ledhendrix, those are both fucking amazing dreams.
now, ladies and gentlemen, i give you the single most terrifying thing that has ever happened to me (real or imagined).
sorry it's so long but i typed this up at like six in the morning when i woke up scared for my life and sweating bullets and this was the only way i could even begin to convey it with words. this dream was very obviously inspired by the book i was reading at the time: The Terror by Dan Simmons. so if you've read it, this will sound very familiar.
[We set sail before dawn on a Saturday. We would make it to the Arctic by nightfall if we had a strong headwind and enough luck to avoid any solid sea-ice.
We were lucky. But only once.
We were only in the Arctic a few days before an unnaturally early Winter locked our vessel in it's place in the ice. We were prepared for this sort of thing; you have to be if you're making an expedition to Arctic seas. We had enough food to last us two years...but we remained frozen in place on the ice for three. The hunting on such barren and frozen tundra, as you may have guessed, is not good for people inexperienced in it's intricacies. However, we weren't inexperienced; we were completely clueless. We never so much as saw another animals silhouette in the distance, let alone got close enough to hunt and kill one.
With food stores running low, and daily rations already reduced to as small an amount as we dared, some of the crew began to "suggest" that we rely on some less-than-scrupulous methods of survival. The first of which being cannibalism. The idea was put forth that we would draw straws and whoever drew the short straw would be killed and eaten. I can't remember the first time this actually happened because I was so malnurished that I must have been slipping in out of consciousness for days at a time. After what was apparently the longest of these "sleeps" I remember waking up feeling, somehow, stronger and more focused than I could remember being in quite some time. I found out later that during my hours and days of delerium they had been feeding me my own crew.
-
There are only three of us left. Three broken men finally allowed to leave Hell. We were trapped within the Devil's own mind for those three years and we saw everything his imagination had to offer: murder, torture, rape, sodomy, and of course, cannibalism. Then the ice just broke up and vanished into the rest of the ocean, just like that. Suddenly we were free, but several hands short of running the ship smoothly. Hell, even if we had a full crew, the ship had taken too much damage from the constant, crushing pressure on the ice those three years to be in any condition to sail. So we waited to die, so sure of our fate that killing and eating each other to stay alive just wasn't worth the effort.
I have no recollection of how we escaped or got rescued but suddenly I found myself standing in a corn field with no corn, staring at the lights of a city in the distance. I couldn't believe it! Somehow, I alone had made it back to the civilized world. As I walked towards the burning lights of the cityscape on the horizon, I ran across a man sitting alone on a large blanket in the field directly in my path.
He saw me coming and hailed "Hullo thur!" He said he was having a picnic but the other guests were over a thousand years late and that I should join him.
"Can't let all this grub go to waste eh?" he asked with strange smile that might have looked at home in a house of mirrors, but not here.
I sat down to dine with the obviously insane man and he asked me what I was doing out here all by myself wearing such strange clothes. So I told him about hell on earth and everything that had happened during those three years of frozen isolation. When my story was through, he began to tell me how strong a mind I must have to have been able to keep my sanity through such an ordeal, and it must have been oh-so-lonely. He continued to praise and compliment me, all the while moving ever closer on our little wool island in the sea of dirt. Before long he was right next to me, whispering in my ear about how truly astounding I was and how he could "make me feel better." I told him it was time for me to be going as he started pulling off my outer jacket. I try to get up to leave but I'm totally paralyzed.
The sun is setting as he starts to pull off my last undershirt, and it's getting cold out. As my final layer passes over my face, I instinctually close my eyes and open them only when the shirt is clear of my head. But the landscape before me is not the same now as it was several seconds earlier when I closed my eyes. We are no longer sitting on a blanket in a field, but on a starchy, springy bed in a motel room. Through a crack in the blinds I can see that it's no longer evening either but instead it appears to be about noon and the sound of traffic outside is deafening after the silence of the perpetual Arctic winter. After tearing my mind away from the cacophany outside and questions I had inside, I looked back at the man who must have brought me here. He's still sitting next to me exactly as he was on the blanket in the field that seems so far away now, and I realize that now we are both naked. I'm terrified to discover that I still cannot move and I begin to panic as he lowers his hands between us, below my field of vision from my paralyzed position. Naturally, I am extremely relieved when his hands come quickly back up to where I can see them and he appears to be holding a small tape recorder. He smiles an evil smile at me and I realize suddenly that the man before me is no stranger at all but one of the other two survivors from my failed expedition.
"I got it all on tape, motherfucker!" he spits at me. "You're done for."
He stands up and walks right out the front door, still naked as he came. I'm still struggling to understand what is going on when I feel myself flying face-first towards and the floor. I can see only stars but the last thing I hear before losing consciousness is "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say..."
I regain consciousness to find that I'm sitting in the passenger seat of a minivan, seat-belt buckled, hands cuffed behind my back, with my head pounding. I'm no longer paralyzed but I'm restrained in such a way that it doesn't matter. I'm at the mercy of the stranger in the driver's seat. I'm suddenly aware of other people in the car with us and crane my neck as far as I can to look into the back seats and there, sitting side by side, are the other two survivors from our Arctic journey. I say nothing to them and they return the favor; deciding, instead, to stare unblinkingly ahead; looking right through me. I turn to look through the windshield in an attempt to divine my location but I don't recognize the city around us. So I decide I'd better get some answers before it's too late but when I turn to address my ex-shipmates, only one sits where there were two just seconds earlier and the one that remains is horribly scarred and disfigured by what appear to be burns. He is a truely horrible sight to behold and thankfully I am able to turn my head away from his dripping visage; but not before I start screaming. I know it's not really necessary to be screaming at the top of my lungs like this because it won't do any good but I can't stop. I don't know how to stop. One part of mind is telling me that this is pretty silly and that I should just be rational. Sure, he's gross looking but I'm in no immediate danger. But what about the other man? Where did he go? Well, I just don't know. And how do you explain the instant full-body burns and scars, eh? It doesn't make a lick of sense. Face it, boy: you're crazy. I refuse to believe that. Fine, look outside, then.
So, at my own request, I looked outside and immediately wished I hadn't. All the people were horrible, decaying mutants shambling to work in ragged, rotten three-thousand dollar suits and organic cotton and blue jeans. Every car driving the down the street was pure terror on wheels. I saw what the sane part of my brain told me was once a VW Bug, but to me it was a gigantic, monstrous head on wheels with several extra mouths where it's nose should have been. It was snarling and barking at me, drooling all over the street.
And those are only the things that words exist to describe.
I realized that I was still screaming but everywhere I looked there was a beast ten times more horrifying than the last, and I couldn't stop. I never stopped screaming even as they drove me to the institution, brought me inside, put me in a straight-jacket and wheelchair, and pushed me down the never-ending bleached white hall towards a cell where I would mostly likely spend the rest of my life screaming away at nothing in complete obscurity and anonymity.]
