Hello, I’m not sure how to start off saying this, I’ve never really made a Reddit post before but I want to share my experience. My name is James, I live in Manitoba, and I’m 21 years old, though I suppose none of that is particularly important. I apologize if I’m a bit scattered, I’m not really right in the head at the moment, I’ve been disoriented since I woke up this morning. I woke up from a dream last week that I can only describe as hell, or the closest thing I could possibly imagine. I know the name of the place I was, I don’t know how I know it, no one told me, there wasn’t a sign or a disembodied voice and I can’t find a single thing about it online. I just know I was in a place called “The Works”. I went to sleep last night after classes, that’s when I had the dream, though it was more of the most horrific nightmare you can possibly imagine.
I will describe it as I remember it.
You wake up standing with no clothes on, not that they would help anyways, the sun sits high in the sky, burning hotter than the hottest day you can remember, always sitting at it’s highest point so that no shadows are cast. The ground is a plane of flat black asphalt, stretching off into the horizon, whether it ends or not I can’t tell you, I never made it that far. There are pure white pillars made of Marble that stretch into the sky, so far that I can’t even describe, I’ve never seen anything like it, no shadows, no scraping against clouds, just these giant monoliths, no purpose, other than to stand there, undisturbed. It doesn’t help that there’s tons of them, around one every kilometre? I’m not sure, I couldn’t measure, but I think that’s how far apart they were.
The only thing you can do in the hellscape you’re in is either stand around, or walk, walk until you’re weak and heaving. Walk and shuffle until the flesh tears from your feet, until the muscles char and flake with acrylamide as you grow weaker and more tired from the heat, falling to your knees and crawling, your skin sizzling, and blistering more and more until it either falls off, or is torn apart by scraping against the asphalt, I can’t choose to describe it as being cooked alive, or burned beyond recognition. Once your legs give out, you pull yourself along, your fingers blackening and your stomach bubbling, whether you lay there with your face against the asphalt, feeling your face burn away, or you just black out is up to chance.
After you feel the pain of dying, the split second of what feels like a million serrated knives being plunged into every single part of your body, you open your eyes and are standing again. I’m not sure if you wake up in the same place you started the last time, or a different one every time, everywhere looks the same. I did this over and over, forced to let myself be burned, mocked by the sun beating down by me for what felt like years, walking by the pillars and hearing whispers even though there are none, I was delirious by the end of my 5th walk, and it only got worse as time went on, you can’t end the nightmare. There’s no way to leave until you wake up, at least none that I know, you’re forced to repeat the process, helpless and alone, over and over until you blink and are in your bed back at home, as if you had just normally fallen asleep, my only reminder of the nightmare being a huge burn mark on my back in the shape of a W, as if I’ve been tagged by some sort of creature, even though I saw nothing there. Whether it be to mark me to return, or so that I don’t have to return? I don’t know…
I’m scared to sleep now, every night I stare, my back in the mirror, most of it is just singed raw skin with a scar forming, when I close my eyes I feel like I’m going to open them up to that endless plane of black asphalt. I feel like I’m going crazy, If that place drags anyone else into itself during their sleep, there is no god, no one to protect us from what we can’t understand, I don’t want to sleep or even blink, all I have left is this scar to remind me, I don’t know what to…