Saturday night, my subconscious treated me to the most disturbing dream I’ve ever had. It wasn’t exactly what I consider a nightmare. I think of nightmares as having a quality of raw, fleeing, screaming terror. This had no intense frights, but long and excrutiating horror.
I realize many of you may be more comfortable not reading on. However, for my own sake, I need to push these images out of my head and translate them into words in order to find some peace with them.
1. Secret Society
At times I was a part of it, at times apart from it, watching it. When I was in it, I was among a group of families who had become involved in a cult. They lived in this commune, away from the city where they were able to devote themselves to their lifestyle of choice. It didn’t have a hippie or mystic feel to it. All of the cultists were yuppies. I got the sense that none of them thought of themselves as cultists, but as members of a special society. So, though they lived in these cabins on a camp ground, there was a sense of being progressive and upwardly mobile. Except for the dark underbelly.
You see, now that these people had gotten deep enough into the organization, they were afraid of what they were taking part of, and afraid of what would happen if they tried to leave. I got the sense that at first the selling points were very exciting. They promised a new outlook on life and success and health and personal drive. They had a quest for personal excellence, to stand above the herd. It was the standard line that you would hear from a lot of business conferences.
In the cabin where the dream began, a young family was visited by one of those higher initiates that operated the camp. I don’t remember the gender of the initiate. He or she was clean cut and fit and had this smile that was so placid and upbeat. But the eyes, in them you could see a kind of twinkling of depravity. And the initiate came to tell the family that it was time for them to take their 9 year-old daughter to the daily picture taking.
The parents tried to console their daughter who immediately started to cry. She didn’t like the pictures. She didn’t like the things they made her do. I could see the agony in her parent’s faces, but more than they hated what they were doing to her, I could see they were afraid of what would happen if they didn’t.
As happens in dreams, I found myself knowing things without being told
them. The official reason for the photos was that they were to be used in instructional materials for other members of their organization around the globe. Deeper than that, the purpose of these exercises was to somehow train both parents and child, to make them more a part of the organization. These activities would strip them of their weakness and their humanity and push them on to greater heights of the power they had enterred the organization for. But clearly, the methods of these exercises was to horrify the humanity out of them. The actual content of these photos was never said, but it was clear from the family’s reaction that they were sexual and violent and depraved. The fact that they would carry them out and force their daughter to do so spoke volumes about this society, for the punishment for refusing to be a willing part of this torture must be even more hideous.
When the family left, and the door to the cabin closed behind them, there was a terrible silence.
There were others who lived in the same cabin with that family. It was some time before any of them could speak. Soon after they began, though, they decided very firmly that they could take no more of this. If they were caught escaping, the punishement would be death or torture, but they could no longer be a party to this.
I do not remember the plan that was hatched. Some of these details are fuzzy. They did manage to escape, though not all survived the attempt. Once off of the camp grounds, there began a manic flight back into the world, to try to disappear into society once more.
They were hunted relentlessly, and there were several encounters during which members of the original party were picked off one by one. The hunters that came after them were more and more ferocious, and less and less human. They revealed themselves to be something demonic, and confirmed the fears that the cult actively served evil powers.
2. The Blue Bird
After a chase through a mall and a highway, the dream made me one of the escapees. I remember that we managed to kill one of the hunters, but when we did, it told us of the greater evil that would be sent after us next. It quoted from its holy text and spoke of a blue bird that had been eaten from the inside by parasites. Though the bird was dead, its killers wore its flesh, and this creature was the most powerful and feared of the dark god’s lieutenants.
I found myself hiding in a stairwell when the blue bird approached. I imagined it to be some hideous giant avian with tattered feathers and skin that rolled with the writhing of the infestation it contained. I crouched above the door, one flight up. From where I was, I would see the bird pass underneath me, and would then jump in behind it after it passed, and escape unnoticed, giving me time to flee as it searched the building. So I waited, holding an improvised weapon, somethign like a hoe with a broken head, sharp and vicious.
The door opened. I expected a rush of wind and a monstrous shriek. Instead, I heard the tap of hard-heeled boots stepping in military rythm. Instead of a monster, I saw a woman. She was bald, wearing blue make-up, and a suit of full plate armor. She was not alone, behind her came two of her enforcers. They were cyborgs — huge hulking humanoid bodies that resembeled the armor she wore, with long-mechanical necks that craned forward from their shoulders. At the tip of those necks, each had a face that seemed to be moulded out of silocon, not human but some kind of mannequin replica. They were both bald and pale and blueish to match their mistress.
I then realized that the words about a blue bird had been a metaphor, and that made this woman even more frightening. She was, truly, the blue bird who been devoured from within and whose killers now wore her skin. She must have been human once, another member of this strange society. She had taken the photos and done whatever else had been required of her to remove her humanity, and it was removed. And in its place was left a hideous swarm that stalked the earth in her form.
Somehow, the giant cyborgs seemed less a threat. From my perch, I let my weapon swing down, aiming for the soft, weak, mannequin face. My first strike was glancing, but the cyborg was slow to react. It staggered back, making a soft mechanical mewling sound, it’s face spasming in a way that made it look like a baby. Maybe it had been one. My second strike was better aimed, and with the the third I stunned the other cyborg, and then jumped down just as the blue bird was rounding the corner. Their sounds of pain and confusion could not be heard over the sound of her boots, and so I was able to escape.
3. The Cthonic Bible
It was also at this point that my mind tried to escape the dream by ejecting me back into consciousness. I found my eyes open, and I became aware of my bedroom almost like a swimmer putting his head above water. It was too early for me to wake up though. There were lots of things to do for Easter Sunday, and I would need to be rested. If I were to wake up now, sometime before 5am, it would cause problems. So, latching on to the knowledge that it was just a dream, I closed my eyes once more.
Soon after returning to the dream — and i did return to the exact same dream, though at some point further ahead in the plot — the last of us were captured. We thought somehow that we had just about found our freedom, when we discovered that we were trapped.
The bluebird and the initiates brought us to the lake that the camp had been built around. There, at the water’s edge, we discovered that it was not only too late for us, but too late for all humanity as well. The dark god had arrived, and we watched as it rose up from the water’s surface. It was, in Lovecraft fashion, an immense creature with slimy skin and various writhing appendages. A great tentacle waved in our direction, and it’s tip was a kind of sucker thing, and four small chomping mouths positioned like the petals of a vile flower.
From the gods’ mouths came a gentle and even musical tenor voice, speaking English, but within its voice was a grating hum. You see, the real power of this monster was not its strength or resiliance or deadly appendages, but the power it had to bend the mind of whoever came into its presence.
It told us that the time had come for it to return to the Earth and reign once more. How honored we must be to witness this event. All that it required was a human corpse that it could inhabit and walk the earth. The initiates brought forth the body of one of us who had been killed in the highway chase, and we watched the monster fuse with it, and new that no human force could stop these creatures from turning our world into an everlasting hell.
With that done, my mind closed the book on this dream. And literally, I saw a book closing, and I heard a voice say, "So it was written in the Bible of Cthulhu." Some time later, the daylight brought me back to my bedroom.
4. Reflection:
At some point yesterday, it occured to me that, under different circumstances, this would actually be a very dangerous dream for me to have. In a different time, it would be taken as some kind of evil omen, and I would likely be burned at the stake. Also, if I were a person who believed in such things, I might think that I really had been visited by a prophecy. All I have to say to that is thank God I didn’t have this dream at 14. This is the kind of thing that would have turned my depressed little self into a terminally weird Goth kid, and the Charismatic Andy Campbell would never exist as we know him. I would probably also get myself institutionalized.
I can make sense of some of the elements of the dream. Obviously, it borrows heavily from the H.P. Lovecraft I’ve read, mixing it with aspects of the Hellraiser movies. The Blue Bird seemed in some ways like the Borg Queen and the cyborg had similarities to other sci-fi monsters like the villain from Robocop 2. I think the details of the cult itself relate to some of the bullying I’ve heard about from Scientology, considered the recent South Park episode in which Chef dies. Somehow, the anxiety and uncertainty I felt this week gathered these elements together to make a patchwork horror.
Of course, it still freaks me the fuck out.
Those who have played in role playing games that I’ve run probably wouldn’t be too surprised to hear some of the details of this dream. This dream obviously tapped into the same well that I have used to try to consciously frame the nature of evil.
I’ve said on a few occasions how easily spooked I can get. The girl from "The Ring" stuck with me for over a year and both Blair Witch movies kept me from being able to sleep until sunrise. Something in my vivid imagination has me prone to scaring the living shit out of myself.
The odd thing is I don’t think many people who know me would expect that I have these terrors. And certainly their not regular phenomena, but when they happen they are strong. I mean, I don’t think I’m a particularly morbid person. Yes, I get depressed and tend to be fatalistic, but I’m not generally creepy. Generally.
I will say this for my subconscious, though. There is nothing like raw supernatural horror to shock you into re-evaluating your present difficulties. My Welsh friend Pippa said once that when she’s particularly anxious about something, she’ll often have a frightening dream of something like walking along the edge of a cliff. After the dream, the waking troubles seem not so fearsome. And, I’ve got to say, no matter what goes on in my life, it’s nothing so bad as what I dreamt Saturday night.
