Not a 3 letter acronym, not what you imagine clandestine is. But a put together unit when units need to be put together. Weird, bad shit happens in the world. Weird and bad enough that the people at the top put all the nation and religious and economic shit aside to deal with it. I am one of the people that gets assembled when that level of bad shit happens.
You live your life normally thinking you’re an accountant or a football player or an exotic dancer. Struggling to succeed in your field is fine. By all means be the best. Then you get a touch on the shoulder one day. It could be at a bar. A house party. You could be 20 or 60. Even a travelling punk can get called outside a rail station. But you get called.
I should clarify a bit. I’m a little jumbled and humbled right now. I apologize. Some humans have a preternatural gift to not really feel fear. I don’t mean the guys in squirrel suits or the mt everst people. I mean the people who feel zero fear in the face of maddening horror. Preternatural horror. The kind of shit that turns people insane. I don’t know if it’s an evolutionary trait from 400,000 years ago or what. I don’t know if it’s a genetic switch. I don’t know if we just had weird childhoods. But some of us can watch reality, as in physical reality, unfold itself and feel whatever is beyond claw at our mind to rip us up. And we don’t shake.
For me it was the nightmares. I had horrible nightmares for years every night. Faces just screaming at first in pain and then into some psychotic cadence and the faces would grow larger, impossibly large and surround me and invade me with those psychotic screams. Beyond terror. Beyond pain. Mouthes and jaws impossibly twisted just to get the emotion out. I woke up with a start so many times. But eventually it stopped bothering me. I’d go back to sleep seconds later just snuggled up. I always thought, well my cat is still curled up against my legs. It must not be that bad. After all cats can see things we can’t.
And it happened one day I was leaving the grocery store and a woman came up to me in the parking lot. I wish I could tell you what she said or what she looked like. I honestly don’t remember. I was already so zoned out of life I probably thought she was flirting. Or thought she was annoying and I didn’t want to talk. Regardless the next thing I knew I was mid conversation in a room. I think the man I was speaking to realized my faculties had returned because he paused and gave a wry smile to me. Then he exhaled and I assume started over to bring me up to speed. ##A side note upon reflection, I’m sure the woman drugged me.##
As it would turn out our dreams are monitored. Not directly, but if you write enough about them on social media, or even this website, it garners attention. Then they study you. Watch you for years and years. Or maybe you said a weird thing in elementary school a teacher wrote down. And it gets handed off and handed off again through whatever labyrinth that things go through and lands on an intern’s desk 20 years later. Or now all of the AIs are doing a bang up job of finding us. But however they find us, they do.
The man kept speaking. Dreams are mostly, for most people, a response to the body healing process. Work out, have conversations, eat food, sleep and dream. While your body repairs itself from workouts or injury or fatigue the mind is sort of in freeform mode. It is a response to the body healing. So you dream of tornados or rivers. Of flying. It’s just the brain keeping itself entertained.
There are other things though. That’s what I learned in this briefing room? Debriefing? I’m not sure the accurate word. I don’t want to say “there are other worlds”. Because as far as we know these things aren’t real. Or they can be? Language sort of breaks down when discussing this stuff. Maybe a more accurate thing to say would be the properties of reality that seem immutable are not. Have you ever looked at a wall and seen the space in between unfold itself? Again language is poor. What I’m realizing is words like “wall” and “space” and “in between” are poor also. Have you ever been driving in your car and suddenly felt like you were going to wake up? When you are absolutely for sure awake in the real world? Yet still…that panic of waking up.
I know I sound scatterbrained. I am. How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real? That’s a Matrix quote if you’ve ever seen the movie. How would you know that reality didn’t come into being 5 seconds ago and you just arrived with all of your past and thoughts and everything you “know” already qued up? Isn’t that what dreams are like anyway?
This was the problem the man in the room was addressing. They aren’t sure what’s real. But there are anomalies. Those twins that couldn’t seem to die and evaded police. Google it. That happened. Anomalies. But the real problem is we can’t know for sure we are real. Based on all the evidence this organization has gathered some of us seem to persist through the different scapes. But we aren’t sure. Is it a simulation of some AI? Are we the dream of some elder god? Are you, and the universe itself, just one consciousness gone mad long ago in your isolation, just permeating through dreamscapes in your endless psychosis?
It seems pointless to debate. And even more pointless to give an active fuck about it. Until his face opened up and I could feel his screams in my mind. Whatever it was, that thing that… emerged in the space between what he was, was unhappy he was talking to me. And then I woke up to myself holding my phone typing this. I’m in bed. I’m not sure where my cat is. I’m worried if I open the door to my room to go find him there will be nothingness out there. But I’m not afriad. I work for an organization.