumstances, to the point that it can be heard at any time by just concentrating. Such ability would doubtlessly be invaluable, no? You will be able react to any immediate danger, relate to people around you with greater ease. No one would ever surprise you. Now, of course you are wondering what sort of horrible catch this ability entails. Perhaps the tone of the voice is so horrible that it will drive you mad, or maybe the voice will only predict your death over and over again.

Of course this isn't the case, though, it’s a normal voice, your ears receive it no matter what, and it’s simply a matter of noticing. But there is a danger. For you see, where there is a voice, there is a body. And just like you will notice new sounds, so shall you notice new sights.
____________________________________________________________________________________
The native villagers around these parts say that there’s a stretch of tundra just north of here that is occupied by benevolent spirits. These spirits grant insight and warning, they say, to whoever visits them at night, once the sun has disappeared entirely and left the world in jet darkness.

I drove out to the middle of the frozen expanse of ice and waited, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever commanded these people’s reverence. They send their children out, bundled in furs to keep from freezing, on the eve of their 15th birthday to seek an audience with these spirits. Once they have achieved this, the children run home to their parents to share the news. From then on these children are considered adults in the village. Engaged couples visit this tundra on the night before their wedding. The entire village stays up all night awaiting their return, as it is upon their return that the couple either decides to proceed with their marriage, or to abandon it. The elderly visit the tundra whenever they are sick or ailing, and often make their condition worse by staying all night in the cold. When they return, however, it is most often with an air of sheer serenity.

So I waited, curious to see what phenomenon might inspire people so powerfully. I waited for hours, bundled in my parka and sitting on the hood of my pickup. I waited until I felt that I was going to freeze to death, even in my thick clothing.

I heard the spirit before I saw it.

A crunching of snow in the silence made me jump off my truck and spin around. A hunched, gray-skinned man stood a few meters away. Sad, yellowed eyes stared back at me, set inside a skull from which sprouted only a few greasy hairs. He breathed heavily, with a rattle that shook his fragile ribcage, and one of his arms looked as if it had been messily broken and then neglected, allowing it to knit back together imperfectly. Badly scarred flesh marred his splayed legs. The man stared at me for perhaps ten seconds, breathing in the frigid air and exhaling a sickly dribble of steam, before disappearing when I blinked my eyes.

I spun around, looking for the man, but he was truly gone. Approaching where he had stood, I found a pair of bloody footprints in the snow. Frantic with fear, I got into my pickup and headed for the village as fast as the ice would allow. A few villagers were waiting for me when I arrived, knowing that I had gone out and curious as to what might happen.

I hastily got out of my truck and, approaching the nearest villager, I demanded, "What is so benevolent about these spirits? What is so insightful? How do these spirits help you?"

"What did you see?" he asked, the look on his face now mirroring the fear in mine.

"I saw a man, horribly disfigured and desperately sick!" I screamed into his face, and the rest of the villagers around us backed away a step. "Why? What does that mean?" I begged him.

"The spirits show only one thing," the man explained. "They show their visitors, a year in the future."
____________________________________________________________________________________

"Daddy, I had a bad dream."

You blink your eyes and pull up on your elbows. Your clock glows red in the darkness—it's 3:23.

"Do you want to climb into bed and tell me about it?"

"No, Daddy."

The oddness of the situation wakes you up more fully. You can barely make out your daughter's pale form in the darkness of your room.

"Why not sweetie?"

"Because in my dream, when I told you about the dream, the thing wearing Mommy's skin sat up."

For a moment, you feel paralyzed; you can't take your eyes off of your daughter.

Then the covers behind you

begin

to shift.
____________________________________________________________________________________

"It is a process which I derived empirically. All motion, either generated by or imparted to an object, obeys the same principle," said he. "When your arm moves, is the motion continuous, or are there discretized points, however small, at which there is no in-between?"

"The latter case, I would imagine, at some subatomic level," I offer.

"Indeed," he replies. "In my work, I have discovered it matters not the timeframe in which the motion occurs, nor the force that impels it. On film, during the traditional application of the process, the movement is indistinguishable from life. Would you agree?"

"Aside from the crudity of the animation as has been practiced in the past," I say, “that is entirely the point."

"Yes, you have chosen the perfect word," he says, opening the black leather bag I have been eyeing since we entered the room. Perhaps he has noticed. "The stop-motion animator's work is quite crude. I have refined the processes, and refined them again until the medium was freed of its old moorings, yes? A new art form emerged, and a new science. At a sufficient level the two are indistinguishable."

"Many things seem to be," I say. He smiles at this.

"But enough talk," he returns as his smile is replaced with a stern air of professionalism. There is some hint of pride in his face, though, as he says "perhaps, to begin, I should introduce you to one of my assistants."

He claps his hands three times. From a shadowy corner, a misshapen clay thing the size of a man shambles jerkily across the room towards us, its skin rippling as if plied by countless unseen fingers.