Dementia Dream

My lucid dreams have become lucid nightmares against my will. I don’t know where else to write about it other than my dream journal, so in my journal it’ll go. Hell, I’ll probably post this entry verbatim and see if this has happened to other people. My break time is coming to a close and I don’t have too much spare time.

Well, in that case, I’ll give you, mysterious mystery reader, an intro to lucid dreaming.
It isn’t that hard to do consistently; most of the work is keeping a consistent dream journal to help train your brain to remember what’s most easily forgotten. My dream journal is a few hundred pages long by now and it’s my favorite part of waking up in the morning these days.

What was a calm morning ritual (for a decade now, no less) has become a mental sandpaper drag of my nerves that leaves me more on edge every time I wake up, but they’ve started to get weirder than I’ve ever even heard of.

Even writing them from memory is enough to make me shiver. It’s funny, my dream journal at this point is my laptop, and sitting down to write this was like waking up after a night of playing in my dreams like they were a living sandbox. The only thing missing is the joy: the real reward of being able to relive my dreams. Now, it’s just pouring over someone else’s horrible memories. But they’re mine. They have to be.

My dreams are still lucid, but not for long. They always devolve into random scenes where I’m the lead actor for a production I haven’t been given the script for. One moment I’m in front of a crowd who are eagerly awaiting a speech, yet I’ve never given a speech in my life and have never stood in front of a crowd that huge. Next I’ll be trudging through a swamp, my legs as heavy as anvils as I drag them up and through the mud – the holes in the mud squelching as mud and water rushes to fill the holes my feet are making. In both of these scenarios I don’t know where I’m going or how I got there, yet I’m certain that it’s all as real as my waking life, and it’s vitally important that I don’t get it, whatever it is, wrong. If I’m moving in any of these dreams, it’s away from something I can’t fathom and towards a destination I’m not certain of.

These dreams, even the brief ones that are just imagery and feeling, leave me with a horrible sense of… Longing? Sorrow? Like I was doing something important, inordinately important, and was taken away just before I could do whatever it was I’m supposed to. This wouldn’t all be so bad, but something about the dreams is consistent now.

At the end of every dream, I see a man in a long brown jacket with hair covering his face. Even if the wind is blowing or it’s hot enough to burn my skin wherever I’ve ended up while asleep, he’s wearing a long jacket with his brown mangy hair covering his face. He might not be a man at all, but his hands are white, bony, and covered with hair. Just like my uncle, who I haven’t spoken to since I was a kid.

In fact he hasn’t crossed my mind since I moved into my apartment. I haven’t thought of any of my family since I’ve gotten here.

But it’s not my uncle. My uncle’s dead. My only memory of him is a polaroid that I keep in my physical dream journal from around the last time my family got together.

The last time my family got together… For some reason that even seems to be split in two as I try to recall it. I can see a firepit surrounded by white plastic chairs in some public forest, my dad grilling brats and hamburgers while my extended family talk about local legends around the fire.

We used to go to the library I’m writing in right now constantly. It’s always been my favorite place to write, even more so than my bedroom. In between paragraphs, I took a quick drive here to help clear my mind but I feel more foggy than ever. The library doesn’t feel or look like the one I’m familiar with either and I need to leave. There’s only a few minutes left before the party I need to be at and I just know everyone is going to be pissed at me if I don’t make it on time.

I can’t find anybody and the doors are still locked. The only constant is this laptop and a journal with a polaroid of a group of people that I don’t recognize with their hands on my shoulders.

I can’t read what I’ve written before; it all looks blurry and misshapen whenever I try to look at my screen for too long without typing something.

But it doesn’t feel like I’m in a dream. It hurts when I pinch myself and the numbness I feel in shaking fingers is a physical dullness and not an absence of feeling altogether. The courtyard is dark and overcast and that man is still beyond the hedges, his flowing brown hair covering his face as he waves at me and beckons me to join him… Somewhere.

I’ve picked up my laptop and moved somewhere else countless times by now. There’s always a place to sit and write, and the letters appearing on my screen are my only respite from the man in the brown coat and the emptiness of the field around me. Was it always this overcast? Has it always been raining?

I feel like I’m dying, but I’m not. At least I don’t think I am. I don’t know whether to give up or not. I remember stepping through a thick, muddy swamp to get where I am but I’m as lost as ever and the past is trying to get me while the future, both in space and time, slips from my fingers. The man is there, always, waving at me to join him.

I just started dreaming. I’ve been here forever. My skin is sloughing off of my arms as I wade through open air in a home I’ve never been in before. I’m running in a body that feels alien down a highway that can’t exist.

Yet there’s always a laptop. Always a dream journal. Always a polaroid.

Or is there? The cover of the dream journal changes, or at least I think it does. Now I’m typing on a typewriter, trying to ignore the hairy man waving slowly at me, and slowing down as I sit and try to focus on typing just to experience something that sticks. There’s not much time left.

He’s stopped waving. He’s walking towards me.

He’s running.

Credit: Chance Kimber

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