Dream Journal

Context: I used to work at MLT Creative with Billy, Patrick, Steve, and Chris.

This home was a cross between MLT Creative and a sort of retreat home. The house is of the classic haunted house style, like those in Savannah. There are several people from MLT there, including Billy. Steve was there earlier but left. Then a bunch of people that I knew (but not in waking life) arrived. It felt like I was there several days. In the beginning it was pretty normal, though I felt there was something secretive going on. The leaders — Billy and the rest — knew a lot they weren’t saying.

Here’s one scene: In the center of the house, there’s this open column that goes up all four stories. Someone builds this little one-story sculpture of two-colored metal at the bottom. But then this hefty magician-looking guy whirls to the top of it and pulls all these slivers of silver or gold metal from out of the air and extends the statue all the way to the ceiling, hovering over it. There are lots of people about and it’s generally thought of as someone’s eccentricity showing — like someone who hasn’t taken his medication. People gather to watch. Then two black-haired teens — a Filipino boy and girl — step up and pull out bows and arrows and fire them at the statue. The boy’s arrow hits this curve in the statue, which causes the arrow to curve around and fly straight up. The girl tries and tries to do the same but can’t get it to work. This sort of thing is clearly not allowed in the Home (where’d they get the weapons?) but everyone stares, transfixed. Then some leadership characters arrive and take care of the situation.

From time to time in the days following, people make mention of beasts and monsters, with one conversation where everyone admits what they shape-change into under the guise of “If you could transform into something, what would it be?” Now over the months there, in the evenings, I’d seen some odd things but never put it together — people being rushed off in fits, stories that didn’t seem like they could be anything more than stories. . . . But slowly it came together.

There was a large red-haired guy I thought of as a friend. He transformed into a large red wolf monster, but he wasn’t too dangerous. There was this guy I found interesting but hadn’t approached yet. He transformed into a horrible room-sized mass of purple hooks — like gonzo noses or bent pipes — in a dark black cloud. Both these two would transform unexpectedly. I surreptitiously discovered that Billy himself became a great white-furred yeti wolfman, but it was rare and highly controlled, as it was with most of the leaders. One leader was a woman who generally seemed like a witch. As I began to put it together, I realized that the younger people in the home showed more psychic abilities than shape-changing ones.

There was one point where I was outside the home in a parking lot. It was night. The parking lot was a huge dirt and gravel area filled with cars. I began experiencing something like a hallucination — seeing through other minds. In waking life, we see through a single wide screen located in the darkish orb of our minds. But we can add another screen above ours and see through another mind screen as well. The velvety black sphere of mind can expand and expand to contain an unlimited number of screens. Someone was leading me back to the home. I asked them: “What if someone could see through every single mind? Wouldn’t that make them crazy?” and as I spoke it the black sphere of my mind expanded exponentially, opening up mind screen after mind screen until there were hundreds, each one the size of my own usual mind screen, and each letting more light into the velvet space of my mind until it was a sort of pre-dawn bluish gray. But all the viewpoints made me reel and I closed it down. “That was psychic,” I thought. In opening all those minds, I learned much about the transformations and what goes on at night. Then I’m in a truck being driven back to the home. I take turns looking at others and seeing their psychic abilities/ailments.

The final scene is just before I awoke. Things broke down. I ended up in a swamp, just outside the Home. With me were the leaders, including Billy, the witch-lady, and someone like Patrick from MLT with a camera. Patrick accidentally dropped a bunch of coins and two yellow disks of film into the tar-like mud but only caught one disk and didn’t see the other one fall. I nabbed it. Holding it, I was able to see more pictures of what goes on at night — a taming of the chaos of the transformations. I ended up running back indoors with them where they had a discussion of what to do. Patrick noticed the missing disk and went searching for it. He had a device that could locate it — it beeped and flashed a light when he got close. I didn’t want him to discover it on me so I left it on a counter near a laptop where he did find it.

Then I remember being in a room with a friend and the witch-lady. There’s a dark bed in it, and outside it’s the darkest night. She dumps a bucket of medications and pills onto the bed, saying there are two new pills my friend should try — like DD2T and D2DT. One is in “tab” form like LSD with pictures on them. The other is a pill. I look through some of the tabs, then give him one, but I begin to have colorful LSD-like hallucinations. I basically freeze up and watch the brilliant colors melt through my mind. I reason that the tabs must have worked through simple contact.

Then I’m in a desk in a classroom next to my red-haired friend, still color-hallucinating, when something happens. The dark nighttime scene where it’s just he and I in the room begins to cross-fade into a morning-light version of the room packed with people at their desks. I am very aware of this happening. It takes maybe 5-10 seconds. I’m talking to my friend, then say “Hey, what’s this? It’s daylight. It was just night a second ago and I have no memory of what happened between then and now!” But of course nothing happened. It just changed around me. Everyone seems alive and awake, but I can see their monster shapes as faint outlines within them. Each one is different — from furry wolves or bears to the undead to bizarre twisted monstrosities. And as I watch, everyone in the room begins to change shape. Some more quickly, some less quickly. But it’s dim daylight like just after sunrise so there’s not a lot of fear. Some of the leaders bring in a blonde teenage boy in a big cage and I ask my friend about it. He says “He’s one of the dangerous ones.” The leaders change their minds at the top of the stairs and lead the cage back down, but just before he’s out of sight I see him transform into this furious wicked werewolf. I pretend not to have seen, because it seems we’re not supposed to know.

Now everyone is transforming, and I look down at my hands — they’re slightly blistered but the skin is sunken in. “Oh no! Not undead!” I think. “That’s the worst.” I try to will my skin back to normal but only succeed in stopping the transformation from progressing. I run over to the teacher for help and she looks me over and says: “It’s your name: Adams. Change it and you’ll be fine. Change it to Ben Eckerd.” My name — I’d never thought of that — like in The Addams Family. My skin was like Lurch’s. “But Eckerd?” I thought. “Like the drug store?”

References: The Addams Family is a TV show and movie franchise.