Nocturnal insanity

July 30th, 2004

The little girl was dead, but it was no one’s fault. But who would believe us?
We shoved her in the closet, just in time, because Jim and the others were coming up.
But we hadn’t been thorough enough.
Jim walked in and saw the little hand sticking out from under the blanket.
“Is that a little girl?” he shouted, terrified.
“No!”, we replied and tried to make him leave the room. “It’s a wax figure!”
Eventually we managed to get him out… and then stared at each other, out of breath.
“What are we gonna do?” said one boy. “They’re gonna find us out!”
“We have to get rid of the body!”, I said.
“But where?”, he said. “They’re gonna find her, and then it will look like murder because we tried to get rid of her.”
“Yeah, who is gonna believe us that she died by accident”, I replied sarcastically.
I looked around the room and then looked into the closet. The trapdoor was only halfway covered, by clothes and toys.
“That’s it!”, I said.
“They’re gonna find her!”
“Not if they are not looking for her. Here.”, I said. “Help me!”
The girl had been in our closet for days. Her cold skin was damp and felt like jelly. I dared not uncover her body… the smell would be unbearable.
The boy opened the trapdoor. The blackness in there, the catacombs, the canalisation, the pit was impenetrable. It was old and had not been in use for decades. I would have been surprised if anyone knew it existed.
“You sure?”, he asked.
“Why would anyone go in there?”
The boy stayed silent and without a further word helped me shove the body across the rim.
The corpse of the little girl plunged into darkness. Far down we heard it hitting the floor like a sack. The boy turned away, his face looking green.
The other kid came closer and peered into the black hole. “I can’t see her!”
“Good!”, I said. “Don’t lean over too far!”
The kid stretched its neck, and that’s when it lost its toy fish Nemo. I would have laughed at the pun, if the consequences hadn’t been so harsh. The kid would scream and cry and get all kinds of people up here, pointing them to the hiding place. When it comes to losing toys, kids lose all sense of caution. They don’t give a shit if we go to jail for life, as long as they get fuckin Nemo back.
And hadn’t I predicted it, the kid’s lips began to quiver dangerously. “Nemo!”, it whined.
“It’s ok”, I said. Then I turned to the others. “One of us has to go get him.”
“I am not going down there!”, said big sister.
Tommy looked away, his face white, avoiding eye contact.
The kid looked from one to the other, in anxious anticipation. Its whimpering turned into genuine tears. If we didn’t do something soon, it would be screaming its lungs out.
Before I could say anything else, the boy stepped forward. “I’ll go in.”
None of us protested. He was doing all of us a favour.
The boy slid across the rim and lowered himself down there, until he reached the ladder. We stepped forward and watched him lower himself into the darkness, step by clanging step. He didn’t look very good.
Eventually he was gone, and we heard him rustle in the depths.
We could smell the girl from up here. Down there, the stench must have been unbearable.
We heard the boy retch and cry “Oh my god…”, then a sound of him throwing up. Then, exhausted: “I got him!”
The kid’s eyes beamed with joy.
“You better appreciate that damn fish!”, I said. “He literally went to hell to get it!”
The kid nodded obediently.
We heard the boy climb back up, and eventually his head appeared through the trap door. His hair was covered in dirt. As he climbed out, we saw stuff sticking to his shirt and pants… and he smelled of her. He smelled of decay.
He handed the fish to the kid without a word. The kid hugged Nemo in exulted happiness.
There was nothing to be said. The boy’s face was grey. He never spoke again. He walked past us and whatever bond had existed between us, it was gone from that day.
We closed the trap door, and began to cover the closet door. The kid carefully placed a blanket over it.
“Not like that!”, I said. “That looks like you’re trying to hide something. Throw stuff in casually, like that!” I chucked some clothes and toys in, which fell randomly about, covering the trapdoor. The kid joined me.
When we were done, I went to sit in a corner, and that is when I faced myself. I had methodically and cynically removed the body of an innocent child to save my own ass. I was terrified, in shock… but mostly about myself.
I wanted to wake up.

Review: A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming

You can called it lucky or cursed – I have always had really intense dreams. Dreams so vivid they often form half of my reality, their experience so strong they would affect me in my waking life. There is the old joke about a girl waking up and punching her clueless boyfriend because he cheated on her in her dream. Yeah. Not that I have ever done that, but that intense.

 I’ve had dreams that haunted me for days after waking up, and dreams making me feel unspeakably happy, more than anything ever had in “real life”.

I had serial dreams about a stalking monster as a toddler, and about the Faceless ones, and about that woman that looked like my mother from behind but was a cruel, deformed creature once she turned around to respond to my calls. Freud, Jung, and any dream analyst on this planet would have a field day using me as a guinea pig. Archetypes, classic and more postmodern symbolism, it’s all there.

There was a brief time in my life so traumatic that I didn’t seem to dream at all. And although I know it was just my mind trying to protect me from things I couldn’t handle, it was an incredibly grey and empty time, too, like a part of me had been amputated. It had, in fact – when dreams comprise a large part of your experience for all of your life, suddenly not dreaming feels like you’ve been lobotomised. Then I went on Prozac, and it was like adding fuel to a nearly extinguished fire... it flared up, the dreams returning, even more powerful.

When your life is dominated by dreams, you inevitably search to make sense of them, like you would of any experience. To your brain, it doesn’t matter whether you’re asleep or not: whatever you experience has the same value to your emotional makeup. What you’ve felt is what you’ve felt, no matter when and how. Reality becomes relative in emotion, maybe that is why people often don’t dream or can’t remember their dreams after a traumatic event. And why PTSD is so sinister and self-perpetuating, because the flashbacks and nightmares distress you the same way over and over again.

 So inevitably, you try to get a sense of control over dreams. Especially when your dreams are so horrific that you just want to wake up. Or when they’re so beautiful you don't want them to stop. It might be a fool’s business, attempting that, to some at least. But I had heard of lucid dreaming before, and I might have had a couple of experiences before, which were wonderful, but they were erratic. I needed some guidance.

A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming turned out to be a gem.

Just at the first browse, it is simply beautiful. Wonderfully designed and filled with gorgeous illustrations, it is an inspiring feast for the imagination. But it’s not just eye candy.

It takes you back to the very basics, exploring the history of dreams and lucid dreaming, and how dreams played a huge role in many previous and continuing cultures, essentially showing that the Western view of dismissing them as brain gibberish is a minority, reflecting an impoverished mind... something I have long agreed with. It wipes the plate clean to enable you to start exploring your dreams with a fresh, open mind, teaching you the basics of remembering them, remembering them for longer, outwitting that twilight zone after waking in which a dream often becomes frazzled and diffused, and drifts into forgetfulness within minutes.

It explains the structure of REM sleep to help you ‘find’ the moment in which lucid dreaming is most likely, teaching you mind techniques to help you trigger a lucid dream, delivers tips on how to keep a dream journal, what to make of your dreams and how to develop a conscious relationship with them, of a heightened sensitivity that will ultimately help you reach awareness within your dream, as well as the increasing ability to direct your dreams.

I have yet to have a lucid dream. But I have only started practising, and it takes time to train your mind and awareness to the point that you will have a lucid dream. What I have noticed, however, that since employing the techniques offered in the book, the more elusive dreams have become clearer and easier to remember, more cohesive no matter how random they are. And they have started making more sense, in terms of what they tell me about my state of mind. I’ve started to write them down, and it’s wonderful – tales of an exploration of another, parallel world in which the senseless makes sense. That alone totally makes this book worthwhile.

Nuclear Redemption

We all knew it was gonna happen again. The sirens had been screaming again, it would just be a matter of time till the bomb dropped. People ran about, frantically looking for cover. I was calm. No. Not calm. Resignated. I had seen all this before, and their panic seemed foolish in the face of the inevitable.

There were a few nuclear shelters for the privileged, scattered over the hills like little huts. They were rather meant to calm the masses than to be really effective. They didn’t go very deep into the hill. What’s the point of survival anyway?
Still, my survival instinct caught up with me. Did I really just want to wait? Maybe there was hope. I ran into one of the bunkers, which was crowding with people.

I don’t know what architectural moron had been at work here, but I wonder if people really wanted to have a panoramic view of the coast from the bunker, where mushroom clouds would rise into a burning sky soon, like this was a luxurious 5-star-hotel. The panoramic view bunkers were the most expensive ones. I guess the architect had really missed the point here.
Hah. Maybe it wasn’t too bad if you painted them white.

I had seen it all before. Just the memory made my blood freeze. People melting, burning, being torn to shreds by the heat and the nuclear storm. Screaming, roaring, the incredible stench of burnt flesh which would actually smell marvellously of grilled pork, if you didn’t know it was human.

I pushed the memories away, looking around corners for more protective cover, even though I knew how pointless it would be. The covers that kept people from being burnt immediately would collapse onto them, crushing them, and the few that would survive this would be devoured by the firestorm.

But there was still optimism. People fought tooth and nail for the corners away from the windows, even though they must have known how little difference these spots made.
Why bother to survive? Just so you can die a slow, horrible, agonizing death? Why fighting for shelter if all it did was to extend hell?

I pushed my way back outside, against the stream of people trying to get in.
The sirens’ howl was deafening, but I could hear the sound of approaching bomber planes cutting through the noise. I turned to the coast and saw them coming.
And suddenly I was calm.
I heard crying and turned around. A little girl stood behind me, sobbing, screaming her little lungs out for her mom who seemed to have disappeared. Maybe momma was one of the few lucky ones who managed to get a class A seat behind the bunker window.
I took her hand. The little one was so desperate with fear, she did not discriminate. Any adult who would stick with her was fine with her. She clung to me.
“Hey, it’s ok!” I said. My mad reason told me I should find shelter for her. But did I really want this little angel to burn alive, turn into charcoal in front of my eyes?
She looked up at me.
“Let’s go to the beach, sweetheart!” I said. “I’ll buy you an ice cream, and then we’ll watch the clouds, what do you say?”
She smiled through her tears.
It would be over in the fraction of a second. We would be gone before our disintegrating bodies registered the heat, or the pain.
And when we walked down to the beach, there was no more fear in us.

Nightmares Squared

Holy F**k.
It's still haunting me...it was one of those dreams that your mind spends chewing on for the whole day.
I don't know why I dream stuff like that because I can't harm a fly. I don't daydream about stuff like that. Why do I dream it?? What's wrong with my mind?
Some of it is simply too unspeakable to describe. This is just some of the comparably harmless stuff.

We, a few kids and me, were in a hotel room with high ceilings and something like a belltower. All the kids... 12-year-old girls... hung themselves. The one in the belltower changed her mind when she hung from the rope,trying to climb back up the very rope that was strangling her, trying to free herself, and she frantically groped upwards, slipping back down, making those horrible gurgling noises. In the end, the room was..."decorated" with hanging girls, some of them twitching slightly, the other ones dead, their faces horribly distorted.

And two people I love very much were in that dream. I felt so happy to see them, and they made me feel loved... but then I found they had just been pretending. It wasn't real, and they were right, why would they love me? I found them laughing to themselves about my stupidity, and I felt betrayed, exposed, humiliated and heartbroken - I loved them so much! I felt like the lowest, utter scum. Laughing at me, they locked me into the room with all the girls who, by then, had been dead for days.

I found myself out in the streets in front of that hotel... but I wasn't me. I was a random person watching what happened next... I watched that girl that was once me climb out of a window, a plastic rope around her neck. Firemen were about, trying to climb up to stop her. She jumped. Someone grabbed the rope and pulled her back up, and she fought against it. Somehow she managed to loosen the rope from the fireman's grip, and lunged forward, laughing, both insane and relieved, against the sharp edge of something further down.
It tore her head off... blood sprayed over people.

What the fuck??? WHATTHEFUCK? I mean, I am a fairly happy person these days, fairly stable... where does this shit come from, why is my subconscious such a sewer of violence and terror?

Needless to say, I have my first counselling session today.

Weird Dreams Endless Sequel Part I Lost Track

Heh, this is so weird (and was cool for a change, and not scary) that I have to write it down before I forget. I had that dream a couple of nights ago, brought to you by the freaky subconscious of yours truly.

I was living with a bunch of friends and we realised we had a beautiful vineyard in our cupboard. We decided to exploit that and make wine. Problem was, that as illegal. So we had to smuggle in bottles and do it secretly, and then sold them, and it went quite well.
Annoyingly, someone noticed and we had to run off. In the end we managed to find a place to hide and continued our dirty business.

I tried to get thru a market place where guards with machine guns have been set up to prevent any people with sausages and other meat products passing thru to prevent cross contamination (which I didn't get cos half of them sold bacon and sausages anyway), and I happened to have a whole box of yummy fried bacon, which smelled gorgeous, but totally betrayed me. But I needed to get to our hiding place with the bottles so they could go making wine.
I managed somehow, and we had decided to set up our wine making equipment (which was more like a home distillery) on the roof of the Health and Safety Department. You hear Baldrick say in the background: "I have a cunning plan!" That would just be the last place they would be looking for us.

Then I dreamt I was at the beach in L.A. and watched the ocean and saw all those war ships pass by which had those giant butterflies attached to them, which moved their wings slightly. First I thought they were real (I dunno why that didn't freak me out, cos the butterflies were the size of an average plane). But then someone told me it's this strange festival each year, that the ships do a parade, and each ship had created their own butterfly. At closer look I saw they looked more like they were kites, and the navy blokes on the ships pulled strings in unison to make the wings move gently.
Then they paraded their butterflies along the beach. We saw that each one was different. One even was a moth, and the best was, one had one of those green flies. My friend and I laughed our ass off and I sent my friend over to say: "That's a nice poopie fly you've got there!"
At the end of the festival, the navy blokes wives (called Jim and Tommy - I kid, I kid) went around, and it turned out that the bodies of the butterflies were made of solid chocolate and nuts, and they would pass them out to people. Which saved my guts, cos I had no money, and the salami sandwiches they sold at the store were frozen.

Weird dreams Part IV

Ack, I am getting mildly worried now. I had another one of those dreams.
I'm sure it didn't help that I just finished "Hey Nostradamus", which is basically a novel about 4 characters directly and indirectly involved in a Columbine-like shooting. Like most stuff by Coupland, it is AMAZING, kind of based on the myth of Cassie Bernall or whatever her name was.

I can't remember much of this one, except that there was a gang of four kids, about 14 years old, dressed in black, with the most evil, vicious, demonic expressions you can imagine.
I was this weird person that changed roles a lot... at one point I was a teacher talking to a shy kid who was being bullied, and at some other point I was a student being hunted down.
All I remember is that those four kids were armed, and they wanted to hurt the shy kid, and I tried to protect him, but they shot him and his sister in front of my eyes.
And then they were after me, because I had tried to protect him. I tried to hide, get away by various means, but they always found me. Always. Like they could read my mind.
At one point I hid in the apartment of the old lady that used to live next to us when I was a kid. I thought they would never suspect me there, and she offered to hide me. I hid under the bed, when I heard them walk past the front door, searching through my old apartment.
And suddenly they appeared. Like it was the most logical thing for them that I would hide here, next.
They killed the old lady and then came for me.
They would shoot anyone I even got involved with.

In the end, I got so scared, I knew that the only way out, the only way to put an end to this, was to kill them.
We were on a rusty ship, suddenly, or a ferry... and they chased me through the bloody thing. Eventually the leader of the gang who looked a bit like the bad kid in "Stephen King's IT", caught up with me, and we struggled. I looked down at some point and saw the ship's propeller swirling in the water right underneath me. And somehow I managed to throw him overboard. I don't have to go into details what happened, right?

But I still couldn't trust that I was safe. I stared at his body parts drifting out there for ages. But for some reason, they stayed around the ship, randomly, but never moving away.
I saw his hand floating separately in the bronze water, his head and torso further off, the lower half of his body at a distance. He was really as dead as can be, and I was relieved, all the fear fell off me.
I turned away, and threw a last glance back... just to make sure.
And my heart stopped.
His hand had just been floating a second ago, but now it seemed to move towards the torso, and I watched in horror as it fused back together with his arm!!!
I panicked and ran towards the door, and then returned to see if my eyes had just tricked me.
What I saw was the Evil Kid hoisting his body back on board, pale with death still, and somehow more demonic than ever... he came crawling back, slowly, but fiercely determined.

I don't remember if he ever got me.

Bloody hell, maybe I should consider therapy. But they'll prolly lock me up. I mean, what on earth makes me dream this kind of stuff? I can't even hurt a fly (just occasional mosquitos, but hey, they are asking for it!)... why this?

Weird dreams Part II

Sequels seem to be the craze, so I hop on the bandwagon as well. I just woke up and decided to write this down before I forget.

Once more, I just remember bits and pieces.
Two friends of mine and I were at the top of a building, taking the lift down. One of my friends had borrowed a book from me...I think it was a C.S. Lewis one, "God in the Dock", or "Surprised by Joy", I don't remember. So it was treasured to me. C.S. Lewis is my guru! ;)
Anyways, my friend left this book on a ledge up there. I looked at it, wondering why the hell she didn't take it along, but never said anything, cos I thought she probably had good reason, cos she did it in full awareness... it was just weird. Halfway down I asked her why she hadn't taken it along.
Oh, she said. Ooops. I'll get you a new copy somewhere.
It must have been in Germany, because I said: You don't get C.S. Lewis in regular bookstores.
Oh, she said.
Why don't you go back up and retrieve it? I asked, and the idea seemed totally strange to her, but...doable. Ok, she said, slowly, giving me The Look (TM).
What the hell does that tell me? Stop making everything complicated? But I'm German! That's my effin job!

And why is it that the most logical, common sense things are the weirdest things in dreams?
Makes you think, huh? Life as we know it is a construct, for the most.
God I am such a nerd.

Another dream was a "Swing Kids" hostage situation. Dunno if you have seen "Swing Kids". I love the film. The music is WICKED! Just realised a while ago that the new Guinness commercial with the moths sports one of the tunes... and I totally and utterly love it.
Swing is the only music that makes me want to dance... and that means a lot, considering how much I hate dancing. I met a Swing Kid once, but that is another story and shall be told another time. Anyone who can tell me where this quote comes from gets a cookie!

Anyways... it must have been the 1930s, because there was wicked swing music playing and everyone wore the clothes.
I dunno how we got into this hostage situation, but we had to tie each other up, cos the hostage takers were lazy sods, and they threatened us. I asked if I was allowed to listen to music on my walkman, but they didn't like that cos they thought I could use it to send messages to the police outside.
For some reason, half the time people wondered whether it was real or not, but it felt pretty damn real.

Keanu Reeves (hubba hubba) was one of the evil guys, walking around with a mobile phone. At some point he wanted to shoot someone because he had accused him of sending a text message to the police outside, giving them details about the situation.
I suddenly jumped up. Stop!, I yelled.
Everyone looked at me.
You're a bunch of idiots, I said. This isn't real.
Yes it is, said Keanu, confused and mildly insulted.
No it isn't, I said. If this is the 1930s, why the f*** are you walking around with a mobile? There were no mobile phones in the 1930s.
Aaaaaah, went the crowd, amazed why they hadn't realised this earlier.
Damn, said Keanu.
Thus, he had no choice but to release us, now that this sham was exposed.
We're released? asked some hostages, in disbelief.
Yes, said others. Because mobiles hadn't been invented yet in the 30s.
I had saved the day. Clever me. Hehe.
For some bloody reason, as I packed up to leave, I seemed to have lots of stuff...like I had decided to move in with the bad guys. (Keanu Reeves? Hubba hubba. Make room in your closet baby, I'm movin in!)
I had a big duffel bag full of stuff (weird stuff like childhood toys I haven't seen in a decade, and oven gloves, and a box of more stuff, and I had to go outside and ask mother, who was waiting for me, to get some more boxes.
At this point I was certain that this was a dream. Mother, waiting for me, in tears. Like that's gonna happen.

Weird dreams

I could fill books with them, honestly. For years, I did not dream at all - or at least I couldn't remember them. And I kinda missed dreaming. Dreams are cool... always crazy stuff happening, and some of them are good story material. Hey, and digging around in my muddy subconscious is therapeutic. Or at least entertaining.

I have had some strange dreams in the past months which I wrote down, and I will prolly post them by and by.
Anyway, the one last night is really blurry, and I just remember a few pictures, but they were quite vivid.
I was at the Oceanarium, or the Berlin Zoo... you know how places sometimes mix in dreams, or you know that this is a particular place you know even if it looks totally different?
I guess it must have been the Oceanarium, cos it had all those fish tanks. And I guess the dream equivalent of Jimbo the Fishmaster (TM) just introduced us to two new species that were featured in one tank. I can hardly describe them, and I don't know anymore what they were called, but both were quite ferocious fish... preying fish, one mildly related to sharks (or they hunted sharks, inspite of their much smaller size, because their bite was so evil). The other one was one of those bigmouthed fish who tended to swallow whole whatever it could get a hold of. Except that it had some pretty nasty row of teeth as well. And it had another talent which we discovered soon: it could regenerate.
At one point we looked into the tank and saw the latter fish float around ... and its head was missing. Instead, there was a gaping hole. Sharkeater was out of sight. We pitied it massively, but suddenly we noticed that it wasn't floating in a current, it was actually swimming. And first we thought it was just some last reflexes, but it seemed a pretty happy fish... just with no head. At some point the gaping hole faced us, and we saw the incredible. The ring of that hole showed the first signs of a row of quite sharp teeth. It looked like a fish that just ended in these massive jaws, no eyes... which protruded later,from tiny patches, into full-grown eyeballs... flicking and dark and cold. It spotted a rare crab, and before we knew it, it had swallowed it whole, just the tips of the legs were still sticking out.
Jimbo was pissed off and knocked on the glass because he wanted the crab back, but there wasn't much he could do.
And then it happened. Sharkeater appeared from behind a rock, and just as we were wondering whether they would ever attack each other... they did. Funny enough, this fighting soundtrack began to play immediately, and masses of people gathered around the tank to observe the spectacle.
Sharkeater attacked Jaws, and tore its back fin. Jimbo winced, his precious fish were eating each other!
Jaws immediately struck back, and both began to hunt each other, tearing each other to shreds. They were bloody killing machines. Jimbo knocked on the glass like mad to get them apart, but they ignored him completely. You didn't want to stick your hand in there, trust me. Not for a million.

That's all I can remember, really... anyone want to have a go at analysing this? And then tell me something about me that I don't know! ;)