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In Dreams I Walk With You
Last Friday night I had a dream.
This may sound strange, but I'm a fan of my dreams; they're cool. Even the bad ones are pretty interesting and fun. Fortunately I dream a lot. I've even had some so-called "lucid" dreams, dreams in which I realize that I'm dreaming, which may be the ultimate in dream coolness. When that happens I often can control the dream, which is very fun indeed (I usually fly, if I get the chance).
But I've had a few nightmares, too. Most are still not too bad - there was one with a bunch of vampires that was pretty wierd - but once in a very rare while I get one of those really nasty ones, the kind where you wake up shaking and sweating.
Parenthetically, if you ever have a dream like that, and are worried that it will become a serial dream - that is, you've woken up in the middle of the night, and are afraid to go back to sleep because the dream might continue - I have a very good piece of advice for you: have a glass of water. I used to have serial dreams a LOT when I was a kid, and had some long and scary nights. Somewhere I read that a glass of water changes your dream state, and it really worked for me. It's also a good idea to go to the bathroom, if you need to. Physical discomfort can translate into nightmares when you're asleep.
Anyway, it was Friday night and we were on the road in Fishkill, NY. We were staying at a Hampton Inn. And I'd forgotten to take my Zantac.
While I slept, acid churned in my stomach and I dreamed:
At that point I woke up, fortunately.
It was an incredibly real dream, very sharp and detailed (all of my dreams are in color). But here's a funny thing: terrifying as it was, it really wasn't that bad. I've had dreams that have scared me far more, even though the details were much less frightening. It was almost as if it was a movie I was watching, somehow, and the fear was the sort of fear you have at a horror movie. So I didn't wake up screaming or sweating, just with an overwhelming urge to tell Teri about it all.
This may sound strange, but I'm a fan of my dreams; they're cool. Even the bad ones are pretty interesting and fun. Fortunately I dream a lot. I've even had some so-called "lucid" dreams, dreams in which I realize that I'm dreaming, which may be the ultimate in dream coolness. When that happens I often can control the dream, which is very fun indeed (I usually fly, if I get the chance).
But I've had a few nightmares, too. Most are still not too bad - there was one with a bunch of vampires that was pretty wierd - but once in a very rare while I get one of those really nasty ones, the kind where you wake up shaking and sweating.
Parenthetically, if you ever have a dream like that, and are worried that it will become a serial dream - that is, you've woken up in the middle of the night, and are afraid to go back to sleep because the dream might continue - I have a very good piece of advice for you: have a glass of water. I used to have serial dreams a LOT when I was a kid, and had some long and scary nights. Somewhere I read that a glass of water changes your dream state, and it really worked for me. It's also a good idea to go to the bathroom, if you need to. Physical discomfort can translate into nightmares when you're asleep.
Anyway, it was Friday night and we were on the road in Fishkill, NY. We were staying at a Hampton Inn. And I'd forgotten to take my Zantac.
While I slept, acid churned in my stomach and I dreamed:
I lived in a city, but it was no city I knew from the waking world. But I did know this: some thing was killing people, killing them horribly, inexplicably. Bodies were found in advanced stages of decay, rags of flesh hanging from bones, which had been seen alive and well only minutes before. Others were found torn to pieces. The city was engulfed in a rising cloud of terror. And I was the only one who knew who - what - was responsible. Because as far as I could tell, I was the only one who could hear and see him.
And not even I could see and hear him all the time.
This much I knew: a deep and incredibly evil laugh, like nothing even vaguely human. And a form, perhaps fifteen feet tall, that seemed to be made of dead things. Things that had decayed, gone through a woodchipper, and then been sculpted into a humanlike form. It could appear and disappear at the blink of an eye, pass through walls, suspend the laws of physics and reality at will...to everyone but me he was utterly invisible, and my attempts to warn others had had the predictable result. The police suspected me.
I'd been taken up to the sixth floor of a huge police building in the heart of the city. Five plainclothes detectives were in the room with me: three men and two women. There was an envelope of evidence on the table in front of me. As they began to interrogate me I knew what was going to happen: there was no way I could make them believe me, and there was no point in even trying. I had to pretend that I didn't know anything about the murders at all.
But as I tried to convince them huge dead fingers came rising up behind my back, six-inch-wide fingers made of chunks of bone and flesh. They grabbed my head and began to tear it off. I fought it desperately, shaking my head violently, almost spasmodically, trying to get free. For an instant I saw what the detectives saw: no hand at all, but simply a suspect who was flailing his head around like a (homicidal?) maniac.
When I finally broke free, the fingers withdrew with the sound of hell's laughter, a laughter I knew only I could hear. I looked at the cops and sighed. There was no hope.
"You didn't see anything, did you?" I asked. They stared back at me, and the answer was plain in their eyes. "Yeah. This is what I do," I said bitterly. "I throw big fits. For fun."
And then the thumb of the creature came up over my shoulder and made a hideous puking noise, spitting a large dollop of its own putrefying essence onto the table before it disappeared again. The vile stuff began wiggling around on the table, slowly vanishing bit by bit, and suddenly I was filled with an unexpected hope.
Because every cop in the room was staring at it.
"You see?" I asked, "you see it?!" One of the female detectives nodded, her eyes nearly popping out of her head. Everyone started talking at once.
"Hold it, hold it!" I said. "We need to-"
"Stop it. Stop DOING that!" said one of the women, her voice high and hysterical. She was staring at the envelope of evidence. It was shaking like a leaf in a hurricane, and inside it new dead things were scurrying around like the damned. They had thought I was psychic, and that somehow I was using my power to cause the apparently supernatural elements of the murders.
"I'm not doing that", I said, "he's here."
There was an enormous flash of lighting and thunder as the lights in the room went out. His impossibly deep laughter came echoing up from below. Some of the detectives screamed. A strange light began to glow through the curtain of the large window. I went towards it and saw shadowy shapes standing, leaning all around the balcony. As I pulled the curtain aside I saw that they were skeletons, and I knew that they were what he had left of some of the police from downstairs. As I watched, red lights slowly began to glow in their eye sockets. I didn't know if they would move, but I pulled the curtain and turned back to the five police in the room.
With dreadful certainty I said: "Everyone else in this building is dead."
And we all knew he was coming for us next.
At that point I woke up, fortunately.
It was an incredibly real dream, very sharp and detailed (all of my dreams are in color). But here's a funny thing: terrifying as it was, it really wasn't that bad. I've had dreams that have scared me far more, even though the details were much less frightening. It was almost as if it was a movie I was watching, somehow, and the fear was the sort of fear you have at a horror movie. So I didn't wake up screaming or sweating, just with an overwhelming urge to tell Teri about it all.