It all started with a dissonant series of sounds, patterned and regularly spaced out. A thick, resonating whirring, followed by three measured clicks - spaced equally apart. Between each click, the whirring would start up again and proceed to a crescendo, making each subsequent click melt further into the background until the more pressing sound took total prominence. The clicks may have been still ringing off past the three audible ones, as I would distinctly feel the clicks echoing throughout my bones as I lay in my decrepit, isolating bedroom awaiting Dr. Severin’s concoction of sleeping pills to kick in, but I couldn’t know for sure. Other sounds and manifesting visions of things I hesitate to describe would take greater prominence.
As the whirring continued spiraling its sound within me, a sort of scurrying sound would begin to overwhelm. A cacophonous scritching and scratching like a mad carnival of mating insects burning within my skull. Whir-click-whir-click-whir. There was no discernible rhythm left, just a mad thumping and a sense of my mind spinning at an almost comfortable pace. The best way I could describe the feeling of these sounds taking over me was that of a great paralyzing fever, one that would elicit strange, foggy visions and spin the world around you into a heavy and almost humid haze of high delirium. It would be safe to assume that this, along with the inescapable and odd audio hallucinations, the sounds palpably reverberating throughout my thinning bones, would cause a great deal of distress or discomfort. But it was the exact opposite.
I was being lulled into a proper sleep by these gripping sensations that brought me back to my sickly and lonely childhood, only now that diseased and isolated child was being coddled and rocked to bed by a series of otherworldly sounds and feelings. Something in the great tenebrous ether beyond all space and time that for so long called for me to end myself was now showing itself to me and nestling itself within the core of my pharmaceutically addled mind. There was great comfort in this, albeit a growing sense of nausea some nights - which could often feel as if my entire being was actualized in my stomach as a madly churning mess of burning acid. But even still, the faint, and admittedly falsified, feeling of not being entirely alone, feeling as if there was something down here with me that was tasked with aiding in my restlessness, helped a great deal for the first few nights of taking Dr. Severin’s unmarked concoctions of pills.
Little did I know that when I was hearing these sounds and feeling this odd and nigh unexplainable comfort, I was already asleep and this was nearly just a prelude to the worsening nightmares I have yet to escape from. I wish I could determine whether or not I am still taking these pills that have thrust upon me these horrific, unshakable visions - but from where I am now, all reality has slipped from my grasp, and all that is left is a turbulent nothingness that is now sporadically populated with visions I shutter to even attempt to describe. Night and day are nonexistent, the outside world is somewhere far away, and when I am not being broken down to my very core, all I hear are the whirs and the clicks that used to be of such comfort to me but now bring on a litany of pain and dismay.
I don’t know exactly where to begin. Any sense of time has been obliterated and there is no longer much in the way of a grounding sense of place I feel as if I belong to. The dreams have melded my reality to the nonsense of nightmares where I can be fully thrust back into them at any unsuspecting moment.
-
I suppose I should state that I am not wholly irresponsible and uncaring in regard to my own health and whatever remains of my sanity. Throughout all of this, all these different agonizing periods of medical trials and ceaseless bouts of insomnia, I did have Dr. Severin to speak to. Usually, I believe my self-hatred to be so rampantly extreme that even confessing to the right medical professional what exactly is wrong with me will feel severely wrong to me. Sometimes it is as if I do not want the proper help, I do not want to get better, because I want whatever it is I am dealing with mentally or physically to go completely unchecked to the point where it can freely do away with me once and for all. Needless to say, this destructive self-hatred didn’t get in the way of what I chose to share with my doctor. For whatever it’s worth, I trusted him. For all his coldness, his unwaveringly stern, and sometimes even smug, demeanor, and his lack of personability when it came to addressing me and my ugly myriad of problems, I still saw him as this open and welcoming source to ship off my woes to and have them bounced back to me all molded and chipped away at to be compartmentalized and easily managed. That is to say, I didn’t hold back with Dr. Severin. Especially when it came to my experience on the unmarked combination of pills he was insisting I would take, pills I had to go out of my way to a strange chemist shack in the middle of a fog-drenched alleyway in some unpopulated section of the city I never once knew existed. I’m not a fool, none of this was without suspicion to me. But lack of sleep for what feels like years will make even the most headstrong and cynical individual bend to whatever peculiar whims that are claiming to be able to help them.
However, when I first relayed the new twisted incarnations of dream images the pills seemed to have forced upon me to the doctor I saw his demeanor finally crack. I sat there, not quite facing him but facing the wall adjacent to him, a wall covered in odd outsider paintings and diplomas from universities I’d never heard of, and tried my absolute best to trudge up all the ugly and shameful visions of extreme, torturous violence that have visited me to make him understand just how horrific these new dreams were. I explained to him, as he smugly adjusted his glasses and jotted down whatever was on his oblique notepad, in great detail what I experienced right down to the exact nature of the whirs and clicks that would lull me to sleep. And at this, he stopped and made direct eye contact with me, something I have known him to do several times but this time there was something markedly different in his eyes. Dr. Severin’s eyes were usually these opaque pools of steady darkness, every move they made seemed highly calculated, and no matter how long you stared into them nothing of note would ever stare back. However, when I told him about the sounds and how they felt to me as these conversely comforting presences within my bones but also portents to worsening dream images, his eyes shifted back and forth rapidly - his pupils grew huge and I saw my shaken and unkempt reflection clearly in them like mirrors flowing with reflective tar. Seeing this, I immediately froze - his gaze ceaselessly scanning me - as all the images haunting my brain evaporated into the emaciated face of the doctor.
His face, so often a sternly blank slate, now awash with a supremely uncanny emotion. His thin, often frowning, lips parted and a series of extremely faint words escaped him, almost as if it was involuntary. What he said, at the moment I couldn’t be totally sure, as my mind was reeling and firmly rooted in that horrible blackness of his eyes and the reflection of my miserable, weakened form. But as my dreams progressed, I heard this once faint utterance several times over until it became nothing more than a piping soundscape to intermingle with the rest of the horrors. What I believe he said in the moments after I explained the dream sounds to him was, “And the trumpets shall sound and all the world will make great blood.” And once these words, words that seemed at first to be more so cryptic little clicks and snaps of the tongue and vocal cords rather than any sort of recognizable pattern of speech, left him and escaped into the unease air around us, Dr. Severin fell back in his chair slowly and rather suddenly adopted his old demeanor of non-emotive sternness. His pupils shrank back into the impenetrable, non-reflective little dots in his heavy and steady eyes. At this display, I would usually be on the verge of total mental collapse, shaking with boiling-over turmoil and confusion. But the doctor would always have his ways of calming me down, making me feel oddly secure in his normally austere presence.
A simple convergence of our glances, his gaze momentarily melting into mine, would be enough to bring me back to myself and continue on what I was sharing with him. I couldn’t possibly begin to exactly quantify what was in that gaze of his, or what it was about his rigid posture and unsmiling mouth, that made me trust him - but there was something magnetic there that seemed to pore into my primordial need for order and belongingness. If Dr. Severin hated me, I didn’t care, because whatever magic was behind his presence worked on me. It worked on me to the extent that I am recounting these dreams as they are still happening, that I am sharing with him these images that are surely bringing upon my swift mental decay, that I divulge all manners of my eroding psyche even as he seems to take less of an interest in helping me but more so in facilitating the next stage of my psychic collapse. It worked on me to the extent that I feel strongly that he is directly to blame for my worsening dreams, and yet here I am - trapped in his gaze, still searching for guidance and help in the man who, more so than even myself, seems to want to push me further off the edge. For what, exactly? I could never be sure.
-
After an imperceptible amount of time hung between the two of us in silence, in those moments all I could hear was my irregular heartbeat rattling against my ribcage, I hesitantly asked the doctor to repeat what he said. His stalwart glance once again met mine, but it was at that moment that the room around us began to change. As he opened his mouth in almost agonizing slow motion, the walls of the psychiatric room began to become inundated with withered cracks and what appeared to be growing stains of rust. The entire hue of the lights became closer to that of a late afternoon sun struggling to break free of heavy clouds of gray fog, and the smell in the air, which would usually be scented with some inoffensive air freshener, began to overwhelm with an olfactory bombardment of what I can imagine embalming fluids smelled like, rotting plastic, burning metal, and vague smells of blood pooling around unwashed flesh.
Dr. Severin opened his mouth, every click of his jaw, every stretch of his musculature, every drip-drop of saliva from the roof of his mouth to his tongue, was heard loudly reverberating in the now shifting office. From his mouth came not words, although he continued to move his mouth as if he were speaking in a human tongue, but an all-too-familiar series of whirs and clicks. I was stuck in my seat, every nerve ending of mine buzzing with a horrible sensory recognition that the dream was upon me. It felt as if every layer of my flesh was trying to tear itself off of me, my muscles felt taut to the point of breaking, and my bones hummed with surging vibrations. There was no doubt - either something happened to me during my session to suddenly lapse me to sleep or the dream tricked me and has been with me all along, only now transferring me to the more nightmarish and horrific avenues of these forced visions. I looked to Dr. Severin, even as his creaking mouth flowed forth once comforting whirs and clicks that signaled the beginning of what was to come, and tried to ground myself in some semblance of reality in a dire attempt to wake myself up. Instead, I found myself utterly transfixed on what actions befell him as the dream took hold.
He clicked his pen and raised his clipboard which disintegrated into sparks like it was being welded with his flesh. I felt that pervasive chill of shadowy, formless shadows lurching into existence just beyond my peripheral vision. If I could turn my head, I knew I would see them at a fixed distance away from me - glaring at me with their infinitely empty eyesockets from behind spools of barbed wire guiding their new form. What will become their faces are like a pitch-black desert of rolling waves of shadowed dunes, groaning and rotting animals hiding away underneath the blackness of their undulating faces. I see them every night now, but I’ll never understand their purpose or their plans. The whirring and clicking transitions to a sort of heavily distorted and warbly hurdy-gurdy playing a slow-motion dirge. At this point, I swear I can hear faint pops and wheezes from what sounds like flayed human vocal cords as if someone is creating music by hacking away slowly at their own singing throat. The forms taking shape behind me and around me just out of reach of my vision close in, but my attention is fixed on the doctor.
Where his pen should have been instead clicked out a small blade that coils out with a silvery, gleaming trail and wraps around Dr. Severin - cutting swiftly and cleanly into his flesh as it goes. His skin starts falling off in neatly patterned strips, slicing away at the razor wire pointed with a small scalpel-like blade that wormed its way around him. Underneath his old flesh lay an uneven tapestry of what I can only imagine being tattoos, or purplish-colored patterns possibly formed from scar tissue, that covered him entirely. The meaning of these strange symbols was something that seemed to be far beyond me, some of them looked as if they were a form of ouroboros but with oddly formed roaches instead of a snake endlessly eating itself and simultaneously birthing itself. It moved, slightly, with the glimmer of the razor wire that wrapped tightly around the doctor. Metallic sparks shined and exploded in great bouts of blinding light as the doctor’s eyes sliced horizontally open once the blade glided against them. Nothing oozed out of the bisected globules but a dense fog that encapsulated what was left of the room and brought upon a greater transition. And from his mouth, a mouth that now barely held together off of his deteriorating jawbone, hanging by sinew and acidic saliva, still uttered nothing but intensifying whirs and clicks that spun out throughout the space with the growing fog. The office I once knew was torn away by the nightmare, the doctor, in his new form, disappeared into the fog as the sounds emitting from his mouth continued, and I found myself now standing on uneven concrete ground staring ahead at the epicenter of my now perpetual mental anguish; the nightmare industrial complex, the assumed home of the barbed wire people and the torture they carry out.
At this point, it wouldn’t matter in the slightest if I knew for certain whether or not I was dreaming. Lucidity would have no consequences whatsoever on how I operated through the dream. All control was taken away from me, and the longer I have suffered from these dreams the more I feel as if the last bit of control I had on my life, in reality, has been taken away as well. Furthermore, the effects of what is to follow, what I know is to follow, are so damning to my sanity, so vivid in their minutia and details of experience, that the effects it had on me would be no different if it were all really happening in the waking world. The barbed wire people don’t hurt me physically - for reasons I can never be made sure of and rather not question. I am merely shown and pushed through sensory experiences that serve a purpose greater than myself, or at least that’s how I can rationalize it. It could have no purpose other than sheer, inescapable torment and cruelty, and the nature of the images and experiences repeating every night, throughout my day, striking at any point, are of no value or substance save for my own mental facilities, aided by the drugs Dr. Severin has prescribed me from the strange little chemist shack in the alleyway, laying waste to me bit by bit.
The concrete breathed a strange, liquifying mist that clung to my feet like a trail of thin, noxious slime. Around me was wire fencing that stretched up into the imperceptible limits of the sky, a sky that surged with black and dull orange colors intermingling. It was as if the stars were collapsing in on themselves and bleeding out in these unremarkable, industrial colors that stretched across the skyline like spoiled flesh over a canvas. There was no sun, no clouds save for the low-hanging fog, and the time of day was completely undeterminable. Music, that’s the only word that can fit the sounds I was hearing and would always hear, played in heavily distorted and dissonant echoes throughout the entire dream space from an unseen and unknowable source. And stretching out beyond the wire fencing was a desert as infinite as space. Jutting out of the dunes were heavily buried ship masts that poked out of the sands and titled this way and that, their tattered flags flapping occasionally in the rust-smelling wind. In front of me, always at the same fixed distance, was the industrial complex that was made up of impossible geometry and had no real end in sight. It was a massive wall of impossible design, part government housing project, part high school, part factory, part prison, and all cobbled together inside out and sideways, fixed in one spot in the middle of this fenced-off piece of broken concrete where I stood.
Nothing I did would ever move me further away from the building, and I never wanted to attempt to move closer to it. But just looking at the face of it, the great rusted metallic and brick edifice with exposed piping and plumes of smoke leaking out of its rotting mortar, would fill me with such a gripping and unique sense of dread that nothing in my life, not my childhood nightmares, not the abuse I suffered from my mother and stepfather, not the sense of impending doom I felt each and every day of my fetid existence, has even come close to making me feel before. If the nightmare stopped at me in this space looking at the building with the knowledge of what is to happen in there, even without seeing for sure, then that would be enough. Oh, even just one instance of dreaming this dream and it stopping at the sheer suggestion of me witnessing what happens in the nightmare building should have been enough for me to require a permanent mental sanitarium.
A specific point about this building that I have failed to mention under my increasing delirium is that there were no windows save for one extremely narrow one fixed directly above the closed entrance. This window, which was really more like a hole since there was no glass, a tiny sliver in the brick and metal mess, was always a specific distance away from me so that, from where I was standing on the concrete, I was always able to get a full look inside. Never, even when these dreams first started visiting me, did I want to have a small semblance of a glance into this building, but the choice wasn’t mine. And despite being a fixed distance away from the long, thin window, I was granted an unobstructed view of inside and the inner workings of the nightmare industrial complex. I couldn’t move my head, I couldn’t close my eyes, and I couldn’t do anything to bring myself back to reality, I was forced to watch. And as I watched and freezing terror flooded through my veins, the shadowy forms would continue taking shape around me - just outside of my view. Like monstrosities and human oddities being birthed from a pervasive fog, they came to be in the rusted and heavy air around me. As they closed in, I would be stuck observing the inner happenings of the building, while horrible music continued pipping all around me, staring into the abyssal darkness of the mysterious industrial wasteland. Witnessing the beginnings of the torture I’ve been so well acquainted with.
Out of the rust-colored fog, the barbed wire people were emerging - I could tell. Which meant soon I would be transported inside the building and once again guided by what they had to show me. I could feel my waking body shuddering and shivering, my teeth scraping into each other, one of my incisors chipped at the violence with which I shook. I begged for the presence of Dr. Severin in his original, recognizable form - anything to remind me of waking life, but he was, for the moment, nowhere to be found. Inside that small crack in the building, I saw clearly a crumbling steel staircase where exposed pipes loudly dripped unidentifiable fuming liquid. A small framed body was being dragged up it, one step at a time, all of its anemic limbs and its gaunt head banging against each step with loud cracks and fleshy smacks. Suddenly I’m face to face with the body - up close to their collapsing retinas that spread out through the whites of their eyes like a diseased cracked egg. I saw in them the unquestionable and all-encompassing fear that was surging through me and briefly wondered if it were me I was looking at.
Hands with tightly coiled barbed wire that drew evenly pattered streams of blood came into my view and gripped the face I was looking so intensely in. They heaved the body backward and I was given a full view of them. The body was heavily beaten, some of its bones pointing in askew angles beneath bruised and dented flesh, and it twitched occasionally with unpleasant signs that it was unfortunately still alive. Its face, which I struggled to firmly recognize, was the only flesh it had left on its scalped and skinned head, its jaw bone broken and slack the same as a corpse’s, and its teeth were replaced with hypodermic needles that tore holes through gums and their discolored, flayed lips. Somehow, some patches of hair remained on its scalped head and it shined with such a luster that the few strands managed to slightly illuminate this dark and horribly damp stairwell.
The smell was unbearable, a flood of iron from all the blood, the sickly sour smell of rancid spoiling flesh, and the sharp tang of wet metal. The victim in front of me had their collapsed eyes raised up to the stairwell as it led endlessly into the void-like heights of the building. I wanted nothing more but to help this person, but my actions were not my own and I could only watch as my perspective suddenly shifted to an omnipotent view of myself alone in the dark stairwell with this soon-to-be corpse. The shadows once more took shape as malignant human beings who wrapped up my body in spools of barbed wire, each spike individually topped with tiny bits of human gore. I felt every sensation of pain magnified tenfold, although I could not manage to scream or react accordingly. It all just added to the overall bombardment of sensory nonsense that overwhelmed my senses beyond the limits of eternity. The barbed wire people, who I struggle to accurately describe, with their androgynous, amorphous forms, all bleed together around me. Shrieking with noises that were impossible from any living form and guiding me with the continued torture of whoever was in front of me. One hand, one that was gnawed at to the point of exposed bone pointing out of the tips of some of its fingers, opened my hand and spilled forth vials of squirming insects. Another hand, which was nothing but dancing formless blackness, gave to me a tiny dagger. They pushed me forward. I was back on the concrete, watching clearly and much too closely through the small crack in the building as a projection of myself descended on the already badly beaten, barely alive victim.
Shame and overwhelming guilt washed over me like a mad, mind-shattering fury as I watched myself tear into this person methodically and rapidly. They made no noise outside of the much-too-audible squelching of their manipulated flesh and bursts of blood. Although they quivered and their eyes glistened with a palpable fear that I wish I never felt or witnessed. I uncontrollably proceeded to watch as I punctured them all over with the small dagger, sometimes pinching a piece of their flesh and sharply piercing through the clump I raised up. I was tasked with providing this particular victim with a series of new pores to fester and boil with their blood and ripped-open flesh. Then I took the vials and smashed them over their head, which knocked their head backward in a loud snap making me believe that hopefully, they have died, but the gurgling that emitted from them shortly thereafter quickly did away with that hope. Broken glass and the bugs that came from the vials now rolled and crawled their way through the person’s flesh. Maggots, botflies, and tiny unidentifiable larvae sunk themselves into the new pores I made for them. Then I stopped and grabbed their head, a heavy blood stain and a patch of hair left on the metal stair behind them, and brought it close to mine. From the concrete parking lot in front of the building, I screamed for all of this to stop, even though I knew full well nothing would make a difference now.
The barbed wire people came to me again from out of the shadows, one of them with a series of meat hooks weaving in and out of their blackened flesh so as to showcase new wounds and orifices that breathed forth fog and droplets of rust. Their head split open and fell to the ground, from their open and hollow neck cavity surged forth a familiar image; a pair of stern, reflectively black eyes deep set in a gaunt, emotionless face. They joined me in gripping the head of my victim and lurching it closer to me, its hand nearly embedded in the exposed and dented musculature and badly damaged skull, and it seemed to work the head like a puppet as the slack jaw came to life and uttered from the very bowels of this beaten individual a whisper that echoed through the stairwell; “All this world makes great blood.”
My eyes uncontrollably filled with tears, I prayed to whoever would listen for me to wake up for I knew what was to come next. The projection of myself was shoved aside by the barbed wire people and the shadow person with the all-too-familiar eyes as they worked a strange contraption onto the victim's head. It was like a spherical cage that fit the broken skull of the victim perfectly. Instead of bars for the head cage, there was a series of interlocking thick strands of razor wire, crisscrossed against each other. Once the cage was on the victim, whose flesh now was surging forth with the creation of waves of blood and insects that flowed down the metal staircase and up the walls of the exposed pipes and rotten bricks, the strands of razor wire sank themselves into what remained of their pulpy, abused flesh. Observing this, the shame I felt increased to an unbearable degree and all I wanted to do was replace them with myself and endure their torment to hopefully bring about the end of all of this and the end of my scorned life. But I had no choice but to watch as the barbed wire people took the head of the victim as it now sat in the tortuous cage and place it strategically against one of the metal steps, their eyes facing down. My heart was pounding to the point of bursting forth from my chest and I could feel my tongue drying out and withering within my throat - my voice was completely gone. I couldn’t even scream as they took this body, this new factory for bugs and blood, and smashed their head over and over again into the metal staircase. The cage of razor wire shredded their face into neatly patterned chunks that flew in all directions and dissolved into the squirming darkness of the vile building. Their hypodermic teeth tore into their mouth and lips even further as the razor wire turned their head into a pulpy mince. Over and over again the head was smacked into the metal step, activating the cage and bringing forth an exploding vortex of blood and flesh.
At the end of it, their head resembled that of a suicide victim after placing a shotgun to their chin. And in the flowered wound of shattered bone and strips of bloodied cut-up flesh that continually unfurled past the point of the victim’s death was a cavern of singing darkness. The source of the whirs and clicks was coming from the opened and heavily lacerated cavity that was once this person’s head. Staring into it, overburdened by the sounds that have now utterly betrayed me, I felt all the brunt of responsibility and guilt for what transpired weigh me down into a minuscule corner of existence where I wish I could wither away and die. I felt I needed nothing more than to be tried and punished severely for what my mind has conjured up for me. But I was alone in this, forever.
Usually, this was when the dream would stop, but gradually more and more have been tacked on to this unfortunate sequence to make me stuck in this world longer and longer each time I dream it up. After the explosion of torture, I had to witness, my projected body would fall next to the corpse and stare up at the barbed wire people, noticing the one in particular who had unmistakably familiar eyes, and begin to rot. My real self would go from watching from outside the sliver of a window to now standing within the staircase, looking down at my corpse as the shadow person with familiar eyes escaped up the stairs. Noises of scurrying insects and the slopping thuds of flayed flesh hitting the ground would overwhelm as the building morphed and became even more narrow and even more impossibly dark. At this point, all feeling within me was gone. All I wanted was to find the doctor.
Standing on the steps, wondering where the doctor has went, I watched my decaying body scream out toward me. My eyes ran over with an unshakable coldness as I watched myself lift an emaciated limb towards myself, noticing the gore slowly dripping from the exposed bone, my jaw falling off and my tongue rotting out into a puddle of rust. But I couldn’t move towards it, I couldn’t help it. I had to remain fixed in position as the barbed wire people descended upon my projected corpse and dragged him, viscera flowing in his wake and evaporating into a blood-colored fog around me, into the greater unknown of the abandoned industrial building that was teeming with supremely otherworldly music, inhuman cacophonies of screams, and pooling piles of torn off flesh and human parts melding with the exposed framework of the foundation. I knew the doctor was somewhere above me in this building, I can hear his breathing and the sounds emanating from his patchwork scar tissue and tattoos. Perhaps he was beckoning for my discarded dream flesh. Perhaps for some sort of ritual I was not allowed to witness - a rare instance of my subconscious saving myself from the true extent of horrors it was boiling and conjuring up in my sleeping head.
Perhaps I was finally able to take control of myself, perhaps there was something outside of myself finally shifting the dream into new scenarios, or perhaps this is where the dream was going all along and I simply kept waking up too soon. But regardless of the cause, I shook up my paralyzed stance and moved up the staircase and through the secretive upper chambers of the building. My foot pulled forth sticky clumps of viscera, blood, and exoskeletons on each and every step as I followed the noises of what I could assume were two piles of raw flesh violently melding into each other. The dream was coming to a close, I could feel it. Some new terrified feeling of discovery was creating a storm in my insides, but I had to push forward. It was then that I came across a door. And from behind this door seemed to be the source of the flesh-rending noises and was where all the bugs and blood seemed to be flowing into. I heard once more a crack of a jawbone, the slurping of chunks of flesh, and a voice that seemed to be coming from shredded vocal cords that whispered something unrecognizable.
Finally, an action of my dream self seemed to have come about from myself - a fraction of control returning to me. I opened the door and stepped inside the damp and barren room and once again saw my rotting corpse. His arm still stretched out towards me as if there was anything in my power to help it. And then a head descended upon it and started gnashing and gnawing at the body, a head with eyes that I recognized and even took comfort in seeing their dark reflective pools even as I watched them consume my disintegrating flesh. Dr. Severin, in his torn apart, tattooed, sacrificed, nightmare form lifted his head with his mouth full of my flesh and turned to the torture victim next to him. The victim was laid up against the wall, its head still exploded in a flower-like shape with the noises emitting from it, and its series of newly formed pores from my dagger birthed forth an endless ocean of several different bugs.
Dr. Severin leaned in close to it and seemed to show some sort of strange affection through his body language. He took an emaciated, torn-apart hand and fished something out of his mouth that was stuffed with my corpse flesh. Out of it was a small pill - similar in color and size to one of the many pills he prescribed me. He took the pill and dropped it into the hole in the victim’s scalp where, after a brief moment, it made a splashing sound as if it dropped into a small and distant body of water. He then whispered to it in a surprisingly sweet tone of voice. What he said, I couldn’t quite hear, but it seemed to me to be a sort of promise. Something along the lines of bringing this victim to a new form of being. Then Dr. Severin straddled the corpse of the victim and nuzzled himself deep into the flowering, festering head wound. His tattoos and scar tissue danced and surged with colors and illuminations as the bugs and blood took over the foundation of the building and sounds of heavily pounded drums, conjoining mounds of raw flesh, and repetitive whirs took over.
I woke up.
I was back in my supremely lonely bedroom, a place I have never felt so relieved to be back in. Outside it looked as if it was extremely early in the morning, the sun was not yet out but the moon was low in the sky. My head throbbed with a pulsating ache and all my limbs felt heavy with blood. The sense of shame and heart-pounding guilt was still weighing heavily over me, but there was still the relief of being back in a familiar slice of reality. But that was it, I knew that I had to stop the pills. I had to call the doctor and stop my treatment altogether, I did not care what he thought and I did not fear my condition slipping back into insomnia. I’ve had it.
Lurching my body forward, I reached for the phone and dialed the doctor. He picked up immediately, but his voice was completely different. He was totally muffled and seemed far away for a moment, then said something along the lines of, “I need to pick up this medication. It’s from Dr. Severin.” Then all I heard were footsteps, the humming of an electric sign, wind, and then the surging of machinery - all whirs and clicks and grinding of gears. Suddenly, all light flashed.
I was not in my room.
A strange, little man was standing over me. I was looking at him sideways, his fingers were embedded in my head but I felt no pain. My surroundings were unknown, nothing of note but the hum of a neon sign that filled the foggy room with red light. As he dug into my head I heard the whirring of machinery as if it were coming from within me. Then he extracted his fingers and brought forth a collection of squirming little bugs. He kneaded at them with his fat fingers and moprhed them into pills that he then plopped into an unmarked bottle. I squinted my eyes and watched the man escape back into darkness. Something was wrapped tightly around him that caused a series of scrapping sparks to emit from his feet. I smelled nothing but rust and blood.
The man put the unmarked bottle into a revolving slot and pushed them forth to someone on the other side, someone standing in a fog-drenched alley in an unfamiliar part of the city. The humming of the neon sign began to overwhelm me as my mind began to reel and bring forth images of the nightmare industrial building, the torture I took part in as aided by the barbed wire people, my rotten corpse being eaten by the transformed Dr. Severin, my flesh being turned into pharmaceuticals and dropped into the ocean of bugs surging in the blown-apart skull of my victim. I couldn’t move, my unwanted sleep was returning to me. Then I heard the strange man’s words beyond the hum and hiss of the electricity before returning to my nightmare; “Good luck, and give my regards to the Doctor.”
THE END. 
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