Rants & Essays

Death By Nightmare

By Marcus Pan

So, something weird happened last night, early in the AM. First off, a lot of you will be relieved and happy to hear that I actually bedded down for the night at a decent hour and one that afforded me more sleep than I usually get (yet less than most people...go figure).

Anyway, for the first time in something like 5 or 10 years or so I remembered what I dreamt that night. I won't bore you with the details about it...as it involved vampires and that's a taboo subject here :P, and besides the only portion of it I want to talk about is the very end.

The dream ended thusly...my heart stopped. And I died. Now I'm sure I died in this dream because I felt my heart stop beating and then everything went black in this dream and I was floating as a non-substance somehow in just a void somewhere...and I felt myself fading. So in order to not fade away to wherever I had to start running my mind as fast as possible, and start thinking monotonous things just to NOT disappear. Kind of like when there's an accident and the parameds try to keep a person talking while they get them out of whatever they're in. I had to keep thinking like that. Things like, "I'm Marcus Pan. I work for Quantex. I have two systems to build tomorrow. I have to go to my lab. I have to work on Legends. I have to do this or that or..." just keep running off at the mind because it felt as if I were to stop...I would disappear.

Now, another thing. I was dead...obviously. Now I KNEW I was dreaming...because I knew that vampires aren't real. I was dreaming and this was solid fact...or as solid as it could be in a dream. I remember when I was many years younger, about a decade...I dreamed regularly then. If I was able to determine I was in a dream through some series of events that was just logically impossible or simply ludicrous I'd laugh, know I was dreaming, and request of myself that I wake up. Which I would.

But this time that didn't work. This time when I asked of myself to wake up...I just floated. And when I would wonder why I wasn't waking up I'd start to fade away again and I had to start thinking strings of thoughts again. So it would go something like this...and here it's probably going to look and sound absolutely stupid, but I'm trying to get this out as flowingly as it happened in this black void.

"I'm Marcus Pan. I work for Quantex. I have two systems to build tomorrow. Kim needs those UK computers out. Jessica will kill me if I'm not in the lab tomorrow. I don't have time for this....WAKE THE FUCK UP!"

[pause...wait...no waking]
[fade]
[fade]
[fade]

"NO! I'm Marcus Pan. I have to work for Quantex. I have two systems to build tomorrow. Kim needs those UK computers out. Jessica will kill me if I'm not in the lab tomorrow. I don't have time for this....WAKE THE FUCK UP!"

[pause...wait...no waking]
[fade]

[repeat about a half dozen times for what felt like a LONG time but was really about ten or fifteen minutes I figure]

Whatever this dream was, it held me away from consciousness somehow and I had to mentally WORK to break through and out and back up into waking. Eventually I did. And when I did I was shaken up enough and felt weirded out enough that I had to get out of bed, leave Laura sleeping next to me, and go walking around the apartment a bit, have a cigarette, and think about what the FUCK that was about. I guess it was about 3AM then. And then I went back to sleep figuring it would be gone by morning.

But it's not. And the vision of how BLACK it was there where I couldn't wake up though I KNEW it was a dream is still here. And I don't like it.

I asked some of you once in other dream-related threads if some of you thought I might be missing out on something by not dreaming (or at least remembering them at all) since I was much younger. No, I don't think I have been missing anything worthwhile. One of my greatest fears is not being in control of myself or of a situation that can effect myself. And I wasn't.