Beyond the Dream - Dreams and Nightmares

Escapees

Flitting in and out of our awareness, we almost sometimes see them: a silence we can almost hear. Escapees from dreams move alongside us, rarer than moonshade. Some find one individual and haunt her, until her sanity is torn by attending two worlds at once. Other dreams skitter through our homes, endlessly re-enacting whatever trauma birthed them. All have their own agenda, but some are more active than others.

Dan Paddock used to dream of a meaty skeleton on a crucifix, wearing a smiley-face mask. A voice from behind the smile would pose impossible, obscene riddles--"How many you's can Hades juggle?" "What do you get when you mix your boyhood home with a leper's asshole?" Behind the mask, the voice only laughed. One night, working with a therapist, Paddock tried to confront the dream creature; he pulled away its mask, and found nothing behind it, nothing at all. But when Paddock awoke, he held in his hand a yellow, plastic mask smiling a frozen smile up his way. Ever since then, the crucified dream riddler has followed Paddock, taunting him with bizarre questions that seem almost meaningful. The dream is wearying of Paddock now, and will probably find fresh pastures soon, and another human.

In Italy, a plague victim's nightmare broke loose. What a woman--tall, absurdly fit, with a shaved head, with an endemic terror of germs and human contact. If someone touches her, she'll react violently, and to clear eyes she'll appear as a pustulent living cadaver.

Dr. Mo-Mo, a vulture-headed thought-surgeon with a broken neck, kidnaps people indiscriminately, performing thought surgery on them. He might suddenly alter their ideology, or give them the transplanted memories he stole from his last patient. Most often, he surgically extracts the memory of his operating table, and the scalpels he uses aren't physical--so his victims usually return home disoriented, having lost time, but can't even guess at what may have happened.