A nightmare that was better than the story I made from it

The idea of publishing my 30-year private journal that I recently mentioned here is becoming a reality. The first volume will be published later this year by S. T. Joshi’s Sarnath Press. For weeks I’ve been typing like mad to produce a manuscript from mounds of old notebooks. And I’ve been coming across many things that I forgot I ever wrote down: philosophical and spiritual speculations and ruminations, accounts of and arguments with books and authors I was reading, descriptions of my creative process, commentary on national and world events, descriptions of recurrent inner bouts with icy depression and anhedonia, accounts of daily events during my show business years in Branson and at my other jobs, and a host of additional things.

I’m also finding a multitude of ideas for horror stories that I wrote down and never acted on. I mean dozens of them, spread out across the years. Most of them feel completely new to me. I don’t remember having thought of them or recorded them. But record them I did, some of them as brief capsule premises or plot descriptions, others as fairly detailed sets of notes.

Then there’s this nightmare that I had on the night of Thursday, July 17, 2003. I know I had it that night because I recorded it on the morning of Friday, July 18, at 9 a.m. (For most of those 30 years of journal writing, I noted not only the date of each entry but the time of day when I started writing it.) It was the most detailed dream, narratively speaking, that I had ever had, and it remains so today. Maybe that was why I went on to turn it into a story that was then published under the title “Unfinished Nightmare.” The dream itself was so vivid and narratively developed that I ended up not so much drawing on it for inspiration as expanding the raw account of it into a minimally fictionalized form. The result wasn’t very good, and I regret having published it (which is why I haven’t collected it in any of my books). The original, raw dream transcript is much stronger.

That transcript will appear in my published journal, though not in the first volume, which will drop sometime later this year. But I thought I would also go ahead and share it here for my Teeming Brain readers, as its tenor and content are very much in line with the weird supernatural thrust that’s an abiding thematic interest around here.

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7/18/03     Friday     Around 9 a.m.

A dream from last night:

A young woman — capable, intelligent, pretty, perhaps in her early twenties (college aged) — is babysitting a young boy of around eight years old, or perhaps a year or two younger, during some growing crisis in the outside world, perhaps a series of paranormal or supernatural eruptions. (The specifics of this crisis were relatively clear in the dream but are now vanished from waking consciousness.) This crisis has already put the young woman on the edge and given her a sense of unease, but the young boy is exuberant and playful.

He asks her to go down to the basement with him, where he wants to show her something. She agrees, even though she’s still uneasy, because she wants to keep him feeling happy and safe. So they descend to the basement (which turns out to be a version of the basement in my grandparents’ old house, where they kept the snooker table and the skull that my great-grandfather used to have at his dental practice; where they kept the big antique cash register that my cousin and I used to play with as children; the basement where I enjoyed playing when I was with someone, but the thought of which filled me with a peculiar and intense dread when we would leave and turn the lights out and ascend the stairs, and I could feel the darkness pressing upon my back, and could imagine vividly, with a thrill of real terror, some undefined, monstrous, evil force rushing up the stairs to claim me).

They descend to this basement, where the young woman stands and shifts uneasily while the boy produces a rubber mask. He tells her that this is a special mask, because it turns whoever wears it into it. They really become the monster it depicts. The mask is green with a vaguely reptilian appearance, with irregular roundish eye holds and a twisted, rather jagged hole of a mouth. The boy says he wants to put it on and show her what he means. She agrees.

He dons the mask and begins to hunch his body and growl in an obviously fake manner, just like a regular child playing, as she watches and tries to appear amused.

Then, in a split second, everything changes. The eye holes in the mask twitch and stretch and come to life with a kind of blackish-crimson glow. The mouth animates into a bizarrely twisted organic maw with some sort of whiplike tentacular feelers coiling out of it around the edges. The light in the room vanishes, and the boy—or whatever it is now—lets out a hiss or screech or some other sound as he moves in an impossibly jerking, monstrous, horrifyingly rapid way toward the young woman. She screams in terror, her own eyes and mouth wide, and recoils.

Suddenly, the light snaps back on, and there is her boyfriend, whom she had apparently been waiting on upstairs. He has arrived and descended the stairs and found the two of them. In the light, the boy is now just a boy again. He removes the mask as the young woman throws herself against her boyfriend, still shaking and weeping, almost hysterical. She looks at the young boy with horror and tries to explain to her boyfriend what happened. The boy, for his part, becomes confused and begins to cry at the fact of how horrified she is at him. Sobbing, he says he was only playing.

In the dream, I somehow knew that the thing this boy became was really him, was his real self, what he actually was, and that he took the young woman down to the basement for the explicit purpose of doing violence to her. In other words, he really was some sort of monster. I also knew that somehow this was connected to whatever the strange occurrences were that had been upsetting the young woman and throwing the world into a panic.

And yet I also knew that this boy was sincere with his tears. He really was upset at the young woman’s suspicion and horror. He was both the monster and the boy—both of them truly, both of them with the appropriate and natural attitudes and emotions for the respective identities—and in his little boyness, his boy aspect, he couldn’t understand the woman’s horror, and he was devastated by such looks and emotions being directed at him. Sort of a “What did I do?” attitude.