(no subject)

[felicula]

I need to post this nightmare I had last night. I need to get it out of my head where it keeps replaying. I don’t know if this will help, but I’m hoping it will.



It started out innocuously enough with a neighborhood game. It was a cross between tag, hide and seek, attempting at being stealthy, and various haunted season attractions. It seemed like it started on this street, but instead of Riverside to the south, there was a forest. mechanchaos, dawnstar, kolys, hbbtrbbtbcnbt, ecwoodburn, and lite were all participants, as were many folks from grade school and college. There weren’t many folks I knew from high school. We all split up and hid in the woods, attempting to catch one another and simultaneously hide from one another, as evening fell and the forest grew dark. We didn’t know all of the participants, so most of the people I’d come across or run away from were strangers.

The darker it got, I became increasingly uneasy. The nature of the game meant that if anyone or anything that wasn’t supposed to be a part of it showed up, we’d all be vulnerable to it. There was a lot of pranking going on. We must have all been high school age at the time, because we had a parental curfew to make our way back to the lean-to by what I think was midnight. I didn’t have a watch though, so when I found myself completely alone, I started getting spooked at every stick I stepped on, or every small animal that moved nearby . Of all people, Fred and George Weasly ran into me. They tried to prank me but saw how spooked I was and asked me to join them. I asked them to take me to the lean-to instead. When we got there, the twins weren’t able to sneak out again, and everyone went to bed.

With the morning light, I was older. I needed to find my way to the hospital. It seemed like it was mechanchaos with me, though he only somewhat resembled my love. The building didn’t look at all like a modern hospital. The architecture was closer to the Albright-Knox art gallery in buffalo or the Historical Society building nearby that. It also reminded me of the old psych center in Utica, though the building wasn't as wide or as deep. It was within walking distance. The building was in the middle of a block, with one side facing one street and the other side facing a parallel street. Closer to where we were walking from were a few buildings on the same street as the "back" of the hospital. Near the street was a smaller outbuilding in similar style that had storage, restrooms, and one outpatient examination room. That was between the sidewalk and the street. With the hospital on my right, there were a series of marble steps interspersed with small landings leading up to an entrance with columns going up the height of the building, which was at least 2 stories tall.

At first when I was inside, it was as if I was having a tour, except that mechanchaos wasn’t with me anymore. It occured to me that most of the hospital was subterranean. I went through a chain of tall rooms one of which had a single row of old-fashioned, cot-style white enameled hospital beds on one side of the aisle, clerestory windows high above them. On the other side of the aisle, the row of beds was missing several in the middle. Instead, there stood a doctor’s station with sink, lab counters, cupboards of medical equipment, and a medium sized projection screen mounted halfway up the wall. I must have dawdled, because the lights dimmed and a projection was shown of what looked like a vertical cross-section of a deformed toddler who’d died and was being dissected for the benefit of the doctors. The child looked fairly fetal, except that it was larger. It looked like it had never moved in the whole duration of its short life. It was congenitally missing its legs below the knees, and had obviously atrophied muscles from the waist down.

This image understandably scared and sickened me, but I was morbidly riveted to watching as they showed a new development in science that could help children born with such a problem. The disturbing thing was, the "therapy" required removing the child’s flesh down to the bone, then applying a clay-like paste of "new muscle". I must not have been alone in the room, for I asked something to the effect of "that doesn’t look like it would really work" and a garrulous man in a lab coat explained, "You wouldn’t think so, but this is one of those times when it really isn’t too good to be true." He was quite excited and enthusiastic about the procedure.

Moving on to the next room down, the ceiling was significantly lower that the prior room. There was a single white operating table surrounded by the typical operating-room lights. A couple doctors in white lab coats were leaning over a very obviously living six-month-old boy with the aforementioned condition. I noticed that he seemed to be mute as well as deformed. They didn’t bother with anaesthesia. This made me very agitated, but someone stated plainly that the child couldn’t feel / wouldn’t remember. Every fiber of my being shouted that it wasn’t true. I felt a silent scream from the child, and watched it convulse, uncontrollably though weakly, as they began. It was as if I had empathy with what it was feeling. One of the men (for some reason there were no women doctors there) made an incision at the base of the tailbone and used surgical scissors to cut the skin upward along the spine to begin pealing back his skin to remove his muscles.

I must have passed out. Even recalling the dream, as persistent as it is, I’m feeling somewhat sick to my stomach. Then it turns out I was there to be tested for something. I don’t know if that was related to the children I was seeing. My waking self thinks that I was there to be tested to learn whether I was a carrier for the condition I witnessed. Anyhow, I come to and a receptionist tells me that I need to go wait on the steps to be seen in the outbuilding near the street.

Outside it is overcast. Further down the street, I can see the manicured green of a large public park in the middle of a city. mechanchaos is there with me again. I can see people entering and exiting the hospital at regular intervals, casually. No one seems to be in a hurry. No one seems to know about the horrors that go on inside there. As I’m getting bored I feel a discomfort in the side of my right buttock. It isn’t horrid, but it doesn’t feel quite right. There is a flashback where I recall the enthusiastic, talkative doctor explaining to me that the testing requires them to put a hard, slender plastic tube into my rear all the way to the bone, then remove it in one quick pull after a time. I’m called into the outpatient examination room, and the same doctor states plainly that it’s time to remove the three tubes. Three!?! It turns out that in addition to the one in my derriere, two shorter tubes were in my right shoulder, slightly toward my back. He says one was to measure the "serum" and the other was to measure the "hurt". His expression is deadpan, and in the dream I was completely convinced that it was something that needed to be measured.

He tells me it’s time to take out the first tube, and warns me that I will experience "some discomfort and tingling, but no pain". This, of course, sends my imagination reeling over what it will really feel like. I ended up dodging every time he tried to get behind me. Then we were joined by the first female doctor I’d seen, who just happened to be hbbtrbbtbcnbt. She was a lot more calm and collected than dr. enthusiastic, which helped me relax, and somehow she made the idea of "some discomfort and tingling, but no pain" sound more realistic than it had from him.

She said "let’s take a look at the sites, shall we" and I rolled up my sleeve to see two slender, cylindrical tubes barely showing. A gentle press at the edge of each freed the tip enough for them to protrude about an eighth of an inch. Reaching around to my behind, I gently touched the edge of that one in the same way, and felt it free up similarly. Steeling myself for the worst, I actually trusted her enough to pull it out. The other doctor just scowled in the background. She went behind me and pulled. Some discomfort, yes, but then my entire right leg thrummed as if from a strong electric current down the center of it. That was definitely not comfortable… It subsided within a minute and I let her tackle the two in my arm. I figured that the longest one would be the worst, which –though ucky- was still better than I’d imagined. I didn’t get the tingle at all from the other two, and left to find mechanchaos so we could go.

At the same time that he and I caught up with one another on the steps of the hospital, a pushy hispanic woman was vociferously complaining about having to go in the back entrance. Apparently they used to be able to go in front and were no longer allowed.

At this point the dream faded, and the alarm rang to get me up for the morning.

The scariest thing about this, is that this morning I woke up with cramps in my insides. They had faded by the time I finished my shower, but left me with this uneasiness as to what it all means.

My dreams play like fucked up movies. Sometimes the detail I get is overwhelming, and not always in a good way.