DailyNightmare(Male, middle aged)
the tilted mirror turned my gaze upward, inward.
my skullcap was discolored skin, scalded
freckled with scab-crusted sores.
how long had I been bald? A shameless
scalp naked to the sun’s corroding rays
too preoccupied to notice my corruption?
I dreamed about what I guess was a virus or something. It would affect people without any warning. One minute the person would be fine and the next, horribly afflicted. The symptoms were horrific and disgusting. The sufferer’s skin would break out in huge sores that would pop like bubbles on the surface of boiling water. Literally, the skin would turn liquid and the person would dissolve in front of your eyes. The whole course of the virus took only a couple minutes so you could very easily watch someone melt away while you were, say, standing side by side, waiting for an elevator. The most horrible part came next, though. Within a couple more moments, the sufferer would be reconstituted, better than before, even their clothes would be cleaner as if the virus used every bit of matter even the dirt when building its monster. I say monster because this beautiful creature that appeared resembled the person but it would attack and devour whoever was standing closest to them, all with this wide, terrifying grin.
I witnessed this transformation at a wedding. It must have been in the early days of the outbreak because people didn’t know enough to avoid crowds. The virus struck the father of the bride. One moment he was standing at the altar with this daughter, the next he was a puddle of goop on the floor and the next he was radiantly dressed in a glowing white suit, his gray hair now slightly tinged with yellow blond. He reached out into the audience and grabbed someone at random whom he started to rend to pieces and devour.
We didn’t know how the virus spread but we knew it was susceptible to microwaves of a very specific frequency. I had a small, hand-held device that would neutralize all the of the virus within my general proximity. The hypothesis was that we might be able to kill the virus in the resurrected person and that the person might be OK, maybe a little messed up in the head after what they’re been up to but physically OK. This was an untested hypothesis though. I was sent in to the place where the wedding had been, or maybe it was just where an outbreak had occurred. There were still pockets of the crowds huddled around the grounds of the hotel, maybe a very glamorous church. I located the area where the target was. It was up a soaring flight of stairs that had no railing and that opened into the very spacious entry area of this hotel. Sunlight streamed in the plate glass windows that ran from the floor up several stories. I carefully walked up the stairs. At the top of the stairs were two preachers I knew years and years ago. They had their arms reached out in blessing. They spoke to me as if I would be doing some kind of exorcism when all I really was going to do was a scientific test. A test that would result in me being torn apart and eaten if it didn’t work. But the gist of what they were saying was that it would be the patient’s choice to get better and if it didn’t work, I shouldn’t blame myself.
Then I saw the creature coming around the corner through a pair of open double doors. It wasn’t the father of the bride I had seen before, it was actually a woman I knew. She looked statuesque, immense, regal like some of the portraits of Queen Victoria I’ve seen. But instead of a sceptre she held a tiny baby, her daughter even though her actual daughter is much older. She seemed to float instead of walk which was particularly uncanny for how large she looked.
She approached. I didn’t know what to do.
(Male) This was a dream that had a whole world attached to it, all these things I just knew about this world which makes it rather hard to tell as a straight story.
The whole dream was set in the future, a time when it rained all the time and people seemed to live inside all the time under this really flat, gray light. The world was like a honeycomb of hallways, very institutional-feeling. Everybody wore these very drab gray jumpsuits that seemed to be very fragile, easily torn but then again very easily replaced. What’s coming to mind is that they must have been made out of recycled paper fibres but no one in the dream actually said that.
We were at war with this other society but what was strange was that both societies lived in the same hallways. The only way the different armies could be discerned was by their weapons. Get this: the weapons looked like water balloons but they had a tough enough skin that they could be stacked. There was one hallway that was stacked floor to ceiling with these water balloons. But the other army had their own water balloons, the only difference is that one army had balloons that were red while the other army had balloons that were blue. The weapons had the only bright colors in the whole place.
Since both societies basically looked like each other, we were suspicious of basically everyone all the time. The only way to really tell what side someone was on is if they were carrying a weapon. Through a passing conversation with a friend I knew and trusted, I learned that I had had some surgery as part of a very old military program, something that implanted a weapon inside me. I didn’t like the sound of that, though I thought it would be good to know once and for all which side I was on, which society I really belonged to. He mentioned an “address” which of course was a room number because no one went outside anymore.
I tried to get to the address. I didn’t know what to expect. Would the doctors remove the weapon? Would they program me to explode like a water balloon? Would I find the room empty and abandoned? While I was getting there, I must have made certain army officials suspicious of me. I had to run away from them, down the unfamiliar, indistinct corridors, turning here and there. Finally I got to the room and explained my situation to the doctors. They beat me up and kicked me when I collapsed on the floor. I tried to ask if they weren’t afraid that the weapon would detonate but all they said was “Ungrateful.”
Finally they dragged me over to an operating table. “We’ll take out the weapon. Then we’ll ship you off-world to a mining colony. How do you like that?”
The next thing I knew I was outside, running through the rain. It sizzled, stung a little, as it hit my skin. It was very dark. I ducked into an alley. There was another man there with a long black beard and a woman with snarled blond hair. They had had money once but had wasted it all and so now, they were escaping.
(Female, 44) I had ordered contact lens in the mail and I was very excited to receive them because I haven’t worn them in years. Opening the box, I was surprised at their design: there was a clear lens with this sort of appendage that went into the corner of your eye. It looked sort of “steampunk,” sort of Jules Verne. I knew I should probably read the directions first and buy some supplies, but I was anxious to try them out. I stood in front of a mirror and just lifted one lens up near my eye, just so I could look through it and sort of imagine what it would be like to wear them.
All of a sudden, something slipped off the lens and sealed over my iris. My vision immediately went blurry in that eye and I could feel my eye drying out like the moisture was getting sucked out of it. I looked at myself in the mirror and I could see something on my eye. There was something stuck to my eye. I figured maybe that the lens had some kind coating on it to protect it during shipping.
I touched the edge of the film but it wouldn’t come off. Then I tried scraping my eyeball gently with my fingernail, but all I did was chip a little bit out of the corner of my eye, out of the white part of my eye. It felt a little bit like a bit of candy-coating coming off a chocolate. I knew that this couldn’t be good.
I stopped tugging at the film on my lens and began to look for some saline solution. I thought maybe I could float it off. All the while I could feel my eye tightening and my vision blurring more. There were lots of old friends at this meeting but I didn’t remember who wore contacts.I tried not to interrupt the meeting too much as I went around asking everyone if they had any saline solution. No one did.
Finally I found a bottle of something on the concession table and I was so desperate I squirted the liquid into my eye. Slowly, the film peeled off and I could see normally again.
(Male, 30’s) I don’t know if this qualifies as a nightmare because I dreamt it when I nodded off at work one day. I was in an elevator of a skyscraper with this other man. We both were wearing business suits and staring straight ahead. When you work in an office building you don’t really make too much eye contact with people in the elevator. The elevator seemed to be taking an extremely long time between floors. The man was picking lint off his suit.
At least I thought I thought he was picking off lint. when I paid attention to him out of the corner of my eye, I realized that he wasn’t wearing a shirt under his jacket. Then what was he picking lint from? I looked at him and saw that he was bare-chested under his jacket. The skin of his chest was bright red like it was brutally chapped, possibly even bloody. And instead of lint, he was pinching these small pustules on his skin and pulling on them. Out from the tiny sores came long white worms the diameter of string. He dropped them to the floor like it was nothing strange. He didn’t seem to care that I was staring at him pulling these white worms. I kept waiting but the door to the elevator to open but it didn’t.
After that dream, I was glad to wake up and get back to work.