Shriek Elegance

As I started writing this dream down, I started to remember the middle portion of it. It doesn’t connect the two portions of dream together, I’m convinced that the two are completely unrelated. Though when I think about the two together, all I remember is a big empty, black space where there should be dream or simply an instant transition between the two dreams. I’m not sure what that was. I do know that when I woke up, I was terribly sad, as if what had happened in the second dream bore the same weight as something equivalently devastating that could happen to me in real life. I couldn’t get it out of my head all morning and the more I thought about it, the sadder I got. It really was quite terrible and I’ve never had something hit home like this before. The first part of the dream is completely unrelated to the horrible part of it. I’m not sure why it was even there. It was so uneventful, comparatively. But I’ll write it in anyway. I’m going to warn you now that the second half of my dream is kind of gruesome and might gross some people out. Read at your own discretion.

It was night time, around 10 or 11pm in autumn (so around this time of year, maybe a few weeks from now; still warm enough to wear shorts during the day but cold enough to cover up at night). I was with some friends of which I can only specifically remember Scott, Darek, Brad, and Christina (all from BinaryChaos). We were on a highway of some sort, it kind of looked like Trans Canada 1 would up in Glacier National Park between Revelstoke and Banff. The highway’s two directions were not separated by a median in that area, for some reason. However, we were stopped and out of our cars in a patch of grass where the median was just starting to separate the two sides of the highway, so we were parked and standing on sort of the beginning of a ‘V’ of grass. The road was completely dead and I don’t know why we were out there, let alone parked on the median and standing outside, but there we were. Scott, Darek, and I all drove so our cars were parked in a triangle/circle type thing and we were all standing in the middle and staring at the sky. Christina and I were trying to take pictures of the stars and the other three were just looking at them. And that’s all it was, that dream just ended like that, us standing on the median of a deserted mountain highway looking at the stars.

—Black space here—

I was standing with a group of friends (none of them real). Most of them were anime-style cartoons (don’t ask, I honestly have no clue, I haven’t watched anime in months) except for one girl. She appeared to be one of those down-to-earth girls with short, short, short golden chestnut-y hair, a cream colored tanktop and a calf-length brown flowy summer skirt (yes, specific, I know). She was pretty in an innocent kind of way. It is important to note here that she is vegan. I don’t know what her name was. Actually, I don’t know what any of their names were. When I’m around the entire group in the dream, I don’t seem to take any form (I see it from first person point of view). So I’m neither cartoon nor “real person”. However, when I am with the two types of friends separately, I take on whatever style of appearance they do (so when I’m with the girl, I am as I am in real life; when I am with the other four, I am as I would be animu-style [God that sounds so lame but I assure you, it made the dream creepier]). Aside from her, there were four others, as I’ve mentioned. Two of them were bears. They were both white; however they did not share the same physiology as polar bears. Firstly, one bear seemed as if he was drawn in a rather comic style: simple line art, not too much detail, round, childish features such as his arm being a long u-shape and his “paws” or “hands” being represented by five little claws sticking out of the end of his nubbly arm (kind of like you would imagine a stuffed bear would look like- except his posture resembled an actual bear, none of this teddybear-like stature; he looked extremely similar to this picture, only fatter and not made of plastic). Let’s call him Simple Bear. The other bear was drawn in a more realistic style. Again, he was white, just like Simple Bear, but was not a polar bear (the face and general body structure was not right- strange, I know, they were cartoons, but I could tell). I’ll call him Complex Bear and he looked something like this. Both bears could speak and act like normal human beings and both enjoyed taking part in bear activities as well. The remaining two friends were both boys- one was apparently my boyfriend (with whom I was very much in love) and the other was his best friend. My boyfriend kiiiind of reminded me of the MC of Persona 3, only instead of blue hair and grey eyes, he had black hair and black eyes. Other than that, now that I look at it, they were fairly similar. Hilariously enough, his best friend strongly reminded me of Duo Maxwell, only drawn in the same style as Boyfriend and his face was a little different.

Anyway. We were standing on a street together. There were no people or cars and my view of everything was weirdly distorted, like everything was slightly diagonal and from a slightly higher vantage point. Apparently we were getting together because we felt that we had to save the world. There was a disease or pandemic of some sort sweeping the world that centered around a person making an important decision in his or her life. For example, staying true to oneself, unfortunately, infected that person with this blight of sorts and the only way to save yourself from it was to completely reject everything that you believe in. However, you had to fully believe in your rejection, so if you previously believed that all criminals should be arrested, in order to save yourself, you couldn’t just outwardly say, “I reject the arrest of criminals,” you actually had to believe that all criminals should not be arrested. As you may imagine, making yourself believe something that you don’t actually believe is obviously nearly impossible. This unfortunately resulted in pretty much everyone catching the disease. Additionally, when one is infected, the only words that generally come out of his mouth are those that express the belief that he refused or was unable to reject (i.e. “ARREST CRIMINALS”, etc.). As for the affliction itself, it was rather gruesome and resulted in death. It began with the blackening of eyes (I’m going to have to guess that this was somehow True Blood inspired, Maenad-style). People’s eyeballs, completely and wholly, would turn black. Not only that, but their eyes would “leak” (I suppose that’s the best word) a liquid as black as their eyes, but had extremely high viscosity. As such, the afflicted always had dark streams staining from their eyes down to their jaws. Once afflicted, the people would then start to cough up or vomit blood profusely and steadily, from any frequency from every 10-30 seconds, every 10 minutes, or every hour, depending on the person. The frequency of blood vomiting didn’t seem to have any affect on their actual health or time of death- how fast someone died was completely independent of this symptom and unique to each person. However, the frequency of blood vomiting did represent how insane they had become (the faster, the crazier), for anyone who is infected loses all reason and rationality and is merely insane, killing others or creating mayhem until he or she dies him/herself.

The source of the disease was actually my mother (LOL). Except it was different in that she wasn’t throwing this disease at us in order to conquer the world, she was simply the origin of the disease and explained that it was happening simply because it had to. As a result, the disease did not affect her, obviously, but it also didn’t affect me. I am assuming because I was her daughter (in my dream, I had no brothers or father), or because she was somehow protecting me from it. However, she was still not seen as a “good guy”, she was still regarded as a “bad guy”. She actually reminded me of the Cloud of Darkness (not in appearance- but in mannerisms and speech in that things happened simply because they are inevitable, all will return to the void, etc. etc. etc.). We knew that defeating her would not end the plague, as did she, so we actually kind of coexisted together. I was a little miffed with her that this whole disease business started, of course, but I understood that I couldn’t expressly blame her as this was just the way things were. She wasn’t remorseful over it, though. Just indifferent and rational.

With all of that background information out of the way: we didn’t know how to save the world. We did as much research as we could on anything to do with plagues of this nature, but there simply were none. There was no divine intervention to show us the way, no deus ex machina or mystical artifact, it was simply incurable as we knew it. Unfortunately, I was the only one in our group who was not susceptible to the disease. As I walked through a desolate canyon that was for some reason near my house, I noticed the pretty down to earth girl standing alone. She stood in front of a flat, metallic, ritual-like circle that was some how standing vertically on the ground all by itself. As I approached, she screamed, “I AM A VEGAN!” and slumped over. The next thing I knew, blood poured out of her mouth onto the ground and she straightened up a bit so that I could see her face. As expected, her eyes had turned black, her cheeks were stained with their run off, and she was grinning sadistically with blood leaking from between her lips. She began cackling and moving erratically, kind of zombie-Grudge-like. Ten seconds later, she coughed and more blood spurted out. Noticing that her likelihood of sanity at all was extremely low, I took off in the other direction back toward my house where it was safe; I could no longer trust her. She headed toward the city where she would most likely wreak havoc in a maniacal rage. I told my mom about it and she nodded kind of sagely, as if she already knew. Then she said that I might want to go downstairs before it was too late. Knowing the rest of my friends and my boyfriend were there, I went.

My house was a modest size above ground, but underground it was massive. It was castle-esque- everything was beautiful stonework. It was dark now, but usually it was kept well lit so that you didn’t feel a million miles away from civilization. There were two basement floors and one staircase that took you to both. I went down to B1 where I last saw the bears. This floor served an odd purpose. It was a large room off to the right (there was another to the left, but I didn’t go that way, so I don’t know anything beyond the fact that there was another room there). This room contained a large fountain, large enough that you could step into it and walk around. The water was about knee deep. At the other end of the room was a kitchen-type area and in the corner across from that, three beds. It seemed to be a suite of some sort, except that there was a giant fountain in it for some reason. Simple Bear, for some reason, was standing in the fountain, splashing the water. I approached slowly, but not too close as I soon saw him vomiting blood into it. I stepped back to the doorway again in case I had to run, but neither bear seemed to take any notice of me. Complex Bear, who was in the kitchen nook area, turned around, teeth showing and eyes leaking black goo. He, too, vomited blood onto the floor and started walking toward the fountain. He crawled in and both bears vomited once again. They then began to splash each other with the fountain water, which was now more like watered down blood. They both vomited approximately every 10 seconds. Saddened at the sight, I closed the door and continued down the stairs. I was worried about Boyfriend and Best Friend, since the bears and down to earth girl had been infected.

B2 sits at the bottom of the stairs and is one large room. It, too, has a fountain, similar to the one on B1. It sits in the middle, a small distance away from the stairs. I could hear gurgling coming from both sides of the room. To the left was Best Friend. He was with a group of other infected individuals, but they seemed to be “getting along” in the way that zombies get along and don’t eat or kill each other. They were playing with furniture and pieces of cloth, seemingly impressed by them for some reason. I had guessed that the general group was vomiting approximately every 10-15 minutes (somehow I was expert at figuring this out). In the farthest corner to my right, another small group of infected were playing with the ornaments of the room (it was full of such things as beds, couches, televisions, another kitchen, etc., much like B1). Boyfriend was sitting in the corner to my immediate right. Like the others, he, too, was afflicted, though the blood on his clothing was not very fresh, which meant that he hadn’t purged for at least 30-45 minutes. This didn’t mean that he was not crazy, but the intensity of his insanity was tame compared to that of the bears, for example. He simply sat in the corner with blackened eyes super wide, staring at the fountain, and repeating, “I love her,” under his breath. I knelt down and kind of crawled under his arms and started crying (apparently I super duper loved him). Another ten minutes passed and he started convulsing a bit. I backed away from him and a few moments later, he vomited blood onto the ground next to him. Shortly after the purging episode, he resumed his former position against the wall and went back to his repetitive murmuring. I pulled up and sat next to him on his left side, since I noticed that the floor was clean on that side and that he must always vomit to the right. I leaned on him and stayed with him for hours, listening to him say, “I love her,” over and over until I couldn’t stay awake anymore and I fell asleep.

I woke up the next morning in my own room. Confused, I walked out into the foyer (the above ground house was really itty bitty) where my mom was sitting on the only couch in the room (it was a rather barren room) that sat near a kitchen-nook type thing in the side of the wall with large bay windows that looked out onto a pretty garden. For some reason, we shared a large-ish closet that was in this room. I asked her how I ended up in my room and she said that she had put me there a few hours after I had fallen asleep. I grunted in acknowledgment, still upset about Boyfriend. She seemed to know what I was thinking about and said rather nonchalantly, “he’s still down there, you know.” I was revitalized instantly, as most people were dead after this much time had passed. I dashed toward the staircase when she stopped me and asked if I’d like to change first. She said that it was a disaster down there and that I wouldn’t want to get my nice clothes all dirty (she had apparently changed me when she put me to bed ’cause my clothes were filthy). For some reason, I agreed, rummaged around in the closet and finally found something I didn’t care too much about, but still looked decent and ran down the stairs. I glanced into the room on the right on B1 and saw the bears floating face down in the fountain. I closed the door again and continued running down the stairs. B2 was quiet except for the fountain. Bodies were lying in clusters around the room; everyone had died in the early morning. After my initial scan of the room, I went to the corner where Boyfriend was and he was, much to my delight, still there. However, all happy feelings disappeared when I saw that he was surrounded in half-dried, half-sticky pools of blood that had mixed with the black substance that leaked from his eyes, which had, for some reason, increased and leaked all down his torso to the ground and spread to the wall. Not caring that he was, quite honestly, disgusting, I knelt down and hugged him again, getting covered in the black substance. But he wasn’t murmuring anymore. He was still alive, but he was silent and just staring at the fountain, a complete and silent husk of what he used to be.

I woke up hopelessly sad.