Segment
It’s hard to say when the dreams started. I don’t keep track of my dreams, I don’t use a dream journal or anything, and by the time I noticed it felt like it had been going on for quite some time. But alright, let’s say the first time it really caught my attention was last Spring. I was dreaming about something or other and I was in the office, or a recreation of it, in the vague ways that dreams recreate parts of life. I was talking to Mr. Preinz about cars. I mentioned that mine was constantly breaking down (in fact, it was in the shop on the night of this dream), and he suddenly shushed me, and held out his hand. He held it out to the side and beckoned, and waited. We stood there for a while, waiting. Then some grotesque dark form which my eyes refused to look at approached him. It was massive, writhing, and reeked of death. It wasn’t paying attention to me, but I knew that if it did it could eat me, enslave me, torment me, anything, and this was its only joy. I knew this in the way one knows things in dreams. Mr. Preinz reached out his beckoning hand, and pulled away from the hateful mess a single slug. It was about 3 inches long, black and green and red, and bubbling with pus and bile. Mr. Preinz smiled, and held the slug up to his ear. It burrowed into his head with an easy slurp, and I could hear it munching away on his brains. He then turned back to me, and said, in a crystal clear voice: “I hear Toyotas almost never break down.”
From then on I didn’t talk to Mr. Preinz so much — some irrational part of me feared that his skin would be acrid, his words poisonous. It was a bad dream, but only that, and after a few days I forgot it. But then I had another: Mrs. Hollenburry, the elderly woman next door, did the exact same slug procedure before telling me “put an open box of baking soda in your fridge to reduce odors.” The next month it was after watching too much TV, and Michael Emerson was staring at me with a slug chewing through his eyeball from the inside, saying “don’t you think it’s time you got rid of cable, anyway?” Then I recalled seeing the dark creature before — or, not seeing, exactly, but sensing it in my dreams, often behind me, sometimes in a wall near me, a foreboding presence I hadn’t understood until the dream with Mr. Preinz. I grew anxious, went to see a tarot reader, immediately refused to believe anything she told me and called an old school friend who is now a pyschotherapist. She told me it was likely a result of stress, and that I shouldn’t look for meaning, only examine the emotions I was feeling during the dream. Those emotions were being repressed during my waking hours, she said, and I needed to “resolve” them.
I tried drinking tea before bed, and yoga. I went for a jog in the morning, I did soul searching and I told my wife. The dreams lessened in frequency but did not depart. I experienced one in the summer, two more in the fall, and the most recent one only two weeks ago. This is to say that they have not yet departed me, or, if they have, I do not know it yet. Here is how the most recent one went, for context: I was in high school again, on the football field. In high school I operated one of several cameras on the field, tracking the ball from my vantage point along the 20 yard line, while an A/V club member cut between shots in the booth. In the dream, however, I was on the field, and the ball was in my hands. Both teams were also on the field, and all of them were running toward me at full speed from the other end, in the dreamish way that people will sometimes move very slowly until the dream decides they need to be present at which time they will be right in front of you. That is to say, even though they were all moving inhumanly fast, it took several minutes for them to reach me. I could feel the dark presence on the field, and it seemed that every screaming fan in the stands was Its projection. They were cheering and I thought they were cheering for me to be trampled and mashed to a bloody pulp, that the footballers would kill me viciously and the fans would go home thinking it was exactly the show they’d hoped to see. The footballers grew closer, and I saw them being consumed by slugs. Some with limbs missing, giant gorged leeches hanging off of tattered stumps, bulging veins running down their lengths, grotesque prosthetics for their hosts. Some players were being eaten by many small larvae, their skin papery and cracking, bulging and pulsating unnaturally with the vermins’ movement. None looked remotely well, all seemed to be enjoying the sensation of being eaten like this. The dark presence hated me for not being eaten, and I knew if one of those worms got inside me it would rot my brain and I would begin to enjoy it, it would drug me as it devoured me, like the parasitic wasps do. My throat went dry with fear, and then they were upon me.
They did not slow down and I thought for certain they would crush me, but somehow every footballer stopped just short of touching me, and instead crowded a circle around me. Now that they were close I could see the abominations in hideous detail, and I could smell the nauseating death-stench of the dark presence on them. The players didn’t speak, but the slugs eating them squeaked and hissed, as if burning themselves in their own toxic slime. They surrounded me, some in red and white jerseys, some in purple and gold — our school colors, and those of our rivals. I wanted to cover my ears, to prevent them from putting a slug inside me, but for whatever reason I could not.
Then they began to taunt me. One said I “reeked like an old sock”, another “you must be a time traveler from before deodorant”, a third “look at his greasy hair!” and so on. They made fun of my smell, of my dirty clothes, of my hunched shoulders. They made fun of my acne, which in the dream was worse than it had ever been in real life. They brought up my darkest secrets: how I’d asked out Miranda Apfelmussen in sophomore year very awkwardly and she’d said no, and promised not to tell anyone but she’d told the whole football team while giving them handies behind the bleachers. For that: “virgin! loser! creep!” They knew that I’d once inadvertently insulted my grandmother two days before she’d suffered a heart attack, and for several days I thought she might die before I had a chance to apologize. For this one: “monster! sociopath! idiot!” Somehow they took these events, which were not particularly bad nor special in any way except that I never talked about them with anyone, and they blew them up into catastrophic wrongdoings that exemplified my low character. Primarily, however, they went on and on about how much I stank, and they hooted and hollered and drooled and the slimy worms and slugs inside them boiled and the crowd brayed for blood and this continued for what felt like hours until I woke up.
You may wonder what all this business has to do with you. After all, surely the medium or the psychiatrist has a better claim to my predicament than you. A fair question, and here is how it goes: well, after that final dream, I was not entirely of a reasonable mind about things, and after all how could I be? I went through the day constantly sniffing my armpits, worrying that I did indeed stink, and I resolved to go immediately after work and buy some triple strength antiperspirant, entirely out of residual fear of the screaming footballers. It was a rapidly growing fixation — by 5:00 I couldn’t even think about going home until I had the stuff with me. I think this psychosis was compounded by the fact that I’d eaten very little that day, and was starving for dinner, but even so. I went straight for the store in a mad panic, almost panting from how badly I needed antiperspirant. I felt terribly insecure without it. As soon as my fingers touched the bottle, a wave of relief washed over me. It was as if the threat of the dark presence had been lifted, a burden I hadn’t even realized I’d been carrying.
By the time I made the purchase I was practically crying tears of ecstasy. It was not because the act of buying itself gave me pleasure, please understand, but only the relief at no longer bearing under such a psychic onslaught from this dark presence, Its malice temporarily directed elsewhere. I thought that It seemed satisfied, or maybe satiated is the better word, and — please understand, I know this is all in my head, I know I am insane, but pretend for a minute with me that It really exists — somehow buying this antiperspirant defeated the schoolyard bullies that had been mocking me in my dream, made me invincible to their taunts, and so defanged the monster. This is how I thought, and this is what made buying it feel orgasmic. I know! But listen:
I only yesterday bought a box of baking soda to put in the fridge, and again felt the same release of hateful pressure, the same relief upon touching it. I have been thinking about buying a Toyota, and the mere thought makes me practically giddy. I am afraid, because no matter what I do, I cannot make these dreams stop, only lessen slightly in frequency. I am even more afraid, because despite the dark presence and all the fear and loathing and disgust I feel during the dream, I can feel myself becoming addicted to the rush of defeating the monsters by making their words useless. That ecstatic rush of endorphins, that release of pressure, it is the sweetest thing I have ever known. I am still more afraid because I suspect that I am not really defeating these monsters at all, that this is exactly what the dark presence wants me to do, and every time I act to fulfill the conditions of a dream It digs Its claws a little deeper into me, that It spurs me with the stick and taunts me with the carrot, that It is — is training me. I am deathly afraid, to the point of sickness, to where I cannot eat, I am afraid that… that there is a slug inside me!
Please understand — I have put it in terms of my sickness, the way my diseased mind is comporting itself, but I know and you know that there is another explanation here. Something is putting these delusions inside me. Please, won’t you help?
