Disclaimer: The following document fragment is presented from an in-character perspective, it should not be taken as the truth of the setting.
Context: Nightmares plague both normal people and mages, but the ones experienced by the magically inclined are often quite a lot more potent and even capable to breaching into physical reality, becoming ontological existences. In this expert, we witness the retelling of exactly such an event.
In my dreams, I have seen wonders beyond anything you can witness in the Gestalt. And I have also seen horrors that I would prefer not to recall from memory. Indeed, even merely remembering them puts me at risk, I hope you understand this.
Every dreamer experiences it eventually. Those dreams that feel wrong. It goes beyond just constructing your nightmares. Or even those belonging to someone else. To me, it was always a feeling like something was worming its way under my skin. It was invasive and even vulgar. Like an act of force.
Sometimes they’ll tell you that you’re safe if you don’t go too deep. That’s a lie. It just reduces the chance they’ll find you. If you dive for long enough, often enough, it won’t matter.
There’s so many of them in there, inside of the Deep Dream. We call them monsters or beasts, but those are our ways of sticking a label on them. It helps us cope. But I’ve seen them. I’ve observed the way they act. I can’t think of them like that anymore. They are far worse.
Let me tell you about the first time I met them. I was exploring a small fragment of a city I found buried deep in the dreaming. It was slowly sinking out of memory. How appropriate was it for the whole town to be sunken in water then. Not very deeply. But I could see schools of strange little fish under my feet as I tread lightly over the still depths. It was an eerie but serene place, and I wondered how it got here. Who’s dreams or memories was it, and what purpose did it once serve.
Like I said already, I felt them come before I saw anything. Just this feeling of something crawling over and through my skin. It was a mix of goosebumps and an annoying itch. When I took a breath, it was as if something had gone off. Stuffy, unpleasant, rotting.
These weird green lights started to run just under the water’s surface and the walls of the buildings around me. I thought that whatever it could have been, I could deal with it. The sort of naivete typical of brash youth, you see.
They came from the lights, slowly pulling their bodies from the water’s surface and the stone surrounding me. Dark, barely humanoid figures with long limbs and too many fingers. Their eyes shone with the same faint yellow light. Just the tiniest dots. Little candle-like flames. And their mouths, mon Dieu, their mouths. So many teeth, all bared in sleepy, complacent smiles.
I took to the air to see what would happen. There were a lot of them, just more and more pulling themselves out of any surface. They started climbing up the buildings to reach me. Not only the buildings either, each other as well. And they were managing to climb higher and higher, but I still felt safe.
Until the clouds came, and the same eerie lights started crawling over them. They fell to the ground like rain, grasping at me while I did my best to avoid them. Smiling as they fell, sometimes landing in the water, sometimes against something hard, sometimes against each other. It didn’t seem to hurt or damage them, and they’d continue to climb.
That’s when I decided to eject.
Except that once I woke up, I could still smell that slightly rotted odor. I could see that light as I opened my eyes. And I could see one of them, pulling itself out of the wall over my bed, smiling at me.
My partner shot it, causing it to dissipate into a dark mist. I think that maybe hearing the gunshot woke me up because it all went away. The smell, the lights, the feeling of something crawling in my skin. It was gone.
Sometimes they still show up, though so far only in my dreams. I don’t let them get as close anymore. And if I ever see them… well… I go elsewhere and never return. I don’t know what they are. I don’t even know if they are following me, or if my mind is recreating them over and over. But if there is one thing I can tell you is that I’m afraid of them. It feels like they show up sooner and sooner each time, and I’ve started to sleep less, dream less. I keep a gun next to my bed. It’s not for them, though. I feel it would be useless.
It’s for me.
Esoteric Musings... 