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Underground > Creation >

Unlimited Nightmare Company

  
 
D Terminator XXXIII
12:44 / 24.03.04
Why the Creation and not, say, the Conversation? Because I think the inherent structures and illogical proceedings of nightmares lend themselves more to a storytelling approach than a conversational one. Not that I'm any good at it, but many of you undoubtedly are.

Of nightmares I have been plagued by recently. And I guess that I'm not the only one who sometimes feels betrayed by one's own subconsciousness.

A nightmare inspired by the paltry 15 minutes that we could devote to the Notre Dame, interrupted the few hours worth of sleep that I could manage to accumulate last week. The details are very hazy, but the chimeras and trappe souls within the dome were a part of the unheavenly display which unnerved my senses.

3 days later, on the busride home - something which I'm never going to do again, I swear! - I tried unsuccessfully to perpetuate something resembling uninterrupted sleep. I was lying on two seats, proving my athletic adeptness by adopting various poses, whenever the limbs dictated new positions. In one of the half-awake, half-asleep moments, I chanced upon a static, cinematic half-figure shot of two asians. Even though they had their backs towards me, I studied these two immobile figures, a child holding an adult woman's hand. Just when I thought nothing was going to be developed here, an unprecedented cinematic cut shocked me: The child's face, in a disarrayed close-up showed me the hesitation to reveal himself to me; his was a sickeningly blue complexion, of what skin I could see of the rotting flesh, and his purely black eyes pierced through my sanity. I jerked backwards in reality, and the dull *thump* to the dirty bus floor awoke me. Hesitant to go back to sleep - with the conviction that I would involuntarily return to this nightmare vision - I stayed up for half an hour before uneasy, fragmented sleep resumed me.

But these two are nothing. They are disturbances. Nothing more. It's relatively easy to shake them off. I have no firm, established and real connection with those two immaterial situations. What really got to me, last night, got to me so much that I had to phone somebody at three o'clock in the morning, was far more ingeniously created.

My late father had, for some reason that eludes me, been reborn. I entered this enigmatically strange house, a house I had never seen or visited before. Inside the entrance, with my attention turned to the voices behind a closed, adjacent door, I listened to my father's calming voice. I could only hear broken pieces of the conversation, but the deep tone that my father once was in possession of, ensured that I stood transfixed on the spot. "Why don't you enter," he enquired, and in the illogical omniscience that dreams momentarily affords you, I knew that it was addressed to me.

I entered through a crooked hallway. There were so many rooms, and there were so many alien people. Inside what I perceived to be a meditation room, there sat my father, surrounded by yet more people. I seated myself beside him, and for a period of time, we kept our proximity purely in a state of sensation, without the need to utter unwelcome words.

At some point it became important to me that my mother and brother were with me, experiencing what my father encompassed in that situation. I began exploring this strange house with the knowledge that the rest of my family was there somewhere. I got lost, amidst all these strangers, and defeated by my purpose I returned to the meditation room. My father was gone, and many of the strangers with him. The only ones who remained inside was an old man and a little girl, both of whom were as alien to me as the rest of the unknowable inhabitants of the house. I approached them with a cautious enquiry of where my father had gone to.

"You see," said he, standing in front of me, while the girl passed my right side and began to explore whatever was in the back of me, "this started in a small town up north, five years ago..." I knew instinctively that we had had experienced a collective spiritual apparition, when-

The panic in his eyes, as he and the girl caught sight of something monstrous behind me. The speed of his fragile, old body as he protectively tried to pull the girl to somewhere behind him. The nothingness manifesting itself to a demonic human being, and a splitsecond further, morphing it's body into a grotesque Francis Bacon painting, and how it lashed out at me...

I screamed in horror and surprise - in real life too - and for a short second, the monstrous apparition was beside my bed. It vanished.

I couldn't sleep, and I had this weird sensation that I was all alone in the world. I phoned a friend. I wanted to cry, but didn't. I wanted to go somewhere, where there were other people, but didn't. I refrained from turning off the lights and stayed awake for two more hours.



What haunts you in your dreams?
 
 
Styx
14:44 / 24.03.04
This is not a nightmare but it bugs me because it is recurring. It started about 15 years ago and comes back periodically. A huge house with lots of winding, symmetrical staircases but instead of steps, water cascades down them. There are fountains and incredibly deep pools instead of floors. The whole lit by chandeliers hanging from very high ceilings. There is nobody else in this house but me. There are no other objects, no plant life, nothing else whatsoever. I don’t swim or walk but I hover and see everything from “above”. I have no idea why I am there. Another favourite are Tsunami’s, now those are nightmares. My dreams consist of 90% water.
 
 
eddie thirteen
20:30 / 24.03.04
Spooky creepy nightmares.....

I have to say that, for me, this probably does belong in Magick, but oh well...the last bunch of bad ones I had came when I was attempting (I have since stopped, for reasons that'll be evident) to write a short story (fiction -- so, hey, maybe this *does* belong here!) about a real-life murder that took place in 1992. I didn't and don't know (we-llllll...but we'll get to that) anyone involved: I'd read an article about the case and was so struck by it that I felt like someone needed to explore it through the medium of storytelling. I guess, in some roundabout way, to make some sense out of it...which, of course, cannot actually be done in cases like this one.

In a nutshell, four teenaged girls had participated in the torture/murder of a twelve-year-old fifth girl. One of the four (the instigator) was jealous of the twelve-year-old because they shared a girlfriend; another girl, who believed herself to be possessed by a "vampire," went along with this because she was, as far as I can determine, simply homicidal and insane; the two other girls evidently didn't fully understand what they were getting into (whether they were really to blame was my angle on the story), though participated in the murder to a lesser or greater degree anyhow. That murder went on for about eight hours, because none of the girls knew how to kill anyone very effectively (they tried to slit her throat with a knife that was too dull to cut anything), and then because the twelve-year-old girl apparently had an unbelievably strong will to live -- beaten, bludgeoned, stabbed, she should certainly have died in short order, but she didn't. In fact, she didn't die until she was set on fire.

If I sound at all cold and removed from this, it's only because the case upset me to such a degree that I was completely preoccupied with it for several weeks, and have had to become detached about it. I realized there was something magickal in attempting what I was attempting, and knew too that I was probably opening myself up to all kinds of gruesome influences. I did what I could to protect myself from such, and...well...it didn't work. I literally woke up every morning with my first thought as, "You don't have to do this; you can do something else," and I received this with a great deal of relief. But I felt like I did...I'd kinda committed myself to writing the story, and I don't usually back away from something unless I feel like it's going wrong. Like, that it sucks. This, whatever other problems I had with it...I didn't get that.

Eventually, though, I did let it go. The girls were goths, and gay besides, and I felt like the story could be misconstrued as a rallying cry to put metal detectors in schools, if published. More than that, though, I just felt like I was putting myself in a horrible, Ring-like position, by writing this fucking godawful thing that had a built-in, cosmically-unjust ending that I could do nothing to prevent. If I did change the ending, I would be telling a lie. And, to a degree, I had a sense that there would probably just be people who got off on the story in a way I didn't intend...overall, it made me uncomfortable.

Soooooooo...then the dreams started. I'd like to think it was all my subconscious, but I really don't -- my dreams were full of burning children, little girls and infants, cut to: broiling hamburger patties that put me off meat for a little while (and I tend to be kinda carnivorous, so this basically meant I just wasn't eating anything), plus a sense of being followed, all of which still just sounds like paranoia, until I almost set my kitchen on fire by putting down a plastic object on top of a stove burner that I hadn't turned on (to my conscious awareness), but was on.

Thing is, I couldn't figure out what Shanda (the girl) wanted from me -- by all accounts, she was NOT the kind of person who even *would* torment someone (although maybe that had changed, taking all into consideration). If she was trying to communicate with me, then what the hell was she trying to say? I don't think she wanted me to write the story, but since I'd already given it up at that point, I doubt it was any kind of a warning. Even if I wasn't literally being haunted, and this was all me, I still couldn't figure it out. Eventually, all I could think to do was ask her to leave. She did, and so far, she hasn't been back.

I definitely think that there's a strong connection between our dreams and our creative processes, and maybe to more than that, too. But I kinda see writing as a magickal act, so I guess it's not a surprise. And it's hard to advise creative people to be careful in what they write for fear it'll be realized WAY too close to home (I'm thinking here of stuff like, most dramatically, Morrison's King Mob shooting/real-life near death experience), because the biggest part of creation is the trust in your imagination to go anywhere, without limits. But, y'know, sometimes.....yeah. It's gonna get you, man! So, like... *try* to be careful, maybe?
 
 
D Terminator XXXIII
13:01 / 01.04.04
How can you be entirely certain - and here I realise that I couldn't be convinced if I didn't want to be - that it was the spirit of the girl, showing you the nightmares, eddie thirteen?

I have formulated a little theory for myself, which explains nightmares for me. The body uses a little of the body's muscle tissue during the sleep. What if this has an impact - although how so and how much are arbitrarily, vague issues - on how and what we dream?

I had one of the-

*thump*






*thump*





*thump*






-behind me moment this night. I woke up before I could see what it was.

And actually ashamed that I didn't go over my initial post again before posting - I was interrupted three times when writing, and it shows. Embarrassing. A nightmare.
 
 
eddie thirteen
18:01 / 02.04.04
Oh, I can't, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't...um, except when I'm not. I mean, speaking of being embarrassed, it may come as a surprise considering how much weird and/or unlikely shit gets talked about on Barbelith, but after I'd posted the message in re: this thread, I kinda looked at it the next day in total abject horror, because even I think it's kinda silly. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...*some*times.

I mean, there are any number of other real-life stressors that could be to blame for all of the above. The way I finally chose to deal with it was to accept that I could, maybe, actually have brought myself to the attention of...you know...something, and act accordingly. It seemed to work. It could very well be that I put the little girl's face to all the abstractions that were getting to me right then, and in calmer moments I figure that's probably it. But if so, then at least that projection gave me something to deal with, which normally one doesn't have when grappling with abstract concepts (of a troublesome nature or otherwise) -- in a way, this probably has a lot to do with the underlying psychological purpose of nightmares, providing there is one.
 
  
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