I’m posting here because I’m worried that I’m crazy. I’m probably not crazy. I’m 75% sure I’m not crazy. Either way, I have a hard decision ahead. I need a stranger’s impartial opinion. Please read my take and give me your unbiased opinion.
It started when my wife, Melissa, came home with a book. She is a good partner, we’ve been together about ten years, married for four. For eight of those years we shared each other with our cat, Tabs. She’s smart, ambitious and a hard worker, super pretty with a shock of fiery ginger hair and bright, deep blue eyes that sparkle with her intellect (I’m talking about Melissa, not Tabs). She runs her own architecture and design firm, making many times more money than I do, in my role as a librarian. Fortunately for me, Melissa loathes ambitious and driven people with a passion (perhaps she views them as competition) and is drawn to creative and relaxed people which is how I managed to attract such a perfect woman. I’m unquestionably punching above my weight.
I have never had ambition. I’ve been a dreamer my whole life. I never knew my parents, not really, as they both died when I was very young, too young to remember them. I never really knew what happened to them - they were both killed in some unspecified event, that adults always refused to tell me any details. All I know is it involved a robbery that went wrong. Before you ask, no my name isn’t Bruce Wayne. But, when I was a kid, maybe because I never really knew the truth, I used to make up wild stories for the other kids at school. Kids at the care home never asked, I guess because they all had painful stories of their own, but in school my status made me a curiosity so the other kids would often quiz me.
I suppose that the loss of my parents probably also made me interested in books and libraries. I always had so many questions and no one could answer me. As a kid, the care home used to take us in trips to the British library and I would spend the hours walking the vast shelves and examining the fascinating exhibitions. Obviously I was smaller back then but it felt the library stretched forever and, well it’s stupid really, but I always kind of unconsciously thought to myself that perhaps the answers I seek are in a book somewhere, somewhere in that library, if I could only find the right tome - as a result I’ve collected, since a young age, rare and old books.
Books, of course, also provided an invaluable escape from the harsh realities of life that I experienced in care. I won’t go too deeply into them now but there was an abusive member of staff who particularly disliked me, and well, it gave me an insecurity and a shyness I’ve never been able to shake off.
Anyway, yesterday Melissa came home with this book. She bought it at a book and general bric-a-brac store in the east end (we live in London, UK just to be clear). She often spends time combing those kinds of stores for vintage goods. She told me that she spoke to the shopkeeper who recommended her some trinkets that she had bought, but in conversation she had mentioned my occupation. Apparently, the shopkeeper had recommended a book that given my vocation he was sure I would love. Melissa thought the title fit and it was clearly old and so she picked it up to let me add it to my collection.
It was called the “Library of Dreams”. Old, definitely old, bound in leather, browned with age but with tints of purple. The writing was handwritten and tiny. After thanking my wife, I took it to my study (a grandiose term that I give to the cupboard next to the bed room that I squeezed an armchair and a lamp into, in my tiny London flat) and dug out a magnifying glass I use for these old tomes. Often the passage of time has not been kind to the pages and vision aids are required to transcribe the decaying contents.
Tabs slinked through the gap I always leave in the door, as she likes to come and curl up on the head of my armchair when I read. Her quiet and contented purring is the perfect background when I’m deep in my work.
From first glance at the text was so tiny it looked like normal, albeit small, text. Once I magnified it, I realised that it was nonsense. It wasn’t runes or hieroglyphics, it looked kind of like Latin characters but blurred, unreadable. Like when those AI image generators try to generate text and just make a meaningless pattern that broadly resembles letters. The more I furrowed my brow and frowned at the letters the harder it was to perceive them. They almost seemed to dance before my eyes, although I’ve experienced this before when working on ancient and tiny manuscripts. The eyes tire and play tricks.
Frustrated, I went to speak with Melissa, I told her I couldn’t make out any of the writing and asked her to take a look, make sure it wasn’t just my tired eyes. She looked for a few seconds flipping through the pages and then placed it back down, dismissively. She asked me if I was trying to play a joke on her, she told me the book had no writing in at all. Just an entire book of ancient crumbling blank pages. I laughed, assuming she was messing around, but she wasn’t. I could see the marks on the page, clear as day, albeit unreadable, but Melissa saw nothing. She looked at me with concern in her eyes and told me to get a good night’s sleep. She said she would take the book back to the shop the next day and get a refund. At this point, I assumed I had just overstretched myself. Although you might not think it, the library is actually a busy place to work and I’d been doing long shifts recently. Couple that with my obsessive reading habit - my brain definitely gets overtired.
I decided to put it from my mind and turn in early, as Melissa had suggested. She brought me some tea and cuddled me for a bit, before leaving me alone to sleep. I took a while to fall asleep, my thoughts constantly drifting back to the book. You know when you try to sleep but you are worried about something and you just lie there, in the dark? Open eyed sometimes, staring at nothing. Thinking the same cyclical thought over and over again. It took me a while to fall asleep.
When I did I had the most vivid dream I’ve ever had in my life. I have experimented with lucid dreaming before and have had some success but this was unreal.
I felt as though I woke up, lying on a cold floor. I picked myself up and found myself on a marble platform. It was suspended in the air, about 40 metres squared in size, I’d estimate. I was in the open air and the sky stretched expansively, unfettered by visual clutter as there was no ground I could see, with trees or building to corrupt the skyline. The platform floated in clouds and when I nervously stretched my head over the edge I could see only multiple layers of swirling cloud going down forever. No ground. No obvious way the platform was supported.
While this was obviously a dream, I just wanted to reiterate how wholly real this felt. In dreams I feel like you normally can’t really feel the dream you know? Like pain, heat, cold, in dreams you can sort of feel it, but obviously your real body isn’t reacting to it, so it always feels somewhat muted. In this dream all my senses were fully alive. My eyes burned at a bright mid morning sun against a peach-coloured sky. I felt the wind on my face, cooling and gentle. I heard birdsong, although could see no birds and I could feel the warmth of the sun shining down on my skin, warming me.
It felt real.
I examined the marble platform. There was nothing, it was just a flat white marble slab. I sat and stared at the clouds lazily floating in that gorgeous golden sky. Eventually I reclined and basked in the sun, luxuriating in warming glow.
Then, as so often happens in dreams, my mind suddenly changed the scene.
First I heard a voice, a deep voice, in my bones greet me by my name. As I got up from my sunbathing posture and turned my head to find the source of the voice, I was suddenly in a dark room. Medieval looking, exposed stonework, thick wooden beams. It was a circular room stretching up into an unfathomable darkness. There were no stairs or ladders to climb it. The gentle sunlight and birdsong replaced with damp, indifferent cold. I looked around the room and either noticed a door I hadn’t before, or it appeared as I searched for it. I grasped the thick, cold iron handle and pulled the heavy wooden door toward me. It moved stiffly, as though it was seldom used.
I stepped out into what seemed like a cave. It was utterly dark. But it felt cold and smelt of stone and damp. If you’ve ever been deep in an old cave, you know the smell. However there were no lights and wherever I was, was so cavernous I could see or feel no wall either side of me. Just a vast expanse of space. I turned to find the door, only to find it had vanished and I was now alone in this abyss.
I stumbled slowly through the darkness, waving my hands in front of me to ward off any wall or outcrop of rock. There was nothing. I walked for what seemed an eternity. Eventually I saw a white light I the distance, and being the only thing I could see, I walked toward it. The light it gave off, though feeble, illuminated this dark place and then, as I got closer, it was strong enough for me to make out the floor. I moved more confidently and shortly came upon the light source, a small fire in a bowl. The fire was a brilliant perfect white. No red or yellow just colourless whiteness. I called out hoping whatever had greeted me earlier would come to my aid, but my shouts seemed to quieten immediately in the utterly still, oppressive darkness.
I watched the shadows dance by the fire, trying to decide what I should do next, until with alarm realised that - as the shadows danced and threw light further, I could make out a solid shadow, like a building, just out of reach of the light. I stepped forward toward the solid shadows and as I did the light rose, that little white flame flared, brilliant and shining and pierced the gloom. The oppressive darkness was still heavy but a beam of pure white light threw into relief the colossus I was standing at the foot of.
It was a statue, but on a scale unimaginable. I stood near the feet and a toe of the skeletal statue must have been at least thirty or fourty metres tall. It was seated on a truly enormous stone throne. It was too huge for me to make out anything past the chest as the light faded so high, but it seemed a humanoid, skeletal statue. It’s hands rested heavily, fingers listlessly draped over the arms of the throne. As I looked upon the magnifence of this statue, I started, unconsciously, to float and I gently ascended in front of the statue. As so often happens in dreams, the laws of physics are in short supply. As I ascended to it’s lap and noted it wore real cloth robes, tattered and torn over centuries by the looks of it. It was only when I ascended to the face and could finally make it out, I realised this wasn’t a statue. It was a skeleton of some monstrously colossal person, or thing. It’s head was wrapped in a hood from the robes, so I could only make out the front which was illuminated by the light.
It’s skull loomed over me, humanoid but not human, each one of its teeth was my height and it’s lower jaw hung slack, low against it’s chest, giving it an unnatural yawn. It had a pair of deep serpentine slits where the human nose would be. It had two eye sockets like a normal human, and it’s general skull shape was human looking, but it had a third eye drawn on its forehead with some red paint. The robes covered the rest of the head and barred any further examination, as the darkness shrouded around this gruesome vista.
As I looked upon this gigantic, yawning visage the third eye glowed and I heard the voice. The skeleton didn’t move but I heard the voice in my bones. It was deep and terrible and when it spoke it felt like there were ants in my veins, frenzied and tearing through my blood, thrashing for freedom. It felt abnormal to hear, like I was committing some universally unpardonable sin just by listening. I would have fell to my knees, except I was still floating, but I was weakened by the voice. I realise that it’s misleading to call it a voice because it didn’t communicate in words, as such, but it simply implanted concepts in my mind - it’s hard to describe, but I felt almost like I was in the cave still, while simultaneously the only thing I could see is whatever this thing projected into my mind.
It felt like it was in my head, I could feel its tendrils probing my synapses, itching and so, so bone wrenchingly wrong.
I’m sorry, I’m losing my cool writing this. Even now thinking about it, it feels so real. Usually, when you have a nightmare, as soon as you wake up there is that wash of relief and the dream already starts to recede and retreat from your waking mind. Even good dreams slip away with the night when we awake. This dream - I remember every detail perfectly.
Anyway, when this thing was “talking” to me it gave me a collections of visions, words and phrases. First it showed me myself, on the marble platform I arrived on. There was an armchair, my armchair from my little study. I was reading a book, bound in leather, no title on the front. The pages glowed, the writing, the runes, whatever it was, glowed off the page. I then felt the thing imprint into my mind the word “knowledge”.
Then I saw myself in my bedroom at home. There was a red eye painted on my cream carpet the same symbol as the giant’s skull. I was leaning over it, wearing some kind of cloak with a hood. I had something small in my hands, it looked furry and bloody, my hands covered in blood. From my viewpoint in this vision, the cloak meant I couldn’t quite see what it was, but I watched myself slam it violently into the centre of the eye and then, in a frenzy fell upon it with a long knife, using my whole body to stab and slash over and over again. Blood arced and spattered on the walls, decisive crimson brushstrokes.
Suddenly the scene jumped and now I could see my double, my vision self, was in a street, unlit by streetlamps hunched over what looked like a body, lying prone in the gutter. I was still wearing the cloak from the prior vision, and watched in horror as I watched myself sawing open the skull of the body with a large saw. Deep jagged cuts, blood spraying in every direction. But it’s the sound that will haunt me. Wet fleshy tearing sounds giving way to deep, crunching, bone tearing bass.
When my vision-self had got about halfway through, he dropped the saw and prised his hands into the cavity he’d created and snapped the top of the skull clean off, spilling brain and viscera onto the cobbled floor. Then, I can barely bring myself to write this, he scooped the disgusting wet flesh in his hands and shoved it vigorously into his mouth. He chewed repulsively, open mouth, retching and gagging until he noisily managed to swallow the gibbets of meat. Suppressing his heaving he scooped another handful and fed it into his bloodied maw. Another, and another, like an automation. Choking and retching the whole time.
I couldn’t watch and threw up, violently. I don’t think I’d ever been sick in a dream before.
When the scene darkened and I found myself back in my living room I felt a moments relief until I took in the scene. The room was dark, blinds down. My vision self was reclined, in a stupor, on the comfortable leather couch. I was covered in blood. Bits of, I don’t know what, chunks of meat, lined my mouth, and chest. The debris of my vision self’s most recent meal. I grimaced with disgust. I couldn’t immediately see the victim because my vision started from our entry hall and the living room is L shaped, so half of the room is not visible from the hall. As I stepped in, to that familiar but haunting room, I saw it. My, his, victim lay on the floor. The light of a streetlamp outside allowed me a murky view and I saw it. Her. I’m sorry I can’t write anymore about this. We have to skip this bit.
My heart ached with horror. I got the next word “sacrifice”. I curled into a ball under the barrage of this psychic assault. As I did the voice and the tension, the presence sitting in my head, lifted and lightened. I was back on the platform, now bathed in a hazy afternoon sun.
My armchair was there, where I’d seen it in my vision. There was a book on the table next to it, the same leather book I saw. Despite the gruesome horror of what I had just endured, dreamlike I sat and picked up the book, inhaling the smell of old leather and pages. The leather smelt a little off to my nose though, there was a strange underdone I’d never smelt in a book before. The leather was browned and old. It had been dyed purple at some point but it looked as if most of that had worn away through the passage of time. It strongly resembled the book Melissa had bought me, except for the lack of a title.
The contents of the book were beyond belief. When I was in the dream I remember I could read the contents, but initially the writing felt blurred, like my book in reality, until dreamlike a question floated into my mind. As it did the writing in the contents, the first chapter, sharpened and defined itself before my eyes. It arranged itself into a neat gothic script which read “Chapter 1: The fate of your parents”.
Delighted I flipped to that chapter and read it voraciously. Every detail was there, every horrible answer. I won’t share with you the details, as they are not pertinent to this post, but suffice to say even with the pain of the answer, the relief from the pain of not knowing was so great I was almost in tears.
After I finished that chapter I returned to the contents page and thought of another question, this time broader, more worthy of such an amazing tome - while I had tried to answer the question in chapter one my whole life, the knowledge was only pertinent to me. Having no surviving relatives I could be assured this information would only interest me. I went for a topic every human in existence would ask. Again the writing formed, neatly underneath chapter 1, “Chapter 2: What will happen to you when you die”.
The book contained every answer I could desire. I read for hours, it seemed, flipping back to the contents and asking anything, everything I could think of. The joy and satisfaction I felt, the joy is indescribable. It almost purged from my memory the hellish encounter with the giant, so elated I felt.
I awoke with a start, and found myself back in my own bed, Melissa snoring softly next to me with Tabs curled up on her pillow. It was still dark, and peaceful. I felt a moment of pure elation as I awoke, which quickly turned to horror. I remembered the dream, all of it.
All of it, that is, except when I thought back to what I read - I could picture only the gibberish scrawl that the book held for me in real life the day before. The rest of the dream was totally clear, but I cannot recall a single thing I read. I remember that at the time it was English and I understood it. I remember summoning chapters in the contents, I remember the names of each chapter but the content was completely gone. I wept with frustration, unable to hide my emotion. Melissa instinctively, half asleep drew me to her - I have some mental health challenges with anxiety and so this behaviour, I’m sorry to report, is not entirely out of character for me.
As I lay there entwined with my wife, calmed by her warmth and steady breathing, I tried again and again to bring focus to my mind. Trying all my memory tricks to recall even a word that I had read. I got nothing. Then I thought about the visions the giant showed me. I think he offered me a deal.
I didn’t know quite what I expected to happen, but I quietly got up, without waking Melissa and crept to my study. It was 4am, this morning. The world was still dark and the house had that unnatural stillness and quiet that you only get in the early hours of the morning. Trying to shake off my growing sense of unease I picked up my copy of the library of dreams and sat down on my armchair. Tabs was still fast asleep and didn’t join me.
I opened the book and to my surprise found I could now read the contents. All the chapter titles I had dreamt! But when I flipped to the first chapter the writing was, again completely blurred and unreadable.
Sometimes, when a house is really quiet your ears pickup the slightest noises and you can misconstrue what you are hearing, plus I was sleep deprived from waking up so early, but as I flipped through useless, unreadable page after page I swear, very faintly I could hear a deep, low laugh, rising in intensity as I went. Frustrated and unnerved I snapped the book shut and put it back on the table, and stalked into the kitchen to make some tea. As the kettle boiled, I ruminated. I sat for hours I the kitchen, thinking. Of course this must all just be a dream, but the contents are real and clear. I have rechecked them several times, no change.
I called in sick to work. So far I’ve spent all day thinking and wondering. I keep reopening and examining the book. It never changes.
I made up my mind. Whatever this is, it’s real. And I think the knowledge that thing promised me is real. But I think I can only get it if I fulfil my side of the bargain.
It feels like a blasphemy to even write this, but I’m considering it. The sacrifice demanded is inhuman and utterly impossible. But the prize is so great. I have often said, especially around my parents deaths, I would give anything to know the truth. I guess this is my test to see if I was telling the truth. Even thinking about it makes me feel sick to my stomach, but could I live with myself if I didn’t try?
I called in sick to work as I would have been too tired to do any good anyway. I spent the first part of my day ruminating, sweating and shaking, thinking. By midafternoon I was tired and decided to take a nap. I was hesitant as I wasn’t sure if my dreams would take me back there, to that place, but I slept a dreamless sleep. It didn’t feel restful and I’m still tired but I didn’t dream at all, which was some relief. I was both terrified of the arcane and unnatural presence of the giant but, equally, the pain of being allowed to read such wondrous knowledge only to know I would have to leave it behind in my dream world was almost a more frightening prospect.
Now it’s late. Melissa came home late after some work drinks and went straight to bed. I told her I had taken a mental health day, which she accepted without question, especially knowing how busy the library has been recently. She eyed me with concern, but as ever she is empathetic and wonderful and chose not to press on this issue - I guess she detected my vagueness and realised this was not something I wanted to discuss.
I’m sitting here in my study, typing this account out on my phone.
So. Readers. Please help me - am I just going crazy? Am I overworked and tired and just imagining all of this? I have tried googling the book, the statue/giant, any distinctive details from the dream but I’ve found nothing. I wanted to research the shop Melissa got this from but she didn’t give me the name, I can ask her tomorrow..
If this is real, IF this is real - what do I do? If anyone knows about these things or has any experience please help me. I’m either losing my mind, or, well… Well. If I’m not losing my mind I have a hard choice to make.
I didn’t call it a difficult choice, because that wouldn’t be the right word. A difficult choice is a choice where you don’t know what to do. My choice - it’s no choice at all. It’s predetermined. How could anyone turn that down? Unlimited knowledge? It’s hard choice, because of what I need to do next.