Beyond the Dream - Dream Landscapes

Dreamsnuff

Three dreamers began it, in the late sixties. They began to abduct the dreamselves of models, dancers, and actresses, bringing them to a pair of dreamworlds where they would be raped, tortured, mutilated, and killed, for the sadistic pleasure of their masters. The women would live on without their dreamselves, but the spark that made them human would be gone. Instead of aspiring to the role of Antigone, a young actress would find herself shooting heroin in dark corners or selling her body cheap to all takers, as part of an effort to soothe her wound, her constant sense of there being something missing.

Allen Turgow runs an acting agency in Hollywood; Pierre Moirane a school for modern dance in Salzburg; and William Templer a modeling agency in London. When they meet a woman they consider appropriate--beautiful enough, vulnerable enough, helpless enough--they leave a mark on her dreamself that will allow them to track her down in the dreamworld. The girls usually put up no fight.

Turgow, Moirane, and Templer have been creating a virtual-reality system that would allow clients to pay a large sum for the opportunity to torture and kill the dreams of these beautiful dreamers. It's not operational yet, but a number of corporations want in on the action.

There are three dream-worlds in this snuff operation, Camp SS5, the Inquisition, and the Volcanic Island of the Cannibals. In addition, there are the viewing chambers, from which the three dream masters observe the carnage.

Camp SS5 is a vast, Nazi-style realm where young women are tortured and abused. Women arrive in crates, as the cargo of a black train, hundreds of women at a time. They are promptly stripped, shaved, and showered, and then given a demonstration of authority with electric prods. They are sent to one of three destinations: the Lab, where doctors perform experimental surgery, uterus transplants with animals, and test the limits of the pain threshold with flames, blades, and electricity; the Torturers, under the guidance of black-leather lesbian dom Madame Eva, who subject them to electroshock, whippings, beatings, wire suspension, verbal dominance, and forcing them to have sex with animals; or to the Barracks, where they are mass-raped by vicious soldiers, beaten savagely, and sent to die in gas chambers or vats of boiling oil. Every now and then, some women escape from the Torturers, taking Madame Eva hostage; the escapees are unaware that this is just part of the dream script, that Madame Eva is there only so she can get her comeuppance, only so the superiority of men over women can be reinforced as the men of SS5 quickly recapture the escapees and rape them before returning them to their tortures.

In the realm known as "the Inquisition," women are tried as witches. They are asked to confess, placed on stretching racks, subjected to the thumbscrews, burned with hot pokers, burnings at the stake, tested to see if they can sit in boiling water, and their breasts are crushed in breast presses. If they aren't burned at the stake, they're given over to the care of sadistic lesbian nuns who keep them in a dungeon, brand them, cut off their nipples, until the nuns crucify them and brutally sacrifice them to the devil. Throughout all this, the wome's torturers lecture the women about purity and virtue, accusing the women of sin. The women argue, but they argue against a pointless, circular logic.

gut-munching, bloody traps, limbs sawn off, rodentsat the vagina, meals of shit, mutilations, hooks thru breasts, skinning, flaying, breasts ripped off and eaten

dartboard, poker chips, table