Terror Engine

Well. One thing I'm certain we can agree on is that what's done is done. I have batttlegrounds ahead of me, broken light poles and the rest. If we could agree on this one thing then I'd think the rest ought to come easy. Togetherness. Up there through the grey mist I sense a shadow! Darkness in there. A spectacle of a door, and what’s more a door handle, all gemstones with their obtuse angles of power. I ought to grab that thick studded door handle with both hands and see myself in. They have hope in there, that eternal other side. Theres gladness for sale and top-to-bottom pleasantries. I really could see myself in every reflection of that door handle. But I felt better in the mist, it makes sense now to stick around here in the mist, for it’s not a 2d rendering, it's real mist with directional light. So long as one has the processing power it’s not a bad place to be.

The last time I had one of the waking nightmares was early spring of last year. We had just taken a terrifically stressful journey to LA. Drove the 22 hours straight no stopping, couldn't, no time. Except for when we got stopped by the alien demon detective wearing a Border Patrol uniform. He questioned us in every direction and left us questioning whether he did. But besides that we just drove and drove until we got there, and then we built and built all night long. Everything was going pretty good until I had to make 4 boxes out of plywood to be used as bases for some clothing racks. It was all downhill from there. Did our best but it wasn't enough. Had arrived around midnight and finished around 6, got breakfast and then went to the Airbnb, so completely drained, feeling ridiculous in a funny, deathly way.

Knew something was up even as I fell asleep. Sleep is my great love. I find it to be the Absolute Consolation and the remedy for existence generally. I can fall asleep in most situations within twenty minutes. Deeply familiar is the heaviness of passing into sleep, the gentle falling away from the drastic and violent world of the intellect. There are no questions there; or maybe all questions fall happily to the ground-floor of the psyche, a place where nothing needs answering and consciousness can be chaotic without the violence. But above all it is an experience of going down.

The nightmare realm can then be categorized as a floating up, an awful weightlessness, no sure footing, no power, no reassurance of gravity. In the more tangible of the nightmares this was characterized by a simple and horrific hovering, perhaps 20 inches above the ground, while everyone else is stuck firmly to the Earth. They can run from the big scary men while I flap my legs pathetically. In the untangible ones, the real terrors, my horror occured in space, awful infinite space. Those ones left me afraid to go to sleep for months.

So I knew something was up when I felt weightless—more psychologically than physically. Bodily I was all weight and collapsed heavily into the bedding. The nightmare was: I’m attempting to do simple carpentry—constructing a box from plywood—and I am trying to measure a triangle. But geometry wasn’t working. Not like I was getting the math wrong, it was that math actually didn’t exist. The actual basic physics of reality had changed. And this was so terrifying that I felt like a desperate animal trying to save its life, which in this moment meant I needed to wake up. I really thought I would die if I didn’t escape this nonsense dimension I was in. To get back to the living room couch I laid on as a child, bored numb in the summertime when school was out, staring at the curtain rails and fantasizing, what if it’s an illusion that anything at all is separate, and in fact everything overlaps, and nothing can actually can be measured because it could just as well be defined as something else? But in this awful nightmare it’s true. Nothing can be measured or defined as anything. Not intellectually; literally. So I thrashed like an animal in my dream trying to wake up, to get back on the couch where it was just daydreaming. But the worst possible thing happened. I woke up and the nightmare wasn’t over. I laid moaning in that white and grey and beige bedroom and literally could not make sense of anything. As though my body along with the sensory organs were taking in data, but the cerebral cortex was dead. Not even asleep, it had given up.

This was perhaps the sixth or seventh time it’s happened. I wake up and the nightmare doesn’t end. And, just like the so called paranoid schizophrenic who can recognize that the delusions and hallucinations are not part of any shared reality, reality they are nonetheless.

I’ve tried to write about the experience of the nightmares many times. But it’s a bit of a paradox to express it in words, which exist as individual glyphs of meaning working in harmony to produce predictable, meaningful outcomes. The essential experience of the terrors is one of disjunction and its intersection with the unfathomably large. See the worst of them, the one that really sticks with me a decade later, was of a machine, a sort of engine, that was enormous, far bigger than any object one could hold in their mind, the size of many planets. The horror of it was a combination of its cosmic size and an instantaneous event that is the end of everything, sort of a reverse big-bang situation. To this day I have an underlying megalophobia, not consciously but below the waters, triggered by certain words or phrases that bring to mind the extremely large and the infinite. When this animal fear is disturbed it leaps from its resting place in my chest, pouncing up through my neck into my head, and a ferocious battle takes place in a fraction of a second for which being has control over my brain.

I’m happy to report that I have an undefeated record in these battles—though I’ve often wondered if a day will come when I have to vanquish the terrible Universe-Killer-Machine once and for ever.

A psychotherapist told me that this was probably not the case, and that these things generally do not come back later in life, but I feel as though I have unfinished business with the Universe-Killer Engine. So we’ll see about that.

Happy new year. Thanks for reading. I’m back baby. 24 seems to me a very cosmic number and I feel huge things on the horizon. What a time to be alive.