This summer I had had an intensely vivid dream. ‘Twas the night between the 23rd and 24th of June, 2022, and as with many of my most vivid dreams it came to me in two periods of sleeping between which I had woken up to go pee. I have literally no clue why waking up in the middle makes my dreams like this, but it does (perhaps because of the length of sleeping and how it relates to sleep cycles?). Moral of the story is that drinking lots of water makes your dreams funky.
The first part was boring. It started off that I was in some sorta store, movie theater, or hospital with my dad and a kid, and for some reason this kid was getting eight dinosaur-themed $1500 bills (that were clearly legal tender), and I had to hand them to the kid. Then, I heard a noise from the hospital section of the building and went to go and see what it was halfway through giving him the money. This meant that I gave the kid all but one of the bill, thus stealing it. How sad :( I went to the hospital section but I don't remember much about it.
Then, I woke up, peed, and fell back asleep.
Now, the building was a drive through hospital in the center of a huge, busy bridge, and the whole place was decrepit and poorly lit. Clearly, I was somewhere in the US. I exited from the darkest part and found that there were two people in dark hooded robes (which had a light purplish blue symbol on the center made out of some sorta cheap plastic, like a kid’s graphic t-shirt you’d find at Walmart but in hooded robe form), both just standing around. Both of them had faces so white they nearly looked like they were made of paper. I think both were women? I walked right up to them asked "Hey are you guys with the Death Cult of Ultharax?" like the goober I am and they were all shifty eyed and suspicious until I responded "I'm the new girl and I lost my cloak. The name’s Melanie!" and they were like "Oh yeah the new girl! Here's a cloak."
I'm very persuasive, don’tya know? All you’ve gotta be is confident! And asleep.
After that, we piled into a pickup truck and drove away from the hospital, where I was the driver. As we drove, they talked about all the crime that the Death Cult of Ultharax was gonna commit, and it turns out that their next move was to set simultaneous fires all around the city, which would stretch out the fire department, police department and the hospital enough that they couldn't interrupt the cult's final ritual. And, as we drove, I turned on the radio where a very particular song played. I didn’t hear the song in the dream, but as if handed down from the word of God I knew that it was a song incredibly dear to me.
However, even though I was accompanying them, I was secretly working to oppose them. Why? Well, uh… reasons.
We drove over to the police station of the town and I suddenly witnessed a cutscene from a different perspective, showing the cult members causing the fires. The ones I were with were thinking of setting fire to the police station but got scared, so instead we headed back to my house because I said that there was something of interest to the cult in my basement.
We got home and entered inside, passing by the local spirit guide who was inhabiting an alcove in the hallway, selling daggers with large cross guards. All of them were point-down, embedded into something, each one looking quite like a cross. The two in front were small and thin, and apparently wax was to be put around them to make candles. I decided to buy one of the larger ones in the back, which only became plot relevant in the part of the dream that I forgot. LAME!
And then, I heard the sound of my dad coming home and I told the cult members where to go to get into my basement bedroom. They scurried down there like a bunch of squirrels, leaving me to confront my dad. He was shocked at seeing me in the cult robes, but I quickly told him that I was trying to infiltrate the cult. Why? Well, uh… reasons.
Then, I headed into the basement. I kinda forget what happened in here, but we had to move rooms a couple times to not be found out. Eventually, a gigantic clay person (that looked like it was made out of paper due to the color, which was suspiciously similar to the color and texture of the skin of the cult members) met with us in the backyard and subsumed us. I forget what happened inside besides that the dagger was of use, but eventually we got out by puncturing through the lower belly of the gigant, its skin spreading out like stabbing through a thin film of clay or a sheet of thick, wet cardstock. However, I'm pretty sure that this whole section was actually a vision that we were all having within the dream.
In any case, in that little vision, I had to work together with them to get out of the gigant’s labyrinthine innards. At times we had to pause, to slow down a little bit, and it was there that I paid special attention to how little they emoted in any way. So, I told them my corniest jokes (“Whadda ya call a fake noodle? … An impasta!”), which elicited a tremendously tiny smirk from them, barely a little wrinkle at the corners of their mouths.
After all that, we went into the sewers of the city and joined up with the rest of the cult members. They were all in a huge, dimly lit underground theater without any chairs.
On the stage was a terrifying scene with all of the cult members, who all looked nearly identical to the cult members I’d been traveling with besides slight variation in the colorscheme of their gloves and goggles. Many cult members were suspended against the back wall of the stage, pinned down at all parts of their bodies except for their heads in what were clearly extremely painful positions. Some were pinned in different manners than that—all positions were both haphazard and deeply purposeful, patterned in a way that I couldn’t understand but in which I knew that something was very, very wrong. Many of the hanging ones' eyes were glazed over and their heads lolled from side to side, singing a monotonous, baleful dirge without a single word that made you feel like your death was imminent, unavoidable, and incomprehensible. On the stage floor, many cult members were kneeling, their palms flat on the floor, their eyes also glazed and their heads lolling back and forth. In the center of the stage were cult members working to secure the others, seemingly immune to whatever had caught up all the rest, as well as the cult leader in the middle.
Then, I looked over to the cult members I had been with all night and found that one of them was on the floor, sprawled out on her side, painfully singing a different song than all the rest. Her eyes were glazed over and, close up, underneath her goggles (where I had never looked too closely past the tinted lenses) I could see that they were just beads, like on a doll. The other cult member I had been with was coughing, falling to the floor, and began to sing the same song as the other one I traveled with.
I shouted at the cult leader, asking, pleading to know what had befallen my friends, my dear companions who I had come to be comfortable with in a lonely world, and she responded coldly, as if they were an invisible nothing that played no part in her attention, and said, "They are puppets—they sing what they are accustomed to hearing."
It was only then that I realized that I recognized the song they were singing—it was the song that was dear to me.
And then I woke up again. Now is that fucked up or what.
It’s been a while so I don’t remember my reaction very well, but I’m pretty sure I was like huh??? what??? what the fuck???. This was one of the most vivid dreams I’d had in a very long time, but the thing is that this wasn’t that unusual of a dream in terms of its contents; my dreams are always vivid and real to the point that they’re either completely baffling and somehow insightful like this or are such horrendous nightmares that I wake up either screaming or crying. The ones where I wake up crying are the worst by far but they’re relatively rare; the ones where I wake up screaming are more common.
A long time ago I read partway through a collection of all of H.P. Lovecraft’s novels and I got to the ones where it’s in a dream world. It’s been so long since I read those and I forget a lot about them (and I didn’t even finish all of them), but I very much resonate with extremely vivid dreams. They’re real in a somehow tangible way. Sometimes I forget that I’m ever awake.
You know how you can hold opposing sensibilities about a topic? I don’t mean cognitive dissonance per se, but instead how it’s possible to rationally and logically know something and yet feel something contradictory? Like, if you’re someone who struggles to brush their teeth every night: you know for a fact that brushing your teeth is good, healthy, and staves off future medical problems, but at the same time it’s difficult to get yourself to brush regularly. This covers such a wide array of experiences that it’s almost useless, but at the moment it’s the only way I have to explain this.
I logically and rationally know that my dreams are not real. The waking world is real and dreams are a product of biology. But the dream world feels really, really real. It’s hard to distinguish dreams from reality in a very particular way that I can’t succinctly explain just yet.
I am real, but I don’t feel real.
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