Murder dream #4

Hopefully the title indicates that this post is a little disturbing.


Last night I took some melatonin for insomnia, since it's supposed to facilitate deep sleep while also encouraging vivid dreams. I fell asleep right away and dreamed I was in a slightly altered facsimile of my home, trapped and terrified because an angry man was attempting to get in through the window. Cut to the next scene. He is lying inert on the balcony and his head is resting a few inches away from his body. Close inspection of the wound exposes a total lack of blood or any other body fluid. Does this physiological abnormality indicate the inhumanity of his temperament and form, or the collective tendency to disassociate from the suffering of perceived enemies? Did I kill him myself? The thought results in even more anxiety because of how unlikely it is that law enforcement will ever believe I acted in self defense given my disturbing art and writing. Inside, 'the house has rearranged itself again. My old friend Bobby, the one who claimed his family was part of a serial killer cult, is there and he explains the reason behind the attempted intrusion. He says the man is part of a recorded trauma recycling itself through similar personalities and events, as each individual is driven by an external consciousness and assimilated into its history. Looking outside broad picture windows into the front yard, I see a Chinese man pushing a baby carriage in circles faster than my eyes can follow. This image is a bleed-through from another timestream, appearing as a short circuit interrupted and reconnected in rapid succession, a flawed temporal translation whose effect is dizzying. The man is a victim of the event whose daily minutae are regenerated with every successive retelling of the same morbid story. I open the back door again and where the balcony was is a sharply sloping wooden staircase leading down into an overgrown, abandoned yard. The geometry of the steps reveals nested visual projections overlapping and coalescing with the expected form. Embedded in the structure of this image are massive dogs whose morphological mimicry has repeated the pattern and color of wood and grass. Aligned along the steps, blending into near incoherence with the pale yellows and tans of the lawn, are dozens of them. I understand that they are here to protect me and to transition the space and time surrounding the house towards a new cycle of events.

Dreams! : UPDATED 2/5/13

warning: This post contains a lot of gruesome, violent details so sensitive readers may wish to avoid it.

Last night was one of the worst nightmares I've had in awhile. I dreamed about a friend of mine who organizes events where trauma-based mind control is a main topic of discussion, and for some reason I was reading her personal emails. Whether or not I had been given permission to do so or not was ambiguous. In the real world, reading a friend's personal emails without their permission is not something I would ever choose to do because it's a violation of trust, however that's what happened in the dream and it's probably absurd to apologize for dream activity(By the way, it's probably not a coincidence that email intrusions have been an issue in my personal life over the past couple months, an obvious example of my subconscious inserting itself into an otherwise "manufactured" dream). One email was written by a person in our network who wrote "We've been pretending to be friends, but now things are going to change". Then I was at a national park with a stocky brown-haired man with a moustache who had been buying me clothes. In reaction to noises coming from somewhere off the trail, the man began shooting his gun into the trees, at which point crowds near the parking lot went into a panic and people ran in every direction. He then told me that he was an operative who had been sent to kill me, and I was subsequently sequestered inside my house, trying to reason with the same sociopath for no good reason at all. I was having a hard time articulating my words and felt that I may have been drugged, that it was very important to stay awake and coherent even though it was hard to talk. It felt a lot like the sleep paralysis dreams I've had in the past. Then he said "Guess what? I'm right outside your window", and I woke up, right around 3 AM.

I didn't go back to sleep immediately because I knew I would go straight back to the dream like what usually happens with these epic nightmares that last the whole night. Instead I got online to check my blog stats only to see that someone was reading a previous blog post describing a different version of the same nightmare at the same time all this was happening. When I finally fell back asleep at 4 AM I indeed went straight back to the same dream. This time I was at a get-together hosted by the same friend mentioned above. The killer was there and he ran at me across the room with a syringe with a needle about a foot long pointed directly at me. I managed to grab his arm, wrench the needle out of his hand and plunge the needle deep into his chest, after which he seemed to have disappeared. Afterwards people were milling about, and some of them were even defending the man's character, stating that I was just "overreacting". I wasn't. The best part of all this is that the dream was abruptly interrupted by the sound of my dog whining, which is only the first or second time that he's done this in the nearly 6 months I've had him. Normally he waits for me to wake up before making these kind of requests. The first thing I saw upon awakening this morning was his snout pointed at my face from a few inches away, hooked over the edge of the bed. He sleeps on the floor because he's a growling bed hog and this behavior disturbs my sleep.

Last night was the third time now where I've had a dream about killing a contract/serial killer. All of these dreams have occurred over the past year and a half or so. In the last one, I was a shop employee for a serial killer who had been storing body parts in his fridge and freezer, like a stereotypical horror movie. I was responsible for routine maintenance tasks such as washing dishes and cleaning the floor. Basic janitorial stuff. One day I asked the killer a question that inadvertently revealed my hesitance to continue the work(It's been awhile so I don't remember it). Not too long afterwards he pulled the same move as the killer above, rushing at me from across the room, only this time he had a knife instead of a needle. In response I grabbed a meat cleaver from one of the racks and plunged it deep into his chest, again just like the other dream. This time, he would not stay dead (another horror movie cliche) and I had to keep stabbing him, eventually dismembering the killer completely before he was no longer a threat. Recurring serial killer dreams are a problem that have been with me since childhood, only up until the recent past I had always been helpless and immobilized in all of them. I've felt much more of a sense of resolution from the recent dreams, although, really, it would probably be for the best if they didn't exist at all. I'm looking forward to the day when they're gone for good.

This morning when I woke up I realized yesterday was Candlemas, also called Imbolc and Brigid, an astrological holiday that is supposed to be a potent time for divination and invocation work. Around 10 AM, I called my friend who organizes the events. She later told me that she was too groggy to respond, but upon seeing my phone number pop up, her first thought was that I had one of the dreams too. She called me a few hours later to tell me about her nightmare. It was so much like the post-apocalyptic dream I had this past December that I pulled the post I wrote about it up on my laptop to share it with her. As I was reading it, she said "What did you say about gangs?", and I had to inform her that this part was in the next sentence. Her dream was about the also stereotypical zombie apocalypse. Just like in mine, there had been a complete breakdown of civil society, with gangs and mafia organizations running rampant. All sporting events and holidays had been cancelled, and anyone wandering the streets was subjected to murder, beatings, rape and theft. The smell of urine and feces pervaded public buildings, and this contamination provided an avenue for spreading disease. Schooling was a right, not a privilege, so some people were able to maintain some semblance of order (probably within walled security compounds, although she didn't specify that part). Things got so bad that people were trying to get back into the prisons just to get away from the zombie hoards. She later sent me an email that included the following quotes: "they were unable to break down doors, unlock them, or break open windows, so once inside, one was relatively safe...Gangs took over camps and other places where people congregated. Having the street skills they have, they took full advantage of it and basically enslaved large groups of people, trading "protection" for all their valuables (which was now currency since regular money wasn't being used)...Cigarettes and similar things were used as currency. They kept people captive and controlled everything. Basically the lunatics taking over the asylum...People all over tried to migrate to find safer areas, and all over the country they were lugging suitcases and bags, many of which just got confiscated by the gangs who started taking control. With so many people so scared and confused, it created the perfect situation for them to do whatever they wanted, and there was no one to stop them. I saw no police (doesn't mean they weren't in some places, I know what I saw was by no means complete).
Sanitation became a real problem, with water being shut off in many places (even places where it should have remained working) and this really contributed to the contamination/infection spreading, but people seemed unaware that this was the case. Conflicts between gangs also became an issue, as they tried to grab power, build armies, get resources. To kill the zombies, decapitation was best. The ones I saw seemed more (bleah) "fresh", with discolored, blueish skin with some tearing of the skin." I randomly pulled up the legendary metal band Candlemass on Youtube to include a track in this post, and quite coincidentally, the first track that came up was an epic zombie video a la Michael Jackson's Thriller. Excuse the morbid humor, but...wow. I can't stop watching this. :-)

Dreams, updated...

Over the past month or so, to my great annoyance, the use of homeopathy seems to have removed any pleasurable effects of smoking weed, and this means I've been sober except for a few unsuccessful attempts. One of the effects of marijuana is to block memories of dreaming, so as a result of sobriety I've been experiencing a sudden flood of extremely vivid dreams. Since childhood I've had a recurring dream of being pursued by a serial killer. For a long while this dream usually involved me being in slow motion and, later, the lone killer became a team of them, sometimes seeming to be mercenaries or military of some variety. Over the past few years the slow motion sensation has gone away and there have also been people in the dream who are assisting me. At times, there has also been a vague goal of getting the team shut down somehow or even prosecuted. The dreams have gone from being horrific nightmares to being exhilarating, with a lingering sense of accomplishment, although there are still exceptions to that rule.



A few weeks ago was one of those exceptions, a nightmare I had while staying over at a friend's house. This particular friend has been through some extreme situations, so my dream may have come about as a result of absorbing any ambient detritus that may have been floating around in her house. I dreamed that I was living in the apartment of a mercenary soldier who had been decorated with many awards, and had a very well-respected position in his community. I was staying there with a young guy and it was expected that we were to stay out of sight as we would not be welcomed in the community. The soldier wasn't home very often and when he was he rarely interacted with us. One day, while he was gone, the younger guy took a parcel out of the closet and unwrapped it for me to see. It contained a sizable collection of brightly-dyed leather masks, which he claimed were made from the skin of civilians the soldier had murdered in cold blood. The soldier came home in the middle of our intrusion and quickly explained that the masks had come from a South American tribe that practiced cannibalism. By his demeanor I knew he was lying, and indeed the masks had been the culmination of his ritualistic killing spree.



Doing my best to generate exuberance, I said that he should take the masks to a museum or an anthropologist to ensure their preservation. He returned my distrust with a penetrating gaze and I believed I was not safe in his house, or even outside of it, since the surrounding community was hostile to strangers. He left shortly afterwards and I resolved to catch him by surprise before he could murder me. The soldier returned home in the middle of the night and, waiting in the shadows of the hallway, I approached him, wrapped my hands around his throat and strangled him until he stopped breathing. When I awoke in the morning, I was disgusted and queasy about what I had done and there was no feeling of success as there has been in other dreams. I also realized I had not come prepared with the proper clothing since the area my friend lives in is fairly chilly compared to the climate I'm used to. When I left, she gave me a bright red leather jacket to keep warm. It wasn't until I was almost home that I realized exactly what the dream had been trying to tell me.



Putting aside the obvious meaning, a simple verification of non-violence as the most ideal response in any situation, and certainly the one in my dream given that it would have been far easier to just leave the house, I looked up an online dream dictionary which had this to say: "To dream that you have committed a murder, indicates that you are putting an end to an old habit and a former way of thinking. This could also refer to an end to an addiction". A possible reference to quitting smoking weed, or maybe also the ethos of fear-based survival? Hopefully I'm not boring people with the dream analysis, because this kind of analytic thinking can really gloss over less academically acceptable possibilities, such as external influence, not to be discounted in the overall scheme of things.



Then last night I had yet another serial killer dream and it was better, in the sense that I was not doing something which directly contradicts my personal ethics, even if the plot development is a bit lacking. This time, I was working at a mall that was owned by a family which was, again, very prominent and influential in their community. Most of the franchises at the mall were also owned by said family and, like the way that many Chinese corporations have their own police forces, the entire place was run like a prison, with tall fences surrounding it and armed guards at every entrance. One of the girls I worked with, who was an accountant for the family, had also been given access to a walk-in freezer which was off-limits to other employees. She brought me there one day and showed off what appeared to be rows of human bodies in cold storage. I convinced her that this was not a place where we should be working and that knowledge of the freezer was, in itself, a liability. We rounded up another guy who worked with us and decided to try and escape. In the parking lot, we found an older biker couple who agreed to give us a ride in their pick up truck. Along with the couple's giant mastiff, we all jumped in the back of the truck and they covered us with a tarp, before successfully driving out of the compound.

update to dream section

This is just a minor one but it was so vivid I have to write it down before it fades:
Last night, the night before a full moon in Scorpio, I dreamed I was freighthopping through industrial areas that were abandoned except for a heavy military presence. I had thought that the train I was on was destined for a remote grainery but, to my surprise, we pulled into a warehouse setting crowded with people. It turned out to be a hospital and there was a massive medical team in charge of forcibly administering vaccinations. I got off the train because it was being searched and ended up in the line for vaccinations since that's where everyone was being funneled. A lot of the people around me appeared to be sick. A nurse came up to me and explained the way the procedure would work, that I would need to receive an injection and then be quarantined inside the lower floors of the hospital. I informed her that I would be opting out of the vaccination and she was not having that. As the line continued moving forward I looked around me and saw there was a door to my right and the guards outside were busy talking. I ran outside and resorted to a lucid dreaming technique that has worked in almost every nightmare I've had in recent times. I started flying, which was a wonderful feeling because I was never able to do this before, meaning that I was just trapped inside the nightmare, seemingly without end. As I did so the guards seemed to become less aware of me right away. Actually, the dream itself was less aware. Beneath me was the receding empty shell of an endlessly sprawling city, which looked as if it had recently been the target of heavy bombing. At this point I woke up suddenly, at around 3 AM, and have been unable to go back to sleep since.