#674

I dreamed I was standing in a dark room with no clear source of illumination, yet I could see clearly. It felt damp and compressed, like being underground, as if in a mine. I was not touching them, but I knew the walls were slick with wet, a grimy liquid that smelled of calcium deposits. 

In front of me was a man, naked and dressed only in a heavy smock and a sort-of hood. I say man but I do not know what it is I saw. It looked as a strongly-built man whose head covering was a cross between a hat and a hood, pointed at the back and dipping low in the front. But he felt very different, it very different, as if it were not human. Something about him made me cringe up on the inside. Not so much physically, I do not believe I was actually present there beside him. I was just observing. 

He walked away from me. As he turned I saw his nakedness. He walked out of my field of vision and I did not follow, but my mind did. It was like I jumped into his head instead of mine. Now I was walking slowly and my lower body ached as if I had been walking a long time. My head hurt mildly, the mildly burning sort of headache that seems to be as mall thing but naggers at your entire day and ruins everything. I was angry. I walked down a hall, opened a door and there was a naked person standing in front of me. The features didn’t really register; I didn’t care. I took them by the hand and walked back to where I had been. There was an large anvil there that I had not noticed. A huge one some four feet long in all directions. It looked like a steel table set so solidly into the ground that it could’ve once been a pillar that held up the ceiling. The strange thing about it was that even though it was so shiny and clearly metal, it was a dark blue with streaks and spots of black, like blue granite almost. I wondered how you could make such a thing and keep it solid. I threw the person over the anvil and I felt a flash of anger so strong that it shocked me out of my wondering about. the anvil and back into my body instead of his. 

I saw him throw the person over the anvil and lift a hammer that I had not realized I had been carrying. The person screamed and the hammer came down and crushed the face. Instead of the crunch one would expect I heard the clear ringing of metal striking metal. I looked to see if I had been mistaken and that the demon-man had just struck near the other, but he had not. Blood was dribbling down the sides of the anvil and the body was convulsing. He raised his hammer again and struck again and again. Each time blood splashed and dribbled. Each time the clear sound of metal on metal.

Then I was in his body again and I looked down upon my own work. The man’s face had been beaten flat and thick, the blood forced out by the swings of the hammer. He had a sheen of metal and was turning blue-and-black as the anvil and the hammer. I saw that I hadn’t completely forced out all the fluid and struck again and again, forcing it out with the force of my blows and moving down to every part of the body in turn. Soon the body was completely flat and mostly equal, a rectangular sheet of that foreign metal. I could still see the features of the human I had beaten as black lines on the blue and I could see the scream on his face. I picked up the sheet and looked closer. In my fingers I could feel a slight vibration and the psychic sensation of screaming in my head. I do not know how to describe it other than the way your head feels when you scream and scream but no longer have any voice, that high buzzing at the top of your head and that surreal almost-passing-out sensation of choking. I brushed the anvil and felt the same, albeit much more dull, heavier somehow. The hammer too….

And then I was fitting the sheet of metal into one of the notches of the anvil and bending the metal. Bent over the notch, flipped on top and pounded flat. Bent over the notch, flipped on top and pounded flat. Over and over I did this and gradually the sheet lost area, but grew in thickness and denseness. The face was distorted beneath my pounding until you could no longer make out anything. I was making a boot I knew. I shaped my craft, I made ringlets, I made a sole. As I worked my mind stopped being bothered or affected by anything. I was focused completely on what I was doing and the metal qualities of the dream melted away. I was doing a job and I was doing it well and there was nothing else. I remember thinking that I would not be able to do it all myself and that I would need to take another and pound their body into a long steel rod so that another could draw that rod into string to weave shoe-strings. That was too fine a work for hands like mine. 

 At some point I woke up. It was a slow, gradual thing so I don’t remember exactly what caused it or if nothing at all woke me. The experience was singularly disturbing and it bothered me quite a lot, more than I would expect for something so simple. Murder and death are bad things, but they should not bother me this badly. It’s not like I haven’t had twisted dreams before, it’s not like I have not dreamed of killing before. Something about it shakes me though. Maybe that I had the dream to begin with. After all, my dreams are who I am when I’m too tired to be me and they reflect me. I don’t know. It could just be the cost of doing the things I do; surely some of the darker things I read and games I play have given me ideas. And surely my imagination could assimilate them into something that makes a sort of sense. Mm. In that light it’s less bothersome, but it still doesn’t take away from the pressure I have in my chest, the sense that something is terribly, terribly wrong and that somewhere along the line I’m at fault for it or am going to experience it soon or that something is coming for me.