Last night strange and twisted dreams cascaded down upon me, like a whirlwind of surreal madness and visceral hallucinatory imagery and old forgotten memories of lost friends, places I’ve been and things I’ve done. I was in a mysterious town, walking at dusk through the cobbled streets, when I passed by a husky pub, with an old-style rustic atmosphere, and flickering on the frosty windowpanes were the warm hues of orange and yellow, that flowed sensually from the gently crackling embers of an open fire, built up high with well burnt logs of deep orange, but no roaring flames rising from it, just a great warmth being omitted through the solemn yet sublime room. I’m completely alone in the pub. There aren’t even any bartenders. I start drinking an unknown and mysterious liquid – some alien chemical concoction from a lower dimension, an earthly brew of supernatural yellow, green and brown shades, all interspersed and fading into one another – which I seemed to believe was some kind of ancient and magic potion.
When next my dream-self awoke into his surroundings, I, whilst looking through his eyes, was within a ceaselessly long passageway that gave me the general impression of a hotel lobby that was, in its prime, exceedingly grand and luxurious and of high social status but, in its present state, has demonstrably been left uncared for and poorly maintained and, as a result, there is an undeniable sense of decay seeping through its very pores, as the unavoidable processes of time and ageing continue to ravage the elegance that was once held to be fundamental to its inherent nature. Ah time. There is a woman ahead of me, in a long white dress made of the finest embroidery and fabrics, who is leading me down the passageway. I had a gut sense that there was something very wrong with her and that I should be worried and afraid, but, since I couldn’t exactly remember why I felt this way, I chose to ignore my inner voice and continued along the path I so unwittingly tread.
Suddenly, I almost fell down this cube-shaped hole in the floor of the passageway, about two meters each way. Initially I stumbled and swayed over the edge, then I eventually regained my balance and as I attained a firm footing on the ground I was surprised to notice that there were two teenage girls lying on their fronts at the bottom of the cube with their heels kicking playfully in the air as they laughed joyously, chatted casually and reading a shared magazine; a stereotypical but potent image of resounding youthful innocence that at once comforted me and distracted from the eerie texture of the dream thus far, little did I know it was about to transform, like the dark rolling of thunder elapsing overhead, into a full blown nightmare. This sense of peace and comfort was almost immediately shattered by my sudden realisation that they were covered in blood, the sour stench of which arose in the form of a malignant and putrid cloud of visible gas which burned the inner skin of my nostrils. I then noticed mangled body parts had been strewn across their bodies and the floor of the hole. I screamed to them for clarification of the situation and their apparent indifference to the state of affairs they were in and to discover what they were doing and if they were okay, but they just kept talking and laughing with one another as if nothing was wrong, so I continued to scream and eventually they looked up utterly unsurprised by the events unfolding around us, looked me dead in the eye and said in eerie and dissonant unison “mind your own business”.
I then looked up at the woman in the white dress and she was now on the other side of the hole, still facing away from me disconcertingly. As she slowly turned around to face me, I suddenly started to remember why it was I had such a bad feeling concerning her. Her mouth, nose and ears were gruesomely sewn shut – as if the operation had taken place in extremely poor sanitary conditions below deck of an old ship stranded in the middle of the ocean in the sixteenth century with crass surgical instruments – and her head was raggedly shaved with odd tufts of scraggly white hair lurching out of her barren skull upon which there were raw scars barely healed. Her movements were like that of a primitive robotic machine, but when my disturbed gaze fell upon her eyes, they appeared to be a clear crystalline blue and weeping, yet no other aspect of her anatomy indicated the torrent of inner sorrow coalescing within her ghastly skull. It was a horrific and brutally saddening sight to behold.
Suddenly, I was transported again, this time, to a strange and enormous room. A stately room I have been in before in a nightmare long passed, as the spirit of my subconscious mind wandered through a winding maze of hallucination and unconscious symbols. A repulsive stench lingered in the room. It was filled with hundreds of people dressed in smart clothing, though this time it was abundantly clear what was wrong; their faces were melting, there was awful screeching and wailing echoing malevolently around the sinister room, their bodies were being contorted hideously into mangled writhing messes, barely resembling the human form any longer and there was cackling laughter raining down from above these sordid living corpses. I’m screaming desperately and trying in vain to escape but I soon realise that I am one of them. My face is melting. My body is being contorted. I am trapped. The intensity of the nightmare rises, the screaming gets louder, the burning stench of rotten human flesh thickens into a great cloud of rancid despair, the cackling laughter rises and rises until finally I awake screaming in a cold sweat and jump out of bed and slide across the floor into the corner of the room and look around frantically to check that I have fully awoken into the reality my waking-self usually inhabits, unutterably petrified.
Journal Extract by Stamos Mardou