Monsters are Coming
I'm chained to a hill.
Flat on my back, arms splayed, tied down by chains or rope. I'm unable to move.
It's dark, pitch black, save for the light from a streetlamp high overhead, tuned to its dimmest setting.
Monsters are coming.
Lots of them, a variety pack in all shapes and sizes. I can't see them, but I can hear them, shuffling toward me at a pace that feels imminent.
I'm exposed on the slope; no trees, no rocks, nothing to hide between. I'm strapped down specifically for them.
I call out to nobody, shrieking as loudly as I can.
For a second or two after I'm shaken awake, I can still hear the shriek. It's coming through me, and then from me.
The scream I wake to is a guttural, inhuman moan, as if there's a cloth stuffed in my throat. As if another being has inhabited me and is trying to crawl out.
It's so absurd, so thoroughly ridiculous, that fits of laughter arise, as uncontrollable as the dream itself.
This is the first dream.
Initially the dreams were rare. A year - maybe longer - between them.
Enough time to forget until one happened again.
Rare became occasional.
I'm standing by a drain. A bug climbs from it, a dozen legs balancing an almond-shaped body. Its antennae twitch. It's larger than any bug I've seen, and it's growing.
From its back, a strip of white begins to foam. It's a mohawk of fear, poisonous and threatening; it rises like white moss bubbling. The bug begins to move. Toward me.
I shout at it, but this only serves to wake other bugs who peer from the drain.
It's at my legs. The foam is bristling.
I'm woken squealing like a stuck pig, high-pitched and garbled.
In the twilight between sleep and waking, the laughter begins immediately.
Sometimes the monsters won't show themselves.
I am on the floor, only able to see the crack of a door being pushed open. What's behind it must be stopped from entering. I push but, from the floor, have no leverage.
Eventually the door is forced open and a pair of gigantic boots enter the room. I cannot see above the ankles. I berate the boots, "HEY!" over and over, as if to say I know you're here, and I'm here, too.
I'm tapped until I wake, choking a baritone, the sound of Tuvans making throat music.
I have nothing against monsters and don't live in great fear. I don't simmer with anxiety. As a kid I ate pickles before bed to create vivid dreams - I haven't done that in decades.
I dream other dreams, but these specific dreams seem to be a catalog of their own.
There's a pattern to them: fear, shouts, then being woken to noises that break the dream barrier.
The dreams now arrive with increasing frequency.
Last night I had two of them.
The first opened in the theatre of war, a desolation of crumbling buildings obscured by smoke and steam rising from dirty pools of water. There's a shape watching me, peering above a wall. It's a silhouette the color of charcoal, its head wide, shaped like an oblong bell curve. Its eyes blink, blindingly white and symmetrically round, curious.
I call out as a warning to others, but my pleas are lost in the wind. The silhouette wants me quiet.
It wants me to stop, and it stares at me from behind the wall.
The other
dream
I've
already forgotten.
People who smoke DMT sometimes describe encounters with similar entities: machine elves, insect-like aliens, reptilian beings. Recurring themes with substantial variations, as if another dimension awaits, with only a drug able to turn the key in the secret door.
I don't smoke DMT, so maybe the dreams are just one of my 'tisms. Maybe I'm just me, unique, my own little flower, like someone born with a third nipple or the ability to smell colors.
Whatever the reason, the monsters seem like they're here now.
Arriving often enough to be a signal that demands to be heard.
I don't go to bed fearing they'll arrive, but I wonder if it angers them that I laugh when I wake.