Yesterday I posted the transcript of a nightmare that I suffered in 2003 and recorded in my personal journal, which I’m currently turning into a manuscript for publication later this year. I characterized that nightmare as the most narratively developed dream that I’ve ever experienced. Today, in the interest of accuracy, I’ll point out that the one below, recorded directly from another nightmare that I suffered in 2004, seven months after the previous one, gives it a run for its money. As I read the transcript now, I see that this dream was basically begging me to turn it into a fully developed story. Maybe it’s a shame that I never did.
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2/4/04 Wednesday 7:10 a.m.
A dream from last night/this morning:
I am one of a group of people who are staying in some enormous mansion. We are guests, outsiders, and everything in this mansion is a horror. Everything is wrong.
Each opening of a door or turning of a corner suggests, in some unaccountable, irrational fashion, a coming face-to-face with some unspeakable horror. It is horror specifically, the sense of some metaphysically gut-wrenching revelation, that haunts the edges of everything here, although sheer animal terror is present as well.
Strange angles, giddy-horrified trips down hallways or into basements—it all piles on itself. The floors are carpeted and the hallways broad with numerous doorways opening on either side. The colors are pale, tan, muddy sienna. Tan-colored carpet with rust-colored flower patterns underfoot. Dark wood-trimmed doorways. A dungeon of some sort. Horrors.
Disaster, mayhem, death, and nightmare.
Then sometime later, somehow, having alone escaped, I return with another group to inhabit or explore the house. My memories of what actually transpired before are vague. I recall only the sense of an imminent nightmarish unveiling, an annihilating encounter with that horrific presence or principle that infects the edges and angles.
We split into two groups, one of which journeys to the side entrance of the house while another, my group, enters by a south entrance. Once inside, our guide, who seems to know the place, leads us through a foyer of rich, dark, old wood, and then down one of those long, wide, carpeted hallways. It elongates as we walk, and I feel the dread creeping into me in faint flashes. The light in the hallway is bright but soft, yellow, and uniform.
At the hallway’s far end, we reach another foyer and encounter the other group entering by another set of doors from outside. I am astonished. Their direction could not have led them to this angle, this entrance, relative to ours. Then someone points out that the curve of the sidewalk outside hooks around the corner of the house and therefore reasonably led these others to this entrance.
More scenes: of some of the guests milling around curiously. Two men find what appears to be a jail or dungeon door. Figures are chained behind it, hanging limply by their wrists with their faces and heads lolling toward the bars in the door. For a moment it is thought that these are real corpses. Then it is realized that they are extremely supple and lifelike mannequins, arranged in a bizarre display. One of the men reaches gingerly through the bars to touch, move, and inspect one of the figures. He examines its lifelike features, lightly moves its head from side to side, observes its dead, half-desiccated, closed-eyed, quietly suffering expression.
I have a deep, subtle feeling of dread as the man touches and disturbs these figures.
A memory from my previous visit to the mansion: of some old woman being kept and waited upon in this house by a long-suffering servant. The old woman is wealthy and ill. She has bowel problems, and her servant, a mousy woman with a secret attitude of resentment, continually brings not a bedpan but a portable porcelain toilet.
Back in the present, on this second, later visit to the mansion, I look past the shoulder of one of my fellow visitors, through a doorway and down into a spacious, wide room with a bare, polished concrete floor and a set of fluorescent lights overhead that illuminate the room with a flat glow. There are work tables and shelves. Many things are cracked or piled carelessly. It appears to be some sort of shop or workroom. I look to the left and see the white porcelain toilet left there after all this time. Does the old woman still reside here? Down in the base of the toilet, at the bottom of the bowl, I see dark stains that might come either from minerals in the harsh house water or from the old woman’s feces.