Dreams

1993:

I sleep and I dream. I am eighteen years old. Without any understanding of how or why I am there, I am on a white marble balcony, lying at an angle across a shallow dais beneath a huge movie screen.  Upon it plays a series of black and white images, casting everything in shifting shadows and gray and silver light. Beyond the balcony are a number of metal rods spanning the width of the huge room, level with the floor under the dais. Each rod is about five feet from the other. Seated on the rods are a number of people, who would be spectators to the film playing on the screen if not for the disturbing fact that they are each sitting with their backs to both it and me. They balance precariously on the rods, holding themselves in place, but it is not enough and some of them periodically lose their grip and plummet screaming into the abyss beneath them. There is no floor below, just empty blackness.

I am numb to all of this, aware but insensate as the screen above me flickers. While I lay there on the cold stone steps a woman approaches me, materializing like a cloud of smoke in the preternatural haze. She is naked, her pale body almost glowing in the light. Small and slender, her hips are curved and her breasts round, her hair short and dark. A pallid, spectral pixie that moves in an alien, inhuman manner. With small, curious footsteps she scurries towards me, her face blank in the shadows. She puts her hands on my shoulders and tries to clench her body close to mine, but I push her away, terrified to the very core of this woman’s touch. She is a harbinger, I realize, my flesh aware of the destruction that she brings with her. She kisses me, her lips cold as ice, and I try to cry out but my throat is frozen still. As the flatworm runs from the light, every cell in my body retreats from her, but my strength flags and eventually I give in to her embrace, the bizarre menagerie fading into a swirling mass of chaos as I feel her envelope me and pull me into oblivion.

Still locked in the dream, I awaken on the lawn outside of my house. It is morning and the sun is poking up over the horizon, bathing the world in blue-white. The grass is covered in white sand, and alongside me is the pale woman, lying on her stomach and facing away from me as I look around, uncertain. I feel sick and confused. I smell the sweet, nauseating stench of decay. Looking down, I see a writhing mass in her armpit. Looking closer, I can see a group of slugs collected there, suckling at her flesh, more in the manner of leeches. At the center of this group is one huge pinkish slug, pulsing with blood-red veins spread across its surface. Horrified, I turn the woman’s lithe body over onto her back and look at her face, as yet unknown to me. She is beautiful, young, with smooth cheeks and full, wet lips. Her eyes, however, are sunken pits of black, empty and desiccated holes devoid of life or human emotion. The scene loses focus at that point, carrying me on a wave of broken fantasy into the waking world. The images that have unfolded remain imprinted upon my brain, a confusing and unnerving series of events that will haunt me for several months.

2008:

I sleep and I dream. I am thirty-three years old. Sick with rage and disappointment I stand on the lawn outside the house that my family moved out of when I was nineteen. Behind me stands the pale woman, her naked body close to mine as she puts her hands on my shoulders. Without hesitation I turn and take her in my arms, welcoming the touch that I abhorred so many years ago. Her empty sockets stare at me and I push my lips to hers, my fingertips pressed into her waxy flesh. Beneath us our feet sink into the white sand, and as I give in to her desires I try desperately to remember what there is to return to in the meat and bone world. I smell the miasma of rotting flesh and I ignore it, unable to concentrate on anything else that would throw it into focus as being something other than normal.

The woman pulls her mouth from mine and whispers something in my ear. I do not know what it is. I cannot hear her words, only the musical hiss of her voice and the mocking sound of her laughter after she is finished. She smiles and bites into my earlobe, her teeth ripping through my skin. The sharp pain of the attack catapults me out of my sleep, hurling me shaking and cold into the world.