So I've been taking Chantix (a pill to help you quit smoking) for about 3 weeks now -- and, oddly enough, one of the side effects listed (along with "nausea, trouble sleeping, and gas and/or vomiting") is "vivid, unusual, or increased dreaming."
"Well," thought I, facetiously. "That will save me a great deal of money per month -- just less Acid I have to buy."
Turns out, they weren't kidding. (Though to what extent I can attribute this dream to Chantix, obviously I can't say for sure...)
At any rate, here is last night's dream:
1. I am being chased. (By whom, as usual, I am not sure.) We're in a kind of run-down inner city area. Many of the buildings are decrepit and/or outright condemned. I am with two others -- not sure who. We run. We hide inside a building -- which, turns out, is not really a building at all, just a facade -- one large brick wall, full of "windows" (holes, where windows ought to be), and nothing behind it. We hide behind this nevertheless. At least it's a hiding spot...
They (apparently) know where we are, so we're stuck. I run. I jump inside the back of a massive truck, parked inside a garage nearby. Safe.
Then, the truck starts up -- and before I can even register what's going on, we're moving.
Oh well -- at least I'm hidden, and surely they won't find me now.
We're on the freeway -- off to god knows where...
It is unclear whether I'm inside the back (cargo area) of the truck, or if I'm underneath the truck, close to the road and holding on for dear life...
The truck stops, finally, out in the middle of nowhere. It's a farm. We're in North Dakota. I know the people (in real life, and in the dream). Their dad (in real life, and in the dream) has recently died -- accidentally backed over by a huge truck.
They know me. Invite me in. I am polite; hug each of the four kids, who I went to school with, and say things like "Sorry about your dad." For the most part, they are made uncomfortable, and just want me to shut up and get away from them. But I can tell they appreciate it, all the same. It's just hard for them.
At some point, the truck is leaving again -- and I am not on it. I run out, trying to act casual while also running as fast as I can... If I don't make it, I'm fucked: I don't really know where I am, or where I am going or how to get there if I did know...... I can't exactly wave to the driver to stop, can I? I do wave. The truck driver sees me, and slows down -- seems to realize, suddenly, that I had been a stow-away on his vehicle. He takes off. I chase after him, but he's gone. I am left -- alone. No idea where I am, or where to go....
Somehow I find another truck, and I steal it. I am driving (extremely fast), and all is well now except that I am completely lost.
Gravel roads. Fields. Scarcely a tree. I don't even know what direction I'm headed in.
I'm afraid to ask for directions -- apparently because I am a sort of fugitive, and it will cause suspicion...
At some point here, this is where the dream shifts.....
I have now, without having realized it, entered into another world....
And someone else is with me, in the passenger seat of this massive truck.
We are driving through this military camp, in North Dakota -- but, the North Dakota in this other world, so it's not precisely the same...
It's some kind of massive yet secret military installation.
Planes and helicopters are flying overhead, dropping bombs -- just testing them, apparently, to make sure they will work. But the whole area is a bombed-out demolished wasteland. It's bizarre, because they're basically bombing themselves -- yet the destruction they cause doesn't bother them...
We are in a school bus now -- long, yellow, packed with kids. A field trip of some kind.
This military camp is bigger than I could have ever imagined. It is quite clear that this is Top Secret -- we're NOT supposed to be here, and if anyone sees us, we'll be shot on site. (How can North Dakota have kept this place a secret?? I am asking myself...)
Aside from the multiple humvees and parked bomber jets, etc., the camp is mostly a vast wasteland filled with haphazardly constructed buildings and tents. We are driving as fast as we can -- not being sneaky, now, just trying to get through there and get the hell out as fast as humanly possible without being seen or rolling the bus and crashing. We gouge through narrow alley ways, between sheds, we run over small huts, through huge canvas curtains used as walls of ramshackle outposts, .....
The bombs are dropping closer and closer and closer.... We can't figure out if they're just running typical training exercises, and we just happen to be in the way -- or if they have spotted us, and are bent on destroying us.....
We are driving so fast, over and through so many things, I feel like we are in an armored tank. But, no, just this school bus: we could tip over or roll at any moment.
One of the bombs hits close, and we are thrown over -- rolling, flipping -- everyone flying around, cracking skulls against the windows and screaming....
Yet, somehow, the bus flips over completely, back onto its wheels -- and we are driving again....
Now we're in an area that is more isolated -- quite. We see NO ONE. It's like a military ghost town. All these huge, elaborate (yet quickly built) structures everywhere, but no one in sight, and not a sound to be heard -- but for the (now very distant) gun shots and bombing practice runs........
The stillness is very unsettling.....
The area is even more rugged -- ditches, hills, crevices everywhere -- though whether this is the work of mother nature or of the military is unclear...
We are still driving over, between, and through buildings and tents -- just going wherever we can to get the fuck out of there as fast as possible....
Now we see a box in front of us -- we're going to run over it. Shit -- it's a wooden coffin....
We smash over it and continue on. Nothing to be done.
We scrape through a tight alley, between two black-painted buildings. Now we find ourselves inside the building, driving through the alley -- it's quiet and dark. On either side, we see row after row after row of narrow cells, more like cages. The doors extremely tall and glass, but the glass is all black -- we cannot see in... We decide these are where prisoners of war are kept -- and just as we cannot see in, they cannot see out.... They're designed specifically for isolation......
We wonder what has gone on in these cells/cages... Are there people locked in them still -- right this very moment? Are they screaming in agony against sound-proof walls?...
Everything looks so old, ancient even -- abandoned....
Now the school bus plows through a massively high black curtain, into the largest enclosed space I have ever encountered or even dreamed of.... It's like a quonset -- times 100. A huge, huge, as far as the eye can see, concrete floor enclosed by a tin shell....
We see rugs -- or grain -- or dirt, or old furniture -- what is all this garbage? Stacks upon stacks of stuff, rows between which people could walk. Thrown together yet organized, sort of like a recycling plant .....
It's like cloth, piles of junk, it reeks -- we all have to cover our noses and mouths, hold our breath....
Bones. Flesh. Some almost intact bodies. But corpses: we are driving over them, between the rows of them.... Everywhere we look, corpses.
Surely more than I could ever have imagined. The sheer volume of corpses makes the photos from Auschwitz look like incidental casualties of war -- nothing to be concerned about. This is layer upon layer upon layer, stack upon stack, of dead bodies -- dumped here -- at first, apparently, stacked neatly in piles and rows, well-organized, perhaps even labeled. But now, simply a city-sized garbage dump for corpses..... It looks as though they're being stored -- but, no, they are being hidden.
This is the part that is -- quite literally -- the most terrifying, disturbing, grotesque dream I have ever had in my life. We were all staring -- screaming -- then gaping again in silent horror. No one wants to say anything -- to point out what is going on, where we were, what we are driving over and between....
Most of the bodies are mangled, mutilated, in various stages of decomposition. It is obvious that many, if not most, were tortured before being executed -- or simply tortured to death.
We all keep thinking: how has this been kept secret for so long?..... And our own government has been doing this all this time........
The sheer scale and scope of what we have done is so overwhelming that we cannot even comprehend it. It is genocide on such a massive scale that it's almost surreal.
We drive through another enormous black curtain, and are now outside. The horror only become greater: more and more and more bodies, everywhere you look. More than inside the structure. It's as though they had been hiding them inside this super-stadium-sized building, but finally ran out of space -- and/or simply could not bear the smell -- so they started dumping the bodies outside.
It is just like a car lot -- the biggest you have ever seen -- except that the cars, and car parts, are not steel but flesh. Bodies and body parts, and blood and bone and fat and gristle, are everywhere. We crunch over them in our bus -- everyone now either throwing up, covering their faces with both hands, or simply staring awe-struck -- unable to look away. Shocked into catatonia....
We drive on....
We're almost out now -- but more planes and helicopters are up ahead -- dropping bombs and firing missiles, still practicing and testing (or so we hope)....
As soon as we are out of the military camp and onto a regular highway, the driver (not me, at this point) guns it -- the engine revs so high that I think it will explode, and I consider telling him to take it easy, so that we're not stranded....). We are driving probably 100 mph on a shitty gravel road, in the middle of nowhere, in an old school bus -- tipping side to side all the time...
Somehow we make it out.....
The dream starts to make more sense at this point......
Apparently we had transversed into another world entirely -- and now we were back.
It was like our world, and parallel to it, but slightly different. (In the dream I compare it in my mind to the film "Children Of Men" -- so completely alien and foreign, futuristic and dystopic, yet SO similar, eerily so, predictably and emotionally effecting....)
We are back now, safe (?) in our own world......
I am at a party now -- in a trailer park, in an unbelievably shitty neighborhood, where all anyone ever does is drink beer, smoke crack, and party. There are homeless blacks, white trash whites, drug-addicted hippies, and junkies of all stripes -- and then there are these "geniuses" who take any and all drugs that they can find, but calmly -- rationally, intentionally, with clear intent and foresight, deliberately..... These people walk around and preach, trying to educate the people there -- yet not condescendingly, or as though they are outsiders or don't belong; just, naturally; more like the preacher in a church, or a missionary......
At some point here I find myself, yet again, in another world completely -- and I am not only confused and pissed off, but having a nervous breakdown...
Like believable dreams, this world is too similar to be completely ridiculous (and thus I cannot dismiss it or laugh at it), and yet too strange for me to understand what's going on or to cope.....
I don't know how I got here....
There are people everywhere -- it's like a fair, or a carnival. Everyone else -- while looking intense and strange -- seems to know where they are, and what they're doing here. I am completely lost. I think I have lost my mind....
Now I discover that people take this trip between worlds intentionally -- and that it is not only desirable, but so desired that people go to great lengths to make the trip.....
The fellow I am with (Francis -- a black fellow) explains some things to me now, but I am still confused....
Apparently one of my friends decided to take a trip to this other world, and to take me along with him, without me knowing...
Now we are doing it again.
A group of us -- maybe 6 people -- sit cross-legged in a row or small semi-circle, as though for some kind of ritual. A thin rope, or string, is passed around.... At first it seems as though it is a meditation technique in which one inserts the string into his mouth, swallows it down into his entrails, through his digestive tract, and excretes it out of his anus -- but that is not the goal here.... Now, instead, I realize what's going on: the first person in the row wraps the string around one of his/her teeth, and then passes the string on to the next person, who proceeds to tie the string around one of his/her own teeth, passes the string on, and so forth.... The idea is, in order to achieve this state of transcendence, one must force their brain to enter a very intense mystical state, and the best way of doing this is to cause oneself extreme, excruciating agony -- even if (or especially if, it would seem) only for a moment.....
After all have wrapped the string around one of their teeth, we are ready. The instructor pulls the string: there are no screams, no grunts of pain, nothing -- except for me. (I have at least two very bad cavities in my teeth -- and have deliberately NOT tied this string around them, out of fear of the sheer agony that would ensue and the fear that the tooth would actually be easily pulled out; instead, I have loosely wrapped it around another, solid and painless tooth...) It hasn't worked right... A woman comes by to me, takes the string out of my mouth.. -- I fear she is going to wrap it around the toothache, of not simply jab at the cavity with her fingernail; but instead of the tooth, she wraps it around my left earlobe (I have very large and very sensitive ear lobes)... She pulls. The agony is more intense than anything I have every physically experienced.......
I black out -- without realizing it.
I have lost time. I cannot see. I don't know who I am, even. Or where. Or who I am with. ... But all of this happens in an instant....
And now we are all in another world completely.
(Apparently, this has to be a group effort -- everyone at once, or none at all.)
The scene now is one of a carnival or sorts -- everyone walking around, looking at odd things to buy, talking to each other, hitting on one another and looking for girlfriends/boyfriends, or just for sex, etc. -- but, mostly, searching for the next doorway -- how to go from here into the next world...... It was like a fair with rides, except that it was a confusing labyrinth in which no one knew quite where they were or where they were going or where they would end up, and in which each ride actually lead to another universe.......... Apparently, you couldn't predict, when doing this traveling, where you would end up; and once you were there, you couldn't be sure how to get back, or even how to get to another world... Some doorways only existed in one world, so you had to go through several others in order to find the doorway into the one you wanted to get to.....
It's all pretty hazy after this. I remember there were some sex shows, some prostitution (we paid with these gold coins -- which were apparently from one of the worlds we had visited previously, and while they were laughed at as worthless in some worlds, here they were considered extremely valuable)...
There was a little shop selling trinkets -- one of them was a large rubber centipede of sorts, which moved and felt like a real centipede on the skin. I was showing it to Abbey and trying to get her to buy it, but she was not interested (since I had suggested it -- if she had discovered it on her own, she would have bought one and excitedly shown it to everyone around).
My parents are there at some point -- and we're all trying to find our way out, to go home and sleep. Somehow we find this doorway -- seemingly just by chance. It's two glass doors -- as you might see at any mall. We can see that beyond them, outside, is our regular old world. Shane is there also (my brother) -- and for some reason we are waiting for him, and for my sister; we all want to go through at once.
Dad is buying some goddamned souvenir -- a large pillow, with the name of this carnival place embroidered on it. He finally shows up to where we are waiting, and we all go through the glass doors (though there are attractive scantily clad women, and voices on speaker, trying to tempt us to stay...).
In the car, it is unclear whether this has really happened, or if it was a dream or what... But we ALL were there, so it could not have been a dream or hallucination... Dad cites the pillow as proof -- and gets it out. Only it no longer has the embroidery on it -- it's just a pillow.
We sort of vow to simply never mention any of this again -- but we all silently look at each other in knowing agreement that it really happened.
(But, then, I should really just shut my bloody trap. Shouldn't I.)
