puddledreams

[puddledreams]

uwaaahhh... last night my dream was awful lol. I like how my dreams are either like "Oh no! I ate some delicious cake my mom made for me but it turns out it had GLUTEN in it! Rats!! Now I'm going to have a tummy ache!!!!" or "You're a young child at a summer camp. You're a bit weaker than your peers, when you were a kid the bones in your feet fused oddly so you could never run or play like everyone else. You're weak. The other children smell it on you. Kids at the camp start disappearing into the woods. The only friends in your cabin vanish and you're left with no one. One of the counselors uses the isolation to start raping you. You begin painting watercolor illustrations of twisted up bodies together, horrid amalgamations of both children and adults fused by their skin. Someone in the woods starts whispering to you, but you can never make out their face. You remember that one of the counselors has a gun hidden in the nurses office. You steal it. You go back to your cabin and strip nude on the bed. You put the barrel in your mouth. You pull the trigger. They find you like that, alone. You're always alone."

[puddledreams]

February 17th 2024

Dreamt last night that my dad (who was not my dad and I was not myself) had gotten in trouble for getting drunk and killing my mom back when I was 12. I was a white male in my mid-to-late 30’s and I had a pretty normal life, even after such a turbulent childhood. I worked in a kitchen for a bakery and dealt mostly with the hot foods for the cafe instead of the pastries (soups, sandwiches, things of that nature). My dad had gone to jail briefly for his negligence (the details of the murder were unclear to me but I was aware that it was determined to be an accident on his part, though his alcohol problems were definitely to blame) and he had been out for some time.

I had a weird sort of relationship with him, he scared me as much as he intrigued me. He would call me up while I was at work and drunkenly beg for me to come back home to him, tell me I wasn’t visiting enough and he was lonely without me. Making it out like I was letting him rot or punishing him for what had happened with my mom. I recalled vaguely that he would beat me sometimes growing up, make me feel small and meek, but also at times our eyes would meet; and something would be said there, in between the lines. A curious little thing he never fully gave into. I wanted to know exactly what that was even years later, well into my adulthood, and I found myself drifting back to him time and time again trying to figure it out.

I kept finding ways to connect intimacy to the abuse and would get goosebumps when he would call me drunk. I craved the way he would wail on me as a kid because it meant hands touching me, it meant pain morphed to pleasure, but it also made me sick to my stomach because it hurt. Everything about him hurt me but he was such a sad excuse for a man, it was impossible not to feel bad for him. He wasn’t evil, I was evil for craving it. He had mellowed out so much with his old age, he wasn’t that same stone eyed drunk, even if he was equally as weepy- so why did I wait so patiently for his call, mind askew as I imagined what it might be like to be 10 again and at the beckon of his belt.

I wanted him to love me in any that he could I guess. Even if it hurt. On my work breaks I would sit outside on the back patio with a cigarette, facing the parking lot and would listen to his voicemails over and over again, feeling heady and flushed and sick. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, how many times do I have to say it? Why are you still punishing me for the past. Do you really think you’re a victim? Do you want me to suffer for the rest of my life? I’m your dad, just come home. Just come home for the weekend and be with me. I know you’re preoccupied and busy with your dismal ‘perfect’ life but you’re still my son. Don’t just leave me here after all I’ve done for you. Call me fucking back. Just call me back. Please. Please.”

ohhhh how good it might be to ruin us…..

[puddledreams]

DREAM LOG

January 6th 2024

Last night I dreamt of an old abandoned house where a skeleton woman was molding something out of ash and bits of burnt wood. She had trash built around her much like a nest and the inside of the building was molded and grey. Over the course of a few months, she licked at the ash to moisten it, and slowly it began to look like small children. The more she did this, the more her flesh became plump. She went through a transitional period where all she was was merely a stack of gore and organs moving about.

She created two children, a tiny boy and a tall girl, and when she was done she looked relatively normal herself. The boy was pale with a large bulbous head and puffy eyes, and he only came to about 3 inches in height. The girl was extremely pale but otherwise alright; if not a bit oddly skinny. Despite the children just having been born, mother took it upon herself to take them on a trip. She wore pearls and an old fashioned cardigan and smelt of stagnant water and ash.

They got into a car and begun driving, the land around them desolate and wide. There were translucent statues placed about with fleshy organs visible inside them. Mother clicked her tongue and mumbled that being in one of those had to be the worse kind of torture. The thought that the eyes inside the plastic were conscious and seeing was a horrible thought.

Finally they arrived at what appeared to be a victorian type boarding school out in the boons. There were lots of smartly dressed women (though waterlogged and gray) and small, malformed looking children running about drinking murky lemonade. It was then that I became Big Sister and brushed my Baby Brother's hair aside. His head was so large that it seemed hard for him to move at times.

The women gathered us all up and told us it was time to play a game. The boys were sent to hide and it was the girls job to seek. I thought, what an impossible thing, such a vast world I had yet to know; but quickly it became apparent that I could smell the scent of the weak.

“That’s it,” mother coaxed, upon seeing my nose twitch at a small breath of wind. “not your eyes, use your nose.”

I did as told, my legs uneven but my stride as confident as ever, winding through the beige tents in the dead courtyard that housed games and shaded areas for the women to drink sullied water in cracked china. My feet crunched in yellow grass and the sky was a constant sheet of gray, I watched as the other girls skulked about and felt my stomach harden to a pit.

“Found you.”

I entered a tent and saw my small, impossibly cute lump of a brother, playing with toys with the other deformed boys. He giggled delightfully at being found, an ever trusting look fancied my way, and it was then that I knew I was meant to eat him up whole.

I took his small hand into mine, trying to ignore the sound of other girls consuming their weaker siblings, the echo of cracking charcoal and soot being gnashed by rotted teeth faint through the shuddering breeze that tussled the barren trees. I hid Baby Brother away, in a closet in the manor on a bed of wool blankets and cloth before rightfully confronting Mother who was sitting at a fancy white table with a clutter of women.

“What is this?” I demanded, “this is sick, to eat your family up like that. Why make it a game? For your enjoyment? So you can watch?”

The other women seemed shocked by my insolence but mother simply licked her at smiling black lips and set her cup down with an unfathomable amount of grace. It was only then that I realized that all the adults here consisted purely of women.

“The males of our kind are weak but they can make us strong when eaten. It’s simply how it is, darling.” she explained. “Don’t you want to grow up?”

Grow up? Is that what there was to do? Somehow the thought was appealing and I got the sense that our kind was a special kind; and perhaps it was a bit uncommon in this world. This world that felt strange, even though I had only lived in it for a day. How was I to know right or wrong, good or evil, when my heart had taken its first beat just earlier that morning? But somehow despite this I knew, and it made me feel very special indeed, and I knew that being special meant I could make my own choices no matter what anyone else said… So I decided that I would protect what was kind to me, no matter the circumstances and whatever I might be (a monster, a threat, a ghoul) because I just couldn’t fathom it in any other way.

I loved my Baby Brother, soot and all.

[puddledreams]

I dreamt a lot last night but what I remember the most was getting shot.

In my dream I sat in the passenger seat of my car, parked somewhere near the mall I used to frequent in my teens. I was cold and my windows were a bit frosted, my breath coming out in fluffy white billows in front of my face. I could see some sort of commotion with the police happening a few feet away from the mall entrance, but a news truck was obscuring my vision. No one seemed particularly panicked so I wasn’t either, lookie-loos moseying around and people returning to their cars after a day of casual shopping. Right by my hood a group of 3 boys leered and stood on their tippy toes, trying to get a peak as they shoved at each other playfully.

I rolled my eyes, though admittedly I was curious too, before rummaging in my purse looking for my keys. I was positioned a bit awkwardly in my seat as my door had been frozen shut by the cold and I had to squeeze in my way from the back, something that had happened in real life a few weeks ago when a storm hit Oregon. Just as I found them, the metal crisp in my hand, I heard one of the boys scream something.

“Shooter!! Someone’s shooting!!”

It happened quickly, half a cognitive thought- an echo of a ‘what?’-as I processed what was said, a kid knocking his hip into my car as he ran past with others in a panic. I suddenly heard a noise, like when you pop open a bag of chips with too much air, as a bullet whizzed right through the metal of my door and hit me directly in my side; right through my arm and presumably into my chest. I don’t know much about the body, but I knew a chest hit had to be fatal.

It was terrifying and I instantly knew I was shot, though I could feel no pain, just a horrible radiating numbness. I could no long move, slumped to my side and heavy like a doll, hearing people scream in fear and seeing their foggy outlines run by. I wanted to yell out for someone or better yet, hide somewhere where I couldn’t be struck by a bullet again, but all I could do was sink further into the numbness, my body lame and useless and my mind in a terrible panic. I was alone and dying in the cold, wishing I had even the strength to tilt my head to the side to see how much blood had leaked out. My last thought before I woke was that even a cop holding me might’ve been nice, and dying so afraid and alone couldn’t possibly be fair.

SOMETHING SOMETHING GUN CULTURE IN AMERICA?

[puddledreams]