Dream of the Barbed Wire People

  The following is a short story I began writing about two months ago following a vivid and incredibly graphic nightmare I had. Upon waking I forgot most of the dream, only small snippets of visuals and scenery, but the feeling of fear and panic and genuine discomfort stayed with me throughout most of the day to an incredibly strong degree. I wish I continued writing this story the day I started it as I now have very little recollection of where it was going or what I planned for it. 

Art by Hellish Razor. 

Dream of the Barbed Wire People 

Part One: The Doctor

   

Doctor Severin was finally able to put me to sleep. After sessions of intense hypnotherapy and routine adjustments of strange, unpronounceable medications in unmarked bottles as well as his supervision over my sleepless body over several nights, it has happened. Sleep has graced me and clamped my heavy eyelids shut. 

    

  With the doctor's guide, I was forced into embracing a darkness that far surpassed what I have ever thought to experience. A brand new nightmare landscape opened up to me after years of nothing. And now, the sleep I so desperately wanted to return to me is something I haven't been able to escape from. I despise sleep, I despise what it now gives to me. No longer am I even capable of recognizing the boundary between dreams and waking life. The images in the dreams stick with me like an everpresent tar coating my brain stem, polluting my already fragile state of mind and causing my every thought to spiral into a sinking oblivion of torment. And when I finally delude myself into believing that I’m free of them, that I can go about my waking day unshackled from the ceaseless effects of the nightmares, my ordinary surroundings seamlessly and without warning transpose back into that dreaded and repeated dreamland of isolated and delipidated warehouses, oceans of broken glass, mangled tortures, maddeningly pipping music of sick tones and overlapping phrasings, elaborate devices of mutilation, and of course, the barbed wire people that preside there - beckoning me to stare into the abyssal chasm of my final mental collapse. There’s no escape, there never was one. And Dr. Severin is there with me all the way, for what I don’t know and won’t ever know because the dreams won’t lead me to any answers. There’s nothing at the end, if there even is an end, but torture, hyperviolence, and exhausting shame. 

As someone once numbed to the nightmares spewing from my sickly child self's head, who then lapsed into a prolonged period of tiny dreamless snippets of sleep, then made victim of rampant insomnia, I foolishly told myself the worst was over. But these new guided dreams won't end and the images they show me, the experiences and patterns of violence and torment they pull me through, have led me to the edge of what I believe any human brain could logistically withstand. The light of day was once so upsetting, so malignantly bitter and harsh to me - but now I desperately wish for night to never fall upon me again.  

-

(I have to start somewhere further back.) 

      As I explained to the doctor on our first visit, I spent a long period of my adult life up to that point "sleeping" completely dreamless nights. A flash of an image or a face here, a burst of unclear audio there, the common cycle of disembodied heads screaming various things through the fog of half-sleep, but nothing ever that I would constitute as a dream. This could, of course, all be largely due to the fact that for the past five or so years I have not been able to properly sleep. It started off as something Doctor Severin referred to as "middle-of-the-night insomnia", in which I would find myself frequently waking up shortly after falling asleep and being unable to return to sleep. Two heavily interrupted hours at the absolute maximum - some nights I am graced by a brief half-hour rest of silent, tenebrous, unconscious peace before being pried back into the waking world irrevocably. It is as if the second my mind feels at ease there is a defensive mechanism that kicks in that forces me back to high-alert, panic-fueled wakefulness. A brief moment of mindlessness and darkness and then all of a sudden I'm up; heart pounding throughout my whole body like a heavy church bell echoing through hollow caverns, the sheets thrown clear off of me, my clothes drenched in sticky, damp sweat - again and again, night after restless night. 

    

     While I have always had great difficulties with sleep I have also always treasured the idea of it. Something just out of reach to me - something just on the precipice - something that, if I properly obtained it, would grant me a small nightly taste of death. Darkness, silence, a void to nestle into and be cradled by while I leave my uneasy conscious brain to rest. But, of course, as anyone could tell you, the subconscious brain is what really stirs up the most trouble. All the repression, the fragments of memories once thought forgotten, the furthest depths of awareness of every single fault and worry and inadequacy within oneself, and, potentially worst of all, the unknowable, unhinged, unspeakable desires now manifested and free to wreak havoc in vivid images and scenarios in your sleeping, completely helpless, momentarily trapped head. That was what I can now assume has kept me from a restful sleep when sleep was actually something obtainable to me - even in small, frantic, unnerving dosages. Although, as I know now, I feel for a large portion of my early life I have had my fill of these subconsciously crafted nightmare tapestries. This is what I explained to the doctor, though being able to introspectively see that this was a problem within myself, a problem that existed perhaps even more strongly for my child self, was not something I was able to so easily accomplish. No, I just wanted to go back to dreaming - to be able to successfully achieve an escape, no matter the dream, for a guaranteed six to eight hours a night. But the doctor saw the issue at hand, he pried deeper, and with him, I was thrust back into childhood and all of the horrid, tumultuous nights I experienced. It didn't take much for the floodgates to open; my mental fortitude perhaps not what it used to be.

    

     Nights as a child where I was held subject to the cavernous depths of my burgeoning subconscious manifested in grueling, ugly dreams were numerous and excruciatingly vivid. Furthermore, lucid dreaming was not something I was ever apparently capable of, if my hazy and blurred memory of childhood serves me well, which would turn every dream, no matter how bizarre or nonsensical or terrifying or completely illogical, absolutely and utterly undeterminable from my real life. Nearly every single one of these nights of intense, nightmarish manifestations that I felt I was experiencing as reality, always ended, as far as I can remember, with screaming, rivulets of tears streaming down my sickly face, soiled sheets, and occasionally deep scratches or colorful bruises along my neck, face, and arms - most likely done by myself while in the midst of a somnambulistic fit. 

   

      And with the isolating, guilt-driven, punishing childhood that I now remember myself experiencing, support or understanding for these nightly tortures, and the long-lasting effects it would have on me throughout my waking day, was tragically nonexistent. I'd wake in total panic at what images and sounds and experiences my dreams subjected me to, and yet the panic that would come about from thinking of the possibility of traversing the dark hallway to my mother and step-father's bedroom to search for some sort of vague comfort or security, knowing I'd only ever be met by worsening disappointment, scolding, ridicule, and smacks from my mother and her frighteningly ungroomed nails, was far more paralyzing and overwhelming than what the dreams could leave me feeling. So I would stay in my cramped bedroom, with its sloping, mold-covered walls, left alone to try to return to sleep with my tear-stricken face, fresh scratches and bruises, and soiled sheets, only for the nightmares to immediately continue. 

  

       And yet, even with the high probability of debilitating and mind-paralyzing nightmares always in the forefront of my still underdeveloped brain, sleep - proper, rejuvenating sleep, was something I still deeply desired every time my frail, sickly body graced my often unwashed bed. Perhaps even more strong was the anticipation I felt every single day for the night to visit me once more. The nighttime, with all of its tenebrous stretches into the unknown, the desolate and liminal isolation, and, of course, the routine and worsening nightmares it could bring, was still so vastly preferable to the horrid light of the day and the vast, inescapable terrors, humiliations, boredom, and the droves of despicable, vacuous people that would operate throughout the day time. Nighttime was a time of solitude, of quiet, detached existence. A time where the unpredictable chaos of life would, for a short while, slow down and I could be left alone in my own tiny, moonlit world of imaginings and introspection. I yearned for it day in and day out. Then night would come, my mother and stepfather would lock their bedroom door, and that squalid little house I was forced into growing up in would be awash with darkness and silence. 

    

     I would sit in my room, sometimes on my floor to avoid my dirtied mattress, in complete silence and look out my bedroom window at the arching dead trees and the crooked roofs of equally squalid surrounding homes. Occasionally a cat or some other small animal, another lover of the night, would appear on a fence post and glide through the night, between the dim cones of light from drooping lamp posts, right past my view from my bedroom window. I would follow it with squinted eyes and try my hardest to project some sort of telepathic call out to it. Something to tell it that I was there, watching it, as another being who felt comforted in the night. I wanted to join it out there, but my fear of what could be done to me if I sneaked out of that house overpowered me every single time. And then there was the wish for it to come up to my window, gracefully and under the darkened blanket of night, so I could let whichever nocturnal animal in. But that too would lead to unknowable scolding and punishment if I was caught - I shudder to think of what my mother and stepfather could have subjected an animal to. Nights would exist in these fragmented, tiny little liminal bubbles where it felt no one else existed outside of myself in my cramped bedroom and my little window in view of the prowling cats and other nocturnal animals outside. But, of course, I would eventually succumb to sleep and night would reveal itself as the playground of unfiltered nightmare imagery that my brain would unleash on me.

    

    Despite my love and anticipation for it, nighttime would simply act as a prelude to torment rather than the restful respite that I desperately craved as an isolated, poorly-treated, overly stressed child - and little would change during my painful and awkward transformation into despondent, isolating adulthood. As the nightmares got worse and my sleeping more and more irregular, night and day became one and the same, neither acting as less of a catalyst for my many stressors and ever-present, worsening, possibly illogical growing list of anxieties. The only difference is that now I am untethered from the dreams of my childhood self and until I was pushed headfirst into the agonizing depths of remembrance, thanks to the persuasive Doctor Severin, I was no longer consciously haunted by them. But now, knowing the full brunt of the cruelty my subconscious brain was capable of subjecting my young self to, I'd actually prefer to be visited by them. That's what I told the doctor, and I meant that. At that point, I'd prefer being visited by the cruel, gruesome, nightmarish screeching onslaught of brainwave images if it meant I could once again fully fall asleep. Doctor Severin listened, he listened to it all and inferred and drew correct assumptions on things I did not tell him as well as things I myself did not yet understand. 

- end of part one -

art by Chris Mars

Part Two: The Treatment 

   After all presently remembered and once repressed memories of childhood, hypnogenic issues, and past nightmares and everything pertaining to them was all neatly "organized, boxed up, and accounted for", as the doctor put it, it was time to begin the actual treatment itself. A series of trials, Doctor Severin told me as an almost veiled threat, was what I likely had to endure moving forward. And endure them I did. 

    It started off, as anyone with any familiarity with the psychiatric process, fairly normal and manageable, yet ultimately frustrating as every "simple" method ended up as a useless endeavor. A series of different pills to try - then a combination - then six to eight weeks go by - then switch to a new pill or a new combination of pills. Swap this one out, replace it with this pill, this pill interacts with this one to do this and if that doesn't work then we'll add in this at a starting dosage and see how that goes for the first four to six weeks. And on and on that went...with no results. Mild, mostly inconsequential side-effects would occur, as I was told and as I expected. And at first, that was true. One of the first sleeping pills I was ordered to test out gave me a strongly persistent itch on the bridge of my nose, which would only get worse throughout the night - obviously putting a stop to any chance I had at feeling any less uncomfortable than I already did throughout my sleepless night. The next one gifted me a sharp burning sensation in my throat that wouldn't dare let up. And, of course, that was the pill I was taking during the three-week period the doctor was on vacation to an undisclosed location. Before leaving, after prescribing me my new medication, he made it painfully apparent all of the disastrous effects sudden withdrawal would cause upon my mind and my body if I abruptly stopped taking them. So the burning sensation intensified for what felt like a lifetime, steadily getting worse and worse each passing day, before the doctor was able to see me again. The next few all meld together in my memory, but certain nights taking certain pills, more painful than the usual sleepless nights, stick out in the faltering, undulating patchwork of my memories. 

    

One particular pill did not cause any sort of sleep to come to me, but instead, as night descended, left me utterly paralyzed in my bed. My finger bones would twitch and ache horribly, I would begin to sweat profusely, and what followed were strange hallucinations as the all-too-familiar surroundings of my damp and lonely bedroom would begin to shift. The walls would start to rise up and free themselves from my apartment building's cheap foundation - writhing and squirming, their spackle flaking and scattering through the room like the beginning flurries of a blizzard. Once reaching a certain state, the walls would fully converge above me, forming a quivering peaked dome. Cracks would begin to form in the ceiling and a cone of dark blue light would filter in. The first time this occurred my first feeling was that of elated relief as I thought I finally was able to fall asleep and dream. But as the hallucination went on, the more clear it became to me that this was not a hypnagogic gift but something my brain was conjuring up for my waking self to be trapped in. 

    

As my fingers continued to painfully twitch, the joints in my knuckles felt as if they were swelling and ready to burst out of my flesh, the blue light washed over the room, and I became intensely more and more uncomfortable and out of my own control. Soon after, I realized I was completely paralyzed. It was akin to sleep paralysis, although I knew for absolute certainty that I was fully awake and experiencing a horrid unreality like the hell of my waking mind had been made flesh and descended upon me. The blue light caused my eyes to feel as if they were being forcefully pulled open from my eyelids and the overly bright, unearthly hue began to cause strange gesturing patterns in all of the inanimate materials around me.

    

The domed walls and that horrid light held me like a daemonic cocoon as the innards of my body felt as if they were rising and twisting to the surface of my skeleton trying desperately to break free. My brain swelled and scrapped against my skull and my eyes searched the room in a panic to find something to ground myself with, something to rocket myself back to reality - no matter how bleak and lifeless that reality was.  But then, the light would diminish and fall to the floor around me like a dull haze. The walls continued to stretch inwards and outwards and noises would begin to pipe in from somewhere beyond myself and my squalid room. A vaguely familiar voice, at first, then a cacophony of familiar voices all intermingled and talking at the same pitch. The tone was indiscernible, neither malevolent nor benevolent, and it would unleash a torrent of incomprehensible speech where only one or two words would occasionally stick out to me as being identifiably human. Words like "chasm" and "alleyways" and "soiled" and "locked" are of the very few I can remember, but these would hardly, if ever, repeat on subsequent hallucinations. Two words did repeat, however. And with those words would call forth the climax of this hellish unreality. All other voices in the auditory maelstrom would pull back, still quietly piping along in the background, as one distinct voice claimed dominance. It was the voice of Doctor Severin, his voice cutting clear through all the noise and light and undulating hallucinations of my surroundings. "Barbed Wire".

And with those words, everything froze, the lights spreading a thinner and thinner mist below me and around me, images would flash like they were erupting out of the bits of exploded wall spackle that was drifting down towards my face; my childhood home, the face of my mother in a twisted contortion of a scream, a locked door at the darkened end of an impossibly long hallway, then my own face as a child floating above me. I saw his eyes mirroring into the void of mine, the heavy bags weighing them down and discoloring the entire face. It would remain there floating for perhaps less than a second, but in the now stillness and quiet of my room, it felt like an entirety. I stared into my child self's floating, emotionless head, wondering with twitching anticipation when this was all going to end. And as my child self looked back into me, I was able to discern the same twitching anticipation - almost as if it was possible that I was just a mere manifestation of his sleepless, unwell mind and he was the one awaiting what would unfold before him. But then those two words would ring out in the domed room again. "Barbed Wire." Staring into my child self's head hearing those words echo from what appeared to be Doctor Severin's voice reaching through a cacophonous backdrop of other familiar and not-so-familiar voices piping away in the blue misty ether drove me to the edge of a new faction of insanity that has since been impossible to shake.

With the Doctor's utterance, my child self's head would begin to subtly shake. Its mouth would open slowly with a crack of its jawbone and out came an unfurling, a slow blossoming, of nests of barbed wire. Trailing blood and bits of entrails on all of the individual spikes that were seemingly endlessly wrapped around each other, the barbed wire would ceaselessly unspool from that floating head's mouth. It began to form a sort of helmet-like cage around my child self's head as screams rang out from the writhing walls - I could begin to make out my name. Watching this unfold, watching an effigy of my tired, sickly head as a child being wrapped endlessly in piercing, stabbing, tearing spools of barbed wire, all the while its expression never changed nor did it seem to express any sort of pain whatsoever, caused me to feel the most intense sense of guilt I have ever since felt. The barbed wire spun and spun, grabbing onto folds of my child self's discolored skin and ripping away bit by bit, as the ungodly blue mist swirled and churned and the voices wouldn't stop screaming my name. Right before the hallucination would end, the barbed wire helmet-like cage would be formed around its head. All of the spikes appeared to be individual hypodermic needles filled with an unidentified metal. The screams would stop, my body would be on the verge of complete panic-fueled eruption, my skin feeling like it was stretched so thin it was going to snap and peel, and the head cage of hypodermic needles and barbed wire would slam shut onto my floating child self's little head. Interlocking and shredding, the head would be swiftly reduced to but mere viscera, teeth, metal scraps, and pieces of skull sailing down on me before I would finally be free and the hallucination would end. 

It would take a considerable amount of time to feel settled back into my reality. There I would be, rolled off my bed and onto the cold hardwood floor of my small bedroom. Heaving with feeble attempts to catch my breath, sweat pouring out of me and staining the floor, my eyes still wide and frantically scanning the room to be sure that the visions and voices ceased. I would look out of my fogged-up window and see that it was still night and it was likely that little time had passed since the start of my hallucinations. Needless to say, the rest of that night was spent doing just about anything other than trying to lay back down in my bed and attempting to sleep. The night would crawl on, occasionally I would hear little auditory flashes of incomprehensible speech or quick squelching noises, or the light from a lamppost outside would flash another earthly blue hue, just for a second, to keep me on edge. I would spend the entire, long drawn-out night, trying to distract myself but stay forever in anticipation of when or if the visions would start up again. Thankfully, they did not. But this still put me back at square one; unable to sleep, unable to escape the torment that night brings on. The only difference now was that I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be able to dream anymore if those visions acted as a portent to what my mind could conjure up for me. Risking the possibility of reliving the nightmares I had as a child would, as I felt at the time, be well worth it if I could successfully fall asleep and experience dreams again, but I want to do anything I can to not experience those hallucinations or anything like that for as long as I live. 

Of course, all of this was relayed to my doctor who did not at all seem surprised or disturbed by the details of the hallucinations I provided him. He simply nodded and crossed something off in his patient notebook. A notebook I, nor any other patient, could ever see. The ultimate barrier between doctor and patient. If only I could take even the smallest peek behind that proverbial curtain to see what Doctor Severin had planned for me. After recounting, in painful detail, my experience with the latest pill, the doctor mostly seemed annoyed and slightly disappointed. Not disappointed by the fact that another pill didn’t work for me, but it seemed as if the doctor was disappointed that I was so displeased with the results. As if those hallucinations were supposed to ease me back into calming sleep and dreams instead of being the harrowing and sanity-shredding experience I found them to be. Furthermore, according to him, we were running low on new pills for me to try out. I sat in silence for a while as he mulled over the remaining list of medications, occasionally sighing to himself or lightly chuckling - making more notes in that unobtainable notebook of his, never once appearing to take any notice of the true severity of my situation. Finally, he seemed to have found a solution. A new mixture of antipsychotics, pills with names I could not dare even try to pronounce nor did I know if it was even English or not, and a new “experimental” pill, as he put it, that should, when mixed together, do away with any possibilities of daylight hallucinations, sleep paralysis, or other physical side-effects. In fact, it might not even allow me to dream, he said almost smugly. Instead, it will act as inducing a sort of comatose state for me thirty minutes after I take them. Anything to put me to deep, regular sleep, I told him. He simply nodded. I pressed him further, something I felt incredibly nervous to do, and told him that I will only take these pills if it is guaranteed that I won’t experience those hallucinations again. He smiled a thin, sinister-looking grin and stared through me from behind his thick-framed glasses. He passed me the prescription he wrote up and told me that every patient varies, but it is unlikely to happen. We’ll just have to see, he told me, with a vague sense of joy in his voice. 

I took the script and went to leave the office before the doctor stopped me and said, without looking in my direction, that he wrote the directions to the pharmacy on the back of the prescription. Apparently, the specific medications he put me on this time were only available from a so-called “specialist” chemist that operated in a secluded section of the city I never knew existed. Doctor Severin’s directions were oblique, a makeshift map with uneven lines denoted streets and barely any street names or actual written directions - just arrows pointing this way, then that way. The only real note on it was, in his typical scratchy doctor penmanship; “only operates at night.” And although I could not quite make much sense of the doctor’s little map, I found myself somehow easily following it - almost as if I was pulled in the right direction just by wandering through the city with his note clutched in my hand. I turned down alleys I never once noticed, then surveyed street signs that were titled and appeared to be much older than the rest, then began to notice the thinning of the dense population of people that would usually crowd the city until I was face-to-face with where I needed to be. Alone. 

It was a rickety old wooden stall at the convergence of a narrow, unnecessarily long back alley that led to nothing else and felt, to me, as if it existed detached from its urban surroundings. The stall itself was always surrounded by dead, spindly fauna and, despite the fact it was only early autumn when I first began to pick up my prescriptions from this “chemist”, had small piles of what appeared to be ash-like snow piled up against and around it. Always. Even with the fact that I was only ever able to go here at night (a “fact” I was not at all ready to test the reason for by going during daylight), it was impossibly darker than the rest of the city and even the rest of the night sky. It was a small pocket within this derelict city that was able to exist in a darkness that far surpassed the starless, polluted night. Because of this, it was always next to impossible to actually see the “chemist” that was operating the stall. Adding to the obscuring darkness was a fog that seemed to begin to roll in as I made my way further down that unnecessarily long and narrow alley. The stall had a tiny, dim red neon sign that would occasionally flash and read “CHEMIST +”. Although, instead of this light providing relief from the darkness, it acted in tandem with the incoming dense fog obscuring things even further. The particular hue of the sign, albeit red instead of blue, gave me the same sick, paralyzed, panicked feeling that the light in my hallucination gave me, and despite several trips to this “chemist”, I never got used to it. There did exist a tiny slot in the face of the stall that I could make out, for this was what I used to slide my prescription through. A few moments of unsettling, lonely silence, then the sounds of gears shifting, levers pulled, steam hissing, and a raspy voice I vaguely remember hearing in my childhood dreams as well as in my hallucination would always call out, no matter how many times I visited, “This is a specialty, you’ll have to wait a bit.” Then, after more industrial sounds and what sounded like small grunts of pain as well the all-too-familiar sound of a blade sliding through flesh, the reverberant rattling sound of my unmarked pill bottle would fill the unsteady air around me. The bottle would pass back through the tiny slot, the neon sign would flash and hum with electricity and then burn out as the chemist called out (sounding further away now despite how small the stall appeared), “Good luck, and give my regards to the Doctor.” 

The fog would disperse, the impenetrable darkness letting up to the normal darkness of a polluted and starless urban night, and I would somehow find my way back to my tiny apartment with my newly filled prescription. The journey to and from the chemist alone would make me feel a newfound level of exhaustion that, for anyone else, would greatly aid in quickly falling asleep. But, alas, for the first few weeks, the pills and the growing exhaustion I felt day after day did nothing to get me to sleep. The doctor was aware of this being a possibility, so I waited and I waited and continued to take the pills that had no real discernible effect on my body or mind. I trusted that they were safe given the lack of debilitating side effects, although I still was devoid of any hope of them working. I continued to take them out of routine and familiarity and also, possibly, out of a slight fear of what the doctor would think of me if I gave up on them. But then, one night, a night unremarkable to any other, I fell asleep. And I stayed asleep. And I dreamt. I fell into a deep, uncompromised, and paralyzing sleep that lasted throughout the night for the first time in possibly my entire life; yet the pills cleaved open my subconscious mind up to an even more vivid, even more sanity-arresting, orchestration of ultra-violent nightmarish imagery that I have yet to be able to escape from. 

-end of part two -

Part Three - The Dream

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.