Many of my earliest memories come not from my waking life but the terrifying nocturnal landscapes of dreams. My mother was an interesting woman, while she shared my love for the world building potential of literature and was intellectually nourishing to an almost superhuman degree she was fundamentally unqualified to reassure a frightened child. I told her, like many children do, that I was scared of monsters. I can’t remember if this was under my bed, in the closet or lingering at the fringes of human consciousness but I will never forget the exact words of her response:
“If you think about monsters than you make them real.”
This would have been Kindergarten or even a little bit earlier. That night I dreamed about a submarine that was filled with little cartoon people. They were running around screaming about the monster that had been created from my imagination as machinery sparked and the water rose up around their knees. The monster and my consciousness were one as I saw the outside of the submarine through it’s oddly distorted vision and heard it’s heavy Darth Vader breathing.
I think I might have caught an early Godzilla movie on late night television with shots like this but it’s impossible to be certain. I felt and shared their fear, I felt guilty for not controlling my imagination and I felt the indignant rage of a monster trapped in a world that didn’t want it and where it was never supposed to exist. Invisible torpedoes of pure malevolent energy shot out and destroyed the submarine, I tried to hold them in but I couldn’t do it.
Their screams flooded my mind as the submarine exploded and I woke up crying in a puddle of my own piss.
It was definitely Kindergarten when I had the China dream. My class had gone on a field trip to China and an overweight classmate who might not have even existed had eaten the entire Great Wall of China without sharing it with anybody. We killed him in retribution and were going to eat his body. He hung upside down naked with a rope around his ankles and there was a raw and bloody spot on one of his buttocks where the grownups had cut out a chunk of flesh with a rough serrated knife.
The janitor at my Elementary School was called Mr. C, he stood with an apron and chef’s hat at a circular red tripod barbecue and cooked the butt meat like a hamburger. The teacher put it on a bun and held it out to ask who wanted the first one. I thought the adults were telling us that we were all supposed to do it so I volunteered and took a bite. My classmate’s eyes went wide with horror as they all started backing away from me as I held the offending sandwich in numb confusion:
“Wait, we were all going to eat him. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“No! Obviously we would have never taken a bite of the still bloody flesh of a fellow child! What the fuck is wrong with you!?”
My mother had a passion for illustrated children’s books and I had been reading a collection of Grimm’s Fairytales where parents abandoned children and characters wandered through caves. I dreamed that I had been left in a cave and couldn’t find my way out. As I made my way around some large stalagmites a man jumped out with impossibly long arms and legs that turned and spun like the “Jumping Jack” paper dolls that are made of brads and string. His nose was long and pointed and a tiny fish dangled from the end of it.
He held out one of the red and blue plastic boats I played with in the bathtub and gloated that because I had already accepted this magically charged object in my waking life I would have to spend an eternity in the dream world as his slave. His laughter followed me as I ran away through the winding cave passages. I reached an exit that opened outward to the ocean in the shape of a pointed capped pixie in profile. The water stretched out to infinity as I stood there feeling impossibly small, helpless and alone.
Another dream had me trapped inside a latticed cylinder with my back against a bonfire as a witch danced just outside this prison and mocked me once again for being bound for eternity. I tried to climb upward but the tower grew with me and stretched upward to a vertical vanishing point. I realized that the square openings I had been using as hand and footholds could stretch out large enough to allow me to crawl to my freedom.
Suddenly I was sitting on a galloping baroque piano stool while rollicking barrelhouse music played and we moved down an ornate corridor. Lords and ladies in powdered wigs and embroidered ball gowns and frock coats came running out of a sequence of adjoining doors. I would point at them in turn and they would scream in agony as they transformed into statues of solid gold. It felt innocent and harmless, like a game.
When I woke up I realized with a sinking, heavy and guilty feeling that I had murdered them.
There are so many things I can’t explain like the reason that all three of my earliest memories are viewed from different vantage points and some details of these and later dreams that continue to confuse and bother me. For some reason it feels significant and important that so many entities that felt as real and alive as I was told me over and over that I would be trapped with them forever. Maybe they were right.
Maybe the child is still with them and the monster got out. For some reason actually articulating and typing this thought has got me crying again and I can’t come up with a rational reason why.
I’ve written about how certain art and artists always felt especially important to me because in the words of Russian Tsarlag it “Let Your Dreams Touch Air”. Nothing obvious like Nightmare on Elm Street movies; this would be the darker works of Dr. Seuss, certain records by The Residents, comics by Mat Brinkman, the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, David Hockney’s sets for a production of Turandot and many of the films of Clive Barker. These things made me feel like certain places I had visited in my dreams were real and other people had seen them too. I would never say that this felt comforting in any way but it felt relevant.
After El Rancho imploded for reasons I will get to in another piece we all moved into a little three story red house in the Old Town neighborhood by DePaul University. The tone of this period was set on the very first night when our alcoholic landlord and neighbor came to the front door in a women’s dress and performed the type of pelvic thrusts that are international sign language for reckless abandon while thirstily draining a bottle of Old Style. The nihilism that had been experimentation at El Rancho installed itself here as a way of life.
The house was so old it had the kind of light switches that are two round buttons and used the kind of glass fuses that look like the bottom of light bulbs. The former elderly neighbors had been avid breeders of racing pigeons and built an attached pigeon coop that we converted into extra bedrooms. When the weather warmed up some of it’s former inmates would return in numbered ankle bracelets and spend several days regarding the “changing of the guard” in disgusted silent disapproval before inevitably flying off to greener pastures.
I lived in the basement with Justin Two next to a slatted off crawl space like the one in The People Under The Stairs and a short hallway that had been labeled in chalk on the wooden lintel piece in an archaic hand as Old Spanish Trail. I could never shake the feeling that this was a portal of some sort but also never built up the courage to attempt to use it. There was a beautiful antique wooden chest at the end of this passage that members of the previous owner’s family eventually came back specifically to retrieve no doubt for some hidden occult power. Years later when I lived in Joshua Tree I would encounter a short street with the exact same name in nearby Yucca Valley that held a single apartment complex where bad things happened.
I live in a house right now where the former tenants died but this basement in Chicago is the only place I have ever lived that felt haunted. It’s important to note that I was injecting cocaine and heroin, smoking crack, had my terrifying first experiences with LSD and methamphetamine but I also did all of these things in many other places and this place felt different. I was in an often toxic and volatile relationship but once again I have been in many others and this place felt different.
On to the hauntings.
I would experience sleep paralysis where I was seeing through the eyes of a searching, floating presence that moved the basement until it saw my sleeping body and would rush toward it until I would finally wake up and bolt upright at the moment of contact feeling terrified. I would have dreams that bordered on sleep paralysis where I was standing or floating against a plane of glass with dark shifting waters on the other side.
I could feel a psychic presence that felt alien and hostile and then the waters would slowly reveal the shape of an aquatic amphibious humanoid floating exactly opposite me and meeting my gaze, coldly staring with black eyes that held small white pupils like hollow circles. Suddenly I realized that I could barely catch glimpses of additional Lovecraftian Deep Ones swimming through the ichorous black waters and then finally, mercifully, I woke up.
The last and worst of these experiences was not in the basement but rather in Robyn’s room upstairs. Our couple hood in the Red House was even more off and on and more of a triangle with John than it had been at El Rancho. On this particular night and the following morning things were natural and comfortable and nice. She left in the morning to go to college and I fell back asleep and I forgot she left.
We were waking up together and the sun was pouring through the window in that perfect way and we were stretching and looking at each other and saying “Hi” the way that lovers do when they’ve had the perfect amount of sleep and slept comfortably in each other’s embrace and feel safe and giddy and perfectly in love with each other and their own beautiful youthful bodies. We leaned in for a kiss.
The moment our lips touched I remembered that Robyn had already left and an alarm went off in a deep animal part of my brain that something was extremely wrong.
Robyn had transformed into a swirling dark void of nothingness. I felt my life force being pulled out through my lips as my consciousness was violated by a sensation of laughter that conveyed complete and utter malevolence. For what I believe to be the only time in my life I woke up screaming with my heart thundering in my chest.
I’m completely used to weird dreams and fucked up nightmares. Outside of the hare and tortoise triptych they pretty much constitute my earliest and strongest memories. But all of these dreams took place in dreamworlds that are insulated from the physical aspects of my reality by the impervious walls of sleep.
This thing was in the fucking house.