A Rough Start

A ROUGH START

Ever since the first of the year, my nights have been interesting, to say the least. Not to say they have been filled with long, sensual lovemaking or wild parties twenty-one year olds would be ashamed to miss. No. It’s nothing like that. My nights are a  bit darker.

My nights have been filled with death and destruction.

I see I need to clarify before whoever reads this begins to think less of me. I haven’t been going out on a warpath killing people. I’ve read American Psycho and I am nothing like Patrick Bateman. My mellow hysteria, for lack of a better term, comes from dreams.

They are not exactly the kind of dreams that have me jarred awake in a bed of cold sweat, screaming into the still air of the early morning hours. There is no Freddy Kruger, no boogeyman to frighten me silly. How can I explain it? I’ll just start from the beginning.

If the first set of dreams had a storyline, it would be “the end of the world”. If you thought to yourself  well, that’s a bit extravagant, I’d be in 100% agreement with you. It is a weird thing to dream about but I did. Several times. The reasons for the world ending are not something I remember, I’m afraid, but they always involved the same plot: the world is ending and no one knows it but me. Can you imagine how helpless I felt? To know that everyone I came into contact with would just live out their lives in boring repetitiveness not knowing they were soon to be obliterated. I hadn’t felt such sadness in a long time.

Soon, it went from me simply knowing about the end of the world to it actually happening. Again, the cause is unclear but now there is a small handful of people who are aware of the inevitability and are trying to get people to safety. Why would they bother if the world was ending, you may ask? Well, I’m not sure how or why but somehow I knew I could stop it. It was almost like the world’s destruction was revolved around me. But it didn’t matter. No one listened to me or my cohorts. Our pleas fell on deaf ears even as the world began to change…

I would wake up from these dreams in a daze and wonder, did I eat something bad before bed? Usually, the answer is “no” unless there is a supernatural crime against lemon sparkly water or rocky road ice cream.

The dreams didn’t end there. In fact, they got worse. Now, not only was I dreaming about some form of destruction (not the end of the world, though. Evidently, that scale of dreaming had become too grand for my little wee mind to handle) but I was also dreaming about monsters. I would go so far as to say the word “demons” in some cases. These were the dreams that bothered me the most.

I’m not going to retell all of the monster-dreams. That would be as pointless as trying to explain the premise of The Matrix in detail to someone with A.D.H.D.  That’s not to say you, the reader, can’t handle the details, but there is something to be said for witnessing the event as opposed to simply hearing how it happened. So, I won’t waste either of our time.

The one thing I can tell you, is that I felt a constant need to get away, to run from these things that seemed hell bent on capturing me. The dreams would always switch. One minute I’m safe at my grandparents house and the next minute that familiar safe haven is now a maze and I’m running for my life. The dreams had constant change but the same plot: I’m being chase by the unspeakable.

The dream I had last night was the worst. I was almost made dizzy by all of the scene changes. It started off in a boarding house filled with rambunctious, sex-crazed people, then a hotel where people ignored the monsters walking next to them. Then it became a run down hospital where children were sacrificed to the monsters (at this point, myself and two companions tried to stop whatever evil was spreading. For the first time, I was fighting back and I had help). From the hospital, the dream became a restaurant that was dark and gloomy, filled with lots of decay and blood-red coloring and yet it was packed with rich patrons. It was in the restaurant things went from just plain weird to flat out terrifying.

I was in the kitchen with the cooks when all hell broke out in the large dining area. Running inside, I saw some people trying to run out of the building but became trapped as they could not find the doors, despite the fact they were in plain view. Some people were going crazy where they stood and began attacking others. But that wasn’t what was so shocking. A vast majority of the patrons were transforming into monsters. They were being stretched, torn, bloodied and carved right in front of me. It was a terrible sight. Simply indescribable.

Eventually, I got my wits about me and along with the same two companions, I tried to escape but that restaurant had become a funhouse maze filled with screaming people being eaten and attacked by things that used to be human. There were some people who remained sane and tried to escape but they never made it. But as horrible as our surroundings were, my friends and I didn’t go crazy. We just did our best to find freedom.

I woke up before we could…

I don’t know what any of this means if it means anything at all. It’s now the second week of the new year and I’ve yet to sleep more than three or four hours a night and it’s beginning to wear me out. Every night I close my eyes, I’m taken to places I never want to be and yet I wake up without fear. Just a deep sense of feeling disturbed.

I guess tonight I’ll try cherry ice cream for dessert instead of rocky road. We’ll see what happens next…