There was a pretty dark time for me, between college and what was to be next. I won’t go into details here, but I was very lost and ended up homeless, squatting in a trailer on the edge of a forgotten dump near my home town. The trailer was just about livable and always smelled of mold and rotting cheese. I only felt safe there because I thought no one else would want it. The trailer always seemed a bit darker than it should be, and a bit out of focus. I only stayed there out of desperation and managed to leave it with my mind basically intact some months later. Many unusual things happened at that trailer, but this is just one of them. I found a small, spiral bound note pad there, with only a few pages left in it. What I share below was written in neat, small letters on the pages. Suffice it to say I don’t know the truth or fiction of it, I just know that it shook me to my core. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the worst thing I found there. I am transcribing it word for word:
My feet hit the floor as I sat up and spun around on the bed, only it wasn’t the floor I was expecting. It was squishy and viscous and smelled of copper and death. I knew immediately I was dreaming. For the last few months these dreams had been driving me crazy. I decided to just go with it and see how long it lasted. I got up from the dream bed and walked. Faces leered from picture frames, dripping and blurry with blood. From a distance I heard a low humming purr, and an unnatural growl. I hurried toward the sound, eager to see what my dream companion looked like. I rounded a bend to see knives and knives and knives, dozens of them, hanging in the air, facing me like a class full of eager children. I paused and they all shot forward, impaling and slicing and embedding and bringing a sweet pain, a dull thud sounding as a limb fell away. I dissolved there and woke up…
In a chair, but again not the chair I expected. Another dream. Well, fuck it all I would go with this too. I wondered how long this would last. Please let it last a long time. Shackles quickly grabbed my wrists, my ankles, and forced my legs apart despite my efforts to keep them closed. A small man with a head like a fist rolled in, literally rolled in like a ball, and stopped about two feet from me. A long black tongue appeared from a slit that I hadn’t seen in his middle and began searching in my lap. Exquisite pain like burning acid flooded my groin, and I felt myself be violated, first with the tongue, then the fist head, pounding and pounding, until I passed out and woke again….
This time in a brightly lit store. Another fucking dream. Ok let’s do this, I thought. I pushed a cart down an aisle with no end, until the floor started to become soft like taffy, and the wheels would no longer roll. My feet and then ankles were soon stuck, like a movie hero in quicksand. I smiled, as I knew where this was going. As the quicksand floor flooded over me, it began to dissolve my skin. Slowly, painstakingly, until I was just rounded nubs, falling face down. It continued and continued to dissolve me, down to raw muscle and rounded bone. My face became covered and I again passed out, from lack of air this time… and woke up again.
No longer dreaming. This was the bed I was used to. That was my chair in the corner. This was hell as I had known it for the last few months. The floor was fire and burned all the time. You couldn’t stay off it, as the hooks started to pull you as soon as you were awake. They pulled off pieces of flesh that sizzled on the floor as you were dragged across. Glass fell, slicing you and slicing you, until you cooked like steaks on a grill, but you were still awake, you couldn’t pass out, not here… You were put back together and taken apart, over and over, pieces and slices and the pain here was nothing like in the dreams. The pain here was forever and never ending and there was no respite in unconsciousness. There was no respite except the very small nap you would get every 7 days, the nap that brought sweet nightmares. The nightmares teased you with normal pain, not the pain of a thousand years and a thousand demons. The nightmares become all that keeps you barely sane, barely able to remember who you are, to remember anything. Just the pain and the cooking and the pain and on and on forever. I cooked, and waited for the next sweet slumber, a scream forever bubbling from my lips, making no sound, no sound except the sizzle.