I think it best to tell you, before I try to explain anything else, about my dreaming habits. Everyone dreams, at least I’m assuming everyone does, maybe some of you don’t I don’t fucking know. But anyway, so far as I know everyone dreams. Me though? In my own humble opinion, I’d say I elevated it to an art form.
From childhood I always had an active imagination, you know? I always had imaginary friends I’d play with, and was always daydreaming. Vividly daydreaming at that. It was only a matter of time before my nighttime dreams became just as vivid, as my daydreams. What I’m saying here is that, at a very young age, I managed to stumble my way into lucid dreaming. I could control where I went, where I explored, and what I saw. I could play with my imaginary friends all night long.
Most mornings I’d have a new tale of adventure and heroism to share with my parents, who always smiled, nodded then went about their day with the knowledge that their daughter had an extremely active imagination. I can only recall one time they seemed actually bothered by the stories of my dreams, which was a time when I was describing one of the new friends I’d made in my dream time travels. They had seemed to think, on that occasion, that I’d been describing a nightmare even though I hadn’t seemed particularly upset while describing my new friend. Apparently ‘melting meat man’ sounded unpleasant.
As I grew older, my dreams grew with me, growing more…how do I explain it? I guess the best description would be solid? They held less the hazy notes of a dream, and more the solidity of reality. It was strange, but it was wonderful because it made my friends seem all the more real. My new friend, who was an old friend by the time I hit my late teens, didn’t always show up in my dreams, but I could always feel their presence on the outskirts of it as if they were keeping an eye on me while they attended to matters of their own.
In the waking world, my life was just as vivid, don’t think I spent all my time sleeping away. It was nothing like that. I loved sleeping, of course, but I also loved living life and my parents encouraged me to experience new things as I came across them. One, in particular, was a part-time job as a scare actor at a seasonal horror attraction. I was “dressed” as a vampire. Why the quotations? Because when I say dressed, I mean I was squeezed into an outfit that just barely covered my upstairs and downstairs, splattered with fake blood, and then shoved into my area of the attraction.
I didn’t….no one was ever really scared, to put it mildly. The men, and some women, tended to linger a bit after they got over the initial jumpscare. Frankly, I kind of hated that job but I wanted to stick it out until the end of the season, just to say I had done it. I’m stubborn, sue me, and no one did anything more than look so I didn’t have anything to complain about. Until someone did do something more than look.
It was my fourth week on the job, and about an hour til closing when that changed. I had seen a soul pass by in roughly half an hour when a lone man came trundling through my room. He was large, huge actually. Six and a half feet tall if he was an inch, and he was looking twitchy as hell, which I kinda thought was hilarious and sort of adorable at the time, a giant man scared of the horror attraction. It’s cute alright? So I out I jumped ready to do my oh-so-spooky spiel, but before I could get a word out the huge son of a bitch was on top of me. I mean this quite literally. On top. Of. Me. With a speed unexpected from a man so large he’d rushed me, knocking me to the floor, and dropping onto me.
His hands had gone immediately for my throat, squeezing so tightly, so swiftly, that I never had a chance to regain the breath that had been knocked from me. I fought back, of course, I fucking did. I wasn’t going down without at least some semblance of a fight. My hands had gone straight for his eyes, I remember scratching and clawing at his face while he choked the life out of me. And I remember thinking ‘Why isn’t anyone coming?’. Because surely someone had to have heard the struggle. To my ears, it sounded like a roar of noise, my desperate wheezes, his enraged grunts, and the scuffing of my feet against the floor as I tried to kick my way free. Looking back though it was probably all too quiet for anyone to hear.
The last thing I saw before my vision faded, were his eyes. I remember that clearly, they’d looked impossibly wide, filled with madness I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. And then, suddenly, I was asleep…well, unconscious at any rate. I’d always thought there’d be some sort of difference between sleeping and being unconscious, but here I was in my dreamscape while I was being strangled to death in the waking world.
The dreamscape was dark this time, a cavernous room surrounded by walls that oozed a fleshy red substance. Viscous slime trickled through clumps of meat on its path to the ground, all converging at the center of the floor where stood…my friend. The ‘melting meat man’ from my childhood dreams. I hadn’t seen them in any of my dreams in a few months now, but I always felt their presence, a comforting cold thing that kept away any nightmares.
It made sense, at that moment, that my panicked brain would conjure up one of my oldest imaginary friends, and their home. Small comfort when survival seemed unlikely. I immediately ran to them, pressing my face into the oozing mound that made up their front, and began to sob even as meaty tendrils wrapped tight around me in an all-encompassing hug. The sickly sweet smell that I associated with them surrounded me and brought me small comfort as I clung tightly to them, my shaking form sinking slowly into their mass.
My friend cooed and warbled to me, their words were impossibly alien, but their meaning clear. Comfort. Love. Anger. Protection. As they cooed, and comforted I felt their mass begin to grow smaller, though they continued to affectionately envelop me in their greasy mass. I looked up then and saw the fleshy lumps and greasy liquid on the walls surging upward to the inky blackness of the cavern’s ceiling, something that in all the times I’d visited their home, had never happened before.
I fell asleep there, in my dream, clinging to the slimy, oozing form of one of my best friends. When I awoke, and I can’t describe how shocked I was to actually be waking up, to be alive, I was in a hospital. My mom was asleep in the chair beside me and I was feeling pretty floaty, not gonna lie. The floating, I found out, was because I was on the good drugs, and I was alive and in the hospital because someone had found us, myself and the man that had attacked me, in my room unconscious.
I should say, I was unconscious. The man, however, was in pieces and I, and most of the fucking room I later learned, was covered in him and a viscous substance that had yet to be identified. The police had questions, a lot of questions, unfortunately, the only answer I had was ‘I don’t know’ to each and every one. I didn’t know why that man attacked me. I didn’t know who he was, I’d never seen him before that night, and I sure as shit didn’t know what happened to him.
That last one though… might be a lie. I don’t know for certain, but I have a theory, an insane theory. One I’m only going to share with you. I think my friend saved me. Fucking crazy right? I think while I was there with them in my dreamscape, they were there with me in the waking world this time, and they weren’t at all happy with what that man was doing, and they made him stop. Permanently. It doesn’t make any sense, it sounds ridiculous, I know, alright? But the more I think about it, the more I think, maybe? I mean I visit their world when I dream, who’s to say they can’t visit mine in return?