Prologue -----------
My earliest memory is when I became extremely ill with the flu at the age of three.
For two days, I had full-body pains, tremors, and sweats. I puked everything I was given to eat or drink, except water. My mother read stories to me from my bedside. To comfort me, she gave me a heavy, sand-stuffed, gray bunny with black gemstone eyes that were cut in an octagonal, geometric pattern.
At the peak of my illness, I experienced a temperature of 105.5 and began hallucinating.
Lying on my back, staring at the painted ceiling in my room, I experienced an out-of-body experience. I began to see the surface of the paint on my ceiling with an extreme amount of detail that would normally require me to be mere millimeters away from the ceiling. I could feel myself floating up closer and closer, and I could control it. There was an inflatable plastic American Airlines airplane hanging from the ceiling of my room in the corner; I could float over to it and look at the specs of dust on the plastic seams along its wings.
I still vividly remember the microscopic texture of the paint on that ceiling. I felt tiny, hovering just over the surface. It was as if my conscious awareness had become detached from my physical self.
Later in my childhood I would stare at the ceiling for hours, trying to repeat this experience, but to no avail. I began to wonder what might have happened. I told my dad, a biologist, about the experience and asked him what might have happened.
At first he hypothesized that my high body temperature could have caused the fluid in my eyes to expand enough to create a telescopic effect, like how eagles can see a mouse from 50 feet in the air. He explained by showing me how his camera’s zoom lens works, by moving the rear element farther away from the focal plane to enlarge the image.
However, I disproved his hypothesis by pointing out that my eyes would have had to expand much more than is physically possible in order to achieve the extreme magnification level that I saw. Also, this did not explain why I was able to somewhat control the level of the zoom, or why I felt a sensation of floating up.
My father then offered another hypothesis. He conjectured that the human eye might actually deliver much more detail to the brain than we are consciously aware of. Normally, our brain filters out most of this high level of detail. However, my high temperature could have made my brain malfunction and make me consciously aware of something that it normally hides. That could explain how I was able to somewhat control the level of magnification.
However, this explanation still did not satisfy me, because there was no proof.
My mother suggested that my vision was probably just a lucid dream, not an out-of-body experience. She explained that a lucid dream is one in which you can control your dream during the dream, and it feels like reality. I suppose it’s possible that I was dreaming, even though I felt certain that I was awake during the experience.
Ultimately my mother convinced me, and I began to believe I had dozed into a lucid, waking dream, where my dream’s imagination was being fed input by my visual cortex due to my eyes being open during the sleep state. After all, what else could really explain how a section of reality had become so greatly enlarged—unless my brain took that visual input and then extrapolated it, imagining and interpolating what it would like from a closer and closer distance, perhaps using details that our conscious mind normally filters out?
In this way, I came to believe at a very early age that my mind and my senses must contain much more information than we normally perceive. Our conscious awareness must be extremely filtered down, and under extreme circumstances, a person can gain heightened senses and heightened awareness. A person can suddenly hear as well as a dog, or see as well as an eagle.
After this realization, I became intensely curious about what else my mind might be hiding from me. I also wished to repeat this "eagle vision" experience that I’d had.
In turn, I became very interested in lucid dreaming around the age of eight. I did some research on my own in grade school, and began my own personal quest to become a master of lucid dreaming.
At first, it was really cool: I developed an ability to see my dreams coming as I would start to doze off. Eventually, I began to be able to control them to some degree.
However, I found it difficult to control these sorts of dreams, and I failed to repeat the "out of body" experience. Whenever I would try to fly up to the ceiling, it just wouldn’t work. I would get close to the ceiling but then it would be nothing the original experience: the paint and texture would look fake and imaginary, not like the real thing that I had seen that first time in the original experience.
Unfortunately, due to the fact that I am somewhat OCD, I kept trying despite failing every time. And even more unfortunately, not only did I not succeed in ever repeating my “eagle-vision” experience, but also, I became such an expert at lucid dreaming at such an early age that it started to become almost impossible for me NOT to lucid dream after that.
Now, I want to emphasize, this is not a romantic type of lucid dreaming like in the movie, Inception. Lucid dreaming is not restful for me. Sometimes it is cool, sometimes it is boring, but it is usually just frustrating—like trying to paint the floor you are standing on.
After my grades started to drop due to sleep deprivation, I started looking for a way to un-train myself from lucid dreaming. When that failed, I just started looking for ways to knock myself out.
So, in high school, I would get friends to drive me south to Mexico, where I would buy Rohypnol and Valium. I would take a rope or V to get some actual sleep in which I would not lucid dream, nor remember my dream. However, pretty soon, I became totally resistant. It started to be the case that the downers would only calm down my imagination enough to where I could study for Latin or calculus, but some nights they failed to knock me out.
I eventually developed a permanent resistance to these downers, such that they stopped working as a way for me to self-impair my lucid dreaming ability. I began to remember every detail of everything that happened on any given night, even if I’d passed out cold.
Once again, I started to have super vivid lucid dreams, and remembering them the next day. It's as if my brain rewired itself to keep doing what it’s always done, and to do so, it repurposed the part of my memory that formerly stored names and used it to store memories of experiences, both while awake and while asleep. But now, I can never remember people’s names, except a few.
After I gave up downers, I turned to hallucinogens—a combination of weed and LSD or mushrooms. I hoped that maybe, if I could use such drugs to force myself into finally repeating my out-of-body experience, then perhaps my subconscious would finally be satisfied and would not keep forcing me to lucid dream against my will. My friends and I routinely succeeded in frying our faces off, but of course, I totally failed to repeat my childhood "eagle vision" experience.
Chapter 1: Curiosity --------
Tuesday, Jan. 15, 2001. Reed College, Portland, Oregon.
Christmas break had ended so I flew back to Portland and went back to my dorm room at Reed. Things were pretty quiet. Kids were trickling back to campus for an annual weeklong event called Paideia, at which students and alums teach classes of their own.
Before the break I had been elected as the editor of the student body newspaper, The Quest. Since I had yet to bring on any staff, my goal for Paideia was to recruit reporters, have a meeting, come up with story ideas, and do some actual journalism (which was still a thing, back then).
As I wandered around posting recruitment flyers, I saw a flyer for a sleep study being conducted on campus. The study was being held in the lower level of the Vollum building, in some of the classrooms. It sounded like a good article, and I have trouble sleeping, so I decided to do an investigative report.
I began by asking campus administrators about the sleep study. I learned that, to prevent the possibility of a budget crunch, Reed’s administration approved a proposal by Rabb Research to conduct a sleep study on campus during Paideia. In exchange, Rabb would generously endow a chair for the psych department.
During the study, unused classrooms would have sleep chambers set up inside them, which would be monitored via closed-circuit TV cameras and various medical instruments. A construction company installed four such chambers into empty classrooms.
The sleep study’s chambers were of a unique design: they were rooms within rooms, with two inner rooms built inside each classroom. Each inner room had its own floor, ceiling, and walls. The inner rooms were built to completely isolate the interior of the chambers from all outside sound, and from “as much of the electromagnetic spectrum as possible” according to Dorothy Williams of the Reed College Facilities dept.
After I talked to campus administration, I headed down to Vollum itself. There, I interviewed Jessica Dunham, the doctor coordinating the project and overseeing Rabb Research's study.
Being a physics major, I asked which parts of the EM spectrum Rabb sought to block, and why. She explained that a new technology known as "WiFi" had just been installed on campus, and a cellphone tower had just gone up nearby—both of which operated in and around the microwave section of the spectrum. To be properly scientific, she said, the sleep study needed to filter out anything external that might interfere with the sleep of participants, such as high-frequency fields whose impact on human psychology is poorly understood.
At that time, existing EMF research had looked at the link between cell phones and cancer, but lawsuits shut that down quickly. The effects of EMF on the mind had very few studies at all. So, to prevent any unknown factors from corrupting the study, Dunham said, Rabb had designed the chambers to block as much EMF as possible.
After about five minutes Dr. Dunham said her time was up, due to preparing for the launch of the study. She invited me to come back for a follow-up interview one night while the study was actually in progress—and offered that I could even participate in it. I said that was fine, as long as I could bring along a second reporter (objectivity was a thing back then).
Chapter 1.5: Investigation -----------
Wednesday, during the day, I held my first meeting to recruit staff writers for the Quest. Amongst those interested was a quiet, precise young woman named Robin Kurrowitz. She volunteered to help with the sleep study article.
Robin and I then made our plan: on Wednesday, Robin would come with me to my follow-up interview with Dunham, and we'd both ask questions. That night, I would participate in the study. Then, on Thursday night, Robin would participate.
At the deadline of Friday's 4-o'clock Quest meeting, we agreed to submit detailed accounts of our experiences, prior to which we would not communicate. We'd run the pieces as two independent, unbiased perspectives on the study, accompanied by a main article that we'd co-author.
Wednesday night, Robin and I met Dr. Dunham at the front desk that Rabb Research had set up in the lower entrance area of Vollum. The whole level had been transformed into what felt like a doctor's office or medical center.
A small bank of four old-school, black-and-white, low-resolution CRTs wired via coax displayed wide-angle video feeds of students asleep on twin-sized beds in the makeshift, space-age chambers.
At this point, nothing looked unusual. We proceeded to follow Dr. Dunham back down the main hallway, inspecting the various chambers. She showed us into an empty chamber, where we inspected the walls, floors, and bed. It was extremely quiet and cool, and it felt very restful. It made me actually look forward to my night at the sleep study. (If only I had known.)
I then wandered back up the hallway. I said that I needed to go to the bathroom, but really, I wanted to inspect parts of the facility without Dunham hovering over my every move and breathing down my neck.
Robin was excellent at distracting people and monopolizing their attention with her laser-like focus. As I quietly stepped away, she began drilling down into Dunham about whether their walls could stop ultra-low-frequency waves and Unruh radiation. (Robin has a steel-trap mind where, once she engages you, there is no escape.)
I quietly made my way back to the front desk. As I passed the various rooms, I tried to peek in the windows, but they were opaque. Then as I walked by the front desk, I glanced at the monitors. Nothing looked out of the ordinary at first. The small black-and-white screens simply showed images of the various sleep chambers with sleeping students inside. Each monitor would cycle through several different camera angles inside the room.
The multitude of camera angles made me a bit nervous, so I figured I should actually use the bathroom in order not to raise any suspicions. I walked up to the men’s room on the upper floor, and when I came back downstairs, I began to walk past the bank of monitors again, not looking at them directly.
This time, however, something strange caught the corner my eye. I turned, and noticed on the lower right-hand monitor, one of the students now appeared to be stirring. I looked closer, and they appeared to be crouched underneath the covers of their bed. Suddenly the camera changed to a wider angle, making it hard to tell if perhaps they were simply side-sleeping in a curled up ball.
Just then Dunham emerged with Robin from one of the other chambers. I quickly turn my attention away from the monitor bank so as not to raise suspicions or see anyone masturbating. Dunham gave me a suspicious look at first, but then flashed a fake smile to mask her frown.
"Do you have any other questions for me?" Dunham said in a faux polite tone.
I shook my head no. "No, I think that is all for now," I said, "but I am looking forward to the study! What time should I come back tonight? I'd like to get dinner first."
"Why don't you come back in a couple of hours. That gives me time to prep your room and get you signed in," the doctor replied.
"That will do nicely," I said, giving Robin a glance and a nod out the door. We turned and headed out of the building.
As we strolled back up the hill towards the main campus quad, I turned to Robin. "Something about that place freaks the living fuck out of me," she said. "Dr. Dunham equals super fucking creepy."
"Why?" I asked, being the emotionally stunted, dense male that I am. "Why do girls always say things seem creepy? What does that even mean?” After Robin gave me a long pause and a glower, I conceded a bit. “I guess it does have that ‘big pharma’ feel to it, doesn't it?" I said, looking at Robin without a great deal of concern.
After another long pause during which Robin, in her typical fashion, said nothing, I finally continued. "If anything seems creepy to me, it’s how they got that many Reedies asleep by six o’clock,” I offered. “Maybe they’re testing some drug company’s new wonder pill.”
After a moment of deep thought, Robin said, "Well, if that's the case, perhaps the best approach would be to simply gather the facts, not be overly suspicious, and be good journalists about it."
"Hey," I said, "I'm supposed to be the editor here."
Finally she cracked a wry grin, the kind that a girl cracks when she notices you being emasculated by the fact she is more intelligent than you by at least 10 points. Perhaps I should have trusted her fears, but I doubt it would have helped us.
Chapter 2: Going Under --------
After I waved goodnight to Robin, I grabbed a dinner consisting of zucchini and squash with ziti. It seemed like I had this meal every night, but the only other alternative were disgusting chicken strips. I began staring into the murk of Reed lake, trying to forget about the flavorless vegetables, instead thinking about how much I missed the really vegetarian enchiladas at Mother’s in Austin.
Once I finished dinner, I grabbed my backpack, went to my dorm, quickly brushed my teeth, changed into some clean clothes, and headed back over to Vollum for my evening at the sleep study.
Inside Vollum, at Rabb Research’s makeshift reception desk, Dr. Dunham greeted me with a packet of information about how Rabb Research was at the forefront of sleep study technology, and how, for many years, Rabb Research had been doing a lot of the pioneering research into the nature of dreams. It definitely had the stink of pharmaceutical industry corporate propaganda, but, given my own unique history with dreams, it piqued my curiosity.
The Rabb packet also contained a questionnaire, the typical medical stuff. Food allergies, current meds, do you smoke? I took the high road and said no to everything, even though it was a lie. There wasn’t room on the page for the truth.
After I submitted the packet with the forms filled out, Dunham led me back into one of the sleep chambers. As I walked past the adjacent chamber to mine, I glanced inside. I saw no one sleeping in the bed—but in the very corner of the room, a person was crouching in the corner, face to the corner, neck bent down. It was odd indeed, but I only saw him or her for just a brief second as I passed by. He was moving his arms. Since he had his hospital gown on, I figured he was just taking off his shoes.
After entering the chamber, I sat down in the bed, which felt soft and cool. Dunham approached me and with a small cup of water and a tiny packet of pills. The sleep study, she said, was an investigative study for a new type of medication.
"You may be receiving a placebo, or, you may be receiving the actual medication. At this point I cannot tell you the function of the medication without risking the placebo effect. However, after the study, we’ll provide you a full description of its chemical make-up and intended uses for your article," she said flatly.
I nodded, already feeling tired. "Very well," I said, "I'll go ahead and take these. Is there anything that I should know?"
"Well," she said, "the questionnaire that you filled out said that you have not taken any other medications or drugs at all in the past week—is that correct?"
I nodded affirmatively that it was. I knew that I had actually done some drugs recently, but I did not want to jeopardize my ability to infiltrate the study.
Initially, I was quite leery of the drugs that she was giving me. Unfortunately, my curiosity won over. I took the pills. At first, I was going to take them and just keep them in my lip until she looked away. But for some reason, I decided I wanted to help the study if possible (anything that might possibly give me a new way to sleep better would be a godsend for my life), so I went ahead and took the pills.
After I took the pills, Dr. Dunham handed me a hospital gown and told me that I needed to wear it. “This is the only way we can eliminate discrepancies caused by differences in clothing, as a possible factor in the sleep study,” she said.
Why they chose hospital gowns with no solid back was beyond me, but I put it on anyway. Who cares, right?
I lay down on the bed and covered myself in the sheets. Then I started to fall into a deep sleep and I could feel myself beginning to dream.
In the dream, I woke up in the same room, except it was different. I was in the same bed but the door to the sleep study chamber was open, even though I watched them close it before I went to sleep.
“That’s odd,” I thought, as I strolled out through the door, feeling the need to urinate.
The hallway lights seemed reddish in tint, which of course they aren’t in real life, so I knew this could not be real. I walked down the hallway to the bathroom that on the lower level, went inside, untied my gown, and took a piss. I found it odd that I was still wearing the same thing in the dream, since that never happened to be.
After taking a piss, I walked back in the direction of my room. At this point I began to felt a strong hunger, and an extraordinary craving for fresh meat. Being vegetarian, I fought off the feeling, but the hunger kept growing exponentially until it had become unbearable.
I began to look around for a refrigerator or vending machine. However, I quickly realized a major part of me wanted blood.
At the time, in this dream, it seemed completely natural. I felt like a wild animal as the feeling began to grow stronger and stronger her. I felt myself beginning to default into some kind of lower, predatory form of life—a form that is driven purely by appetite and smell.
I stopped looking for the refrigerator and began to scan around.
The walls around me melted away, and suddenly I was a lion on the African savanna. Then my reality morphed again, and I was a shark powering my way through the icy cold Pacific, feeling the distant, electric feeling of prey brushing against my skin from 1000 yards.
The faint electromagnetic sensation of the hair raising up on my arms, caused by the heartbeat and brain waves of some prey just around the corner, led me in my hunt.
My eyes narrowed to in order to focus my mission. I became an eagle soaring above the field, my eyes scanning the surface of the ground, searching for the tiniest of prey to swoop down and grab in my clutches, then instantly devour.
Then, reality, in a way you can't imagine, began to decay into a field of sand, clotting gently in the waters around me.
I was now a great blue whale. As I peeled back my huge lips, revealing my baleen, I felt my cheek—that giant wet flesh sack of my throat—becoming engorged with frigid seawater. I felt my mouth fibers filter out the liquid and become clogged with thousands of tiny krill.
Then I morphed into a school of piranha fish with a hive mind, showering the soft flesh of some hapless mammal, it's formal unrecognizable, except as a mass of partially rotten meat and hair. My razor sharp jaws clamped down on each individual morsel, breaking through bone if necessary, not stopping at anything until my animalistic, raging desire had been satisfied.
I could vaguely now feel myself being transported upon a gurney. I looked around, and each of my appendages had been tied down with a soft, gauze strap. I was a shark having been caught, with a huge hook in my mouth, dangling from a terrible outcropping, hanging inverted, the stinking contents of my guts simply falling out of my mouth onto the ground where doctors sorted through pieces of trash and pieces of creatures.
I can feel them breaking off my teeth, I can hear them talking about my many rows of teeth, and about the predatory function to be served by the teeth.
Then some tall, masked figures cut me down. My body fell down onto the soft earth. I heard them just left me there, even though I was still alive, gasping for air. Eventually, I lost consciousness and everything faded to black.
Chapter 2.5: Awakening -------
The next morning I woke up in the sleep chamber feeling unusually refreshed. Normally, I wake up a basket case; so, I figured that something about the pills they had given me really did the trick. I seemed to have simply blacked out, which is very unusual for me, but also very welcome. (As I have been saying, it has normally been extremely difficult for me to fall asleep past the point of lucid dreaming my entire life. Just to have a normal dream where I was not mentally in control of it was hard, let alone blacking out and not dreaming at all.)
Enjoying my unusually rested feeling, I got dressed and filled out an exit survey, noting that I could not remember having had any dreams. (Well, it was true at that point.)
When I handed in the survey, a Rabb employee handed me back my clothes and provided a fresh toothbrush, a Starbucks mocha, and a bagel.
“Don’t forget to brush your teeth, don’t wanna get any cavities!” he said, with a fake-looking smile. I noticed mouthwash and floss by the sink in the chamber as well.
However, I was late for a Paideia class that I wanted to take, I don’t drink caffeine, and I’m gluten intolerant, so I ignored the toothbrush and breakfast, and instead went straight to my class.
Now, I should note that, due to my past experiences described in the Prologue, I pretty much never black out—I always dream, usually lucidly. So, I kept thinking about how strange it was that I could not remember a dream from the night before. Maybe this new wonder drug of theirs really is a breakthrough, I thought.
However, it quickly began to dawn on me that it was anything but a wonder-drug.
After my class I headed back to my dorm. I looked over into the window of Commons (Reed’s cafeteria) as I walked past. When I noticed someone eating a bowl of cereal, it instantly triggered a flashback in my mind from the previous night’s nightmare.
Vivid images of my reptile hands grabbing raw flesh and shoveling it into my raging, chomping mouth began to flash through my mind. Then, as soon as I looked away from the window of Commons, the images vanished.
I stopped in my tracks. I immediately recognized this was from some kind of dream I had once had, but at first, it felt like it must be a horror movie I’d once seen as a kid, or some old dream from long ago. I tried to keep remembering the dream, but it kept dancing away from me, flitting and flickering through the darkness.
I walked down into the Reed canyon, a nature preserve with a pristine, peaceful lake. After finidng a secluded, quiet bench, I sat down and closed my eyes. This time I delved deeper, chasing after those reptile hands and that awful, raw flavor. It felt like the memory was being actively concealed by some part of my mind, which I had never encountered before.
At first I wondered if perhaps it was such a traumatic nightmare that my subconscious was actively trying to suppress the memory of it, but I quickly ruled this out because I realized how much the feeling of the blackness reminded me of a powerful Rohypnol dose. This was different enough that I did not feel like it was from a “rope.”
What the fuck had Dr. Dunham given me, anyway? I wondered.
Desiring now to just get the nasty taste out of my mouth, I went back to my dorm. No wonder they supplied toothbrushes and mouthwash, I thought—this drug leaves a bad taste in your mouth the next day! Gross.
I began flossing in the mirror, and right as I finished up, I noticed that a chunk of something dark and meaty flick out and stick to the mirror. Being that I am a vegetarian, I thought this seemed very odd indeed. I leaned in close to the mirror and took a whiff of the speck, and instantly the vision of the reptile hands shoveling bloody flesh into my face came streaming back full force.
I fell backwards onto my bed and screamed out, “What the fuck!!!” so loud that my dorm mate ran in from down the hall to see if I was OK. I waved her away, saying that I was OK. But I was not.
I immediately called up my friend Shawn.
“I want to know if perhaps they had fed us something while we were sleeping somehow. It is very disconcerting,” I said. “Maybe they figured most people wouldn't notice a small piece of something in their teeth; maybe they figured people would floss it out and brush it out the next morning when they were given the suggestion to do so,” I told Shawn.
“Dude, it was probably just some of your granola that’s been there for a few weeks and you never noticed before,” Shawn said. “And they probably just gave you some trippy sleep drug. I know when I take Ambien, I have some really fucked up dreams.”
“Look, I know what it sounds like, but you have to trust me, it’s not part of a raisin. This is fucking meat!” I breathed heavily into the phone.
“Dude, you’re freaking out,” said Shawn. “Seriously. I have to go do some work. I’ll talk to you later.”
Then he hung up. I probably wouldn't have believed me either, if it had not been for the extremely vivid dreams that I had about the subject of eating meat. So I haded back out into the darkening Portland rain to gather my thoughts on a cross-campus stroll.
Chapter 3: Recollection
Then I saw Robin walking in the direction of the gym. She was a short, non-overweight, non-skinny, non-descript person. She had a great deal of intelligence, but also, a great deal of self-centeredness.
Seeing her made me suddenly feel great deal of concern for how she would handle the sleep study and its weird drug.
Robin didn’t see me, and I kept walking, and grabbed a quick salad at Commons.
Maybe I am just being paranoid, I thought as I chewed through the greens. Maybe the weird nightmare was just how my own fucked up, drug-addled brain—which has always seemed to be wired very differently than almost everyone else’s—responded to their experimental drug. Maybe, that is what led me to have those terrifying dreams. Maybe, for most people, the drug would have a completely different effect, and it's entirely possible that the meat in my teeth snuck into my salad from cross-utensil contamination, and I'm just crazy.
You know, I thought, maybe I puked up a little bit of the contaminated salad in my sleep. If some meat got in there by accident, that could also explain the dream—it was my body reacting to the presence of a foreign substance. Maybe it was a bacon bit, I mused as I watched various students help themselves to the salad bar in a rather haphazard fashion.
After my quick chaw, it started to get dark, as it is wont to do in Portland around 4 PM in January. It quickly became one of those frigid, drenching Portland nights. Since it did not seem best to be walking in circles outside, I headed to the Student Union building, where miscreant students like myself went to hang around, smoke weed and cigarettes, sit by the fire, drink beer, play chess, read, and argue. (That was a former time, which sadly no longer exists, but back then it was really something special.)
I sat down with some fellow students, and began to read an article for the day to prepare for a European history course. I got to thinking once again about Robin, because she was probably getting into that sleep study right about now.
Just then, I started to wonder just how much had been blocked out of my mind concerning the events of the previous night. Something just didn't sit well with me; I've had a lot of very intense dreams, but this felt unlike any dream I have ever had.
Now that I’d had some coffee and Adderall in my blood, plus some spinach and Gatorade, my brain started to build a fresh perspective on the previous night. It was as if my neurons were self-repairing, just like after a big Rohypnol bender. I started to clearly remember seeing certain things with my own eyes, which I saw while I was actually having the hallucinations.
Even stranger, I got a very strong sensation that the things I was now remembering were things that I was not supposed to remember. It was almost as if someone had convinced me to forget this stuff, and a certain degree of illogical and unreasonable fear and dread crept into my chest as I started to force myself to see what was hidden behind the curtain.
Then it hit me. I suddenly remembered walking almost like a zombie—sort of sleepwalking, but not really—out of the door on the sleep chamber. I remember walking around to the bank of monitors, looking down at one of them, and seeing a person’s face pressed hard up against the camera, covered in blood or some dark liquid. It was all over their face, and they had a wad of what looked like human hair in their hand, balled up. His or her expression was taut, rigid, and animalistic.
Then, I remember sleep walking back into my room, looking down onto my mattress, and crashing down into the sheets. I smelled a strong whiff of rotting meat, so I started to remove the sheets off of the mattress. With the sheets pulled back, I saw a circular plastic flap on top of the mattress in the middle. I peeled it back away, like opening a tin of almonds, and inside was a festering, rotten ball of flesh, sucking down into the mattress.
I grabbed at the mushy morsels with my fingers, shoveling it into my mouth with ravenous desire. As I ate away, I began to feel something hard and smooth inside the chunks of gore. I looked down, and noticed that inside the decrepit stew were a handful of medium-sized, polished stones, ovoid, about 2” in diameter.
One of the stones featured some kind of metal streaking through the rock, a sort of marbling effect. I’m no geologist but this marbling did not look natural in any way—it appeared almost geometric in structure, possibly crystalline. Some of the other stones were semi-translucent, like quartz, whilst others had the appearance of pink granite.
I felt a strong force from the stones, drawing me further into the spoiled flesh. A powerful voice could be heard in my mind, telling me to consume the nourishing meal, which cannot make me feel sick.
As I got to this stage of the memory, a sudden and overwhelming feeling of nausea hit me. This had not been a dream. I rushed into the bathroom at the Student Union and tried to puke my guts out into the toilet. As soon as I threw up a little bit into the bowl, I suddenly felt a searing pain arc through my back and then shoot into my mind, as if something was trying to take hold of me from the inside.
Then I flashed back to the part of the hallucination in which I was a shark, hanging from a hook. The bathroom disappeared around me, but I could still feel my arms. I reached into my mouth and force-gagged myself to puke, as I relived the shark’s insides dumping out all over the ground.
My vision of the Student Union bathroom came back as soon as the stones hit the water. The toilets puke-water started steaming and hissing as the stones made contact with the porcelain. Then I flashed back into the dream, and was hunching over the meat pod. I immediately fell down onto the bed, writhing in pain. I could hear some voices outside.
A man's voice speaking: “…speaking of the madness… 16 sent you. And the wire came…” Then he came barging into my chamber and held out a single hand towards me. He had a concerned look on his face, but not as though he was concerned for me, but as though he was concerned for his experiment. Then he lunged towards me. Behind him came a couple of orderlies. I fought them as they lifted me up onto a gurney where I was strapped down with soft straps.
Then I heard the last stone hit the tile floor of the Student Union bathroom as I gave one final heave. Suddenly my normal vision was back and I could see the bathroom around me. The toilet bowl had shattered into a thousand pieces; water and puke were everywhere. The stones that had come out of my mouth had turned into nothing but sand.
... to be continued
Submitted September 14, 2016 at 09:04AM by gistya http://ift.tt/2cva2XH nosleep
No comments:
Post a Comment