RKNet Blog... Thing

The bathroom was a terrible place to be. All the stall doors were slightly ajar and the terrible placement of the typical office fluorescent lighting gave the shadows life that they certainly wouldn’t have possessed on their own. I kept turning back in terror from what I assumed was a malevolent face in the handicapped stall. The wall by the sink provided me something to look at to occupy my mind, but this too became a source of vile fascination. Whether the talk was all in my mind or if there was someone there I do not know. Kindly and reassuring it spoke to me of demons, and angels, and paths to power sometimes being fraught with dangerous-looking things. There was no need to worry though of course, not if you were prepared.
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So I remember just enough of my dreams to merit writing them down. The reason I remember is because I was awakened by a combination of the cat scratching loudly at the door for breakfast, and the very last bit of the dream (which I’ll get to momentarily).

Going in list form because I don’t necessarily remember big details.

• Several people were standing outside the mill building where I work, and I didn’t really recognize most of them.
• I seemed to be viewing this through the eyes of a girl who was on the ground, but was also the “camera’s” focus at times.
• People were throwing small objects on the ground with video game-esque results. Items like cherry tomatoes tossed to the ground to be mixed with something I think they called bitter acid. Where it then turned into 3 or 4 seperate items (one of which included a whole smaller tomato and a somewhat squished smaller tomato).
• Girl-on-the-ground seemed to be our alchemist here. She also seemed to be captive by a large, angry, rather unattractive man.
• It appeared she was voluntarily mute. She defied him by not giving him the right results of the tomato alchemy, or handing him something that wasn’t what he wanted.
• Somewhere in here, she apparently felt as though she could make an escape, so she did. However, it appeared that at least one of her legs didn’t work so she was dragging herself as fast as she could by walking forward with her hands and dragging her body behind. (Which she was good at.)
• Little moments betray that her legs do work, at least some of the time. It’s never understood why she doesn’t walk or run.
• She flees across the bridge and over into the other part of the mill building, which seems to be part mill building and part fancy house… thing.
• He is following inexorably behind, taking a kind of Pepe LaPew approach, quick but not so fast that she doesn’t have an opportunity to feel like she mgiht actually be able to hide somewhere.
• A door looking like an understair (no stairs there, though) cabinet has a knob low enough for her to reach without getting up. She looks around for her pursuer, and not seeing him or hearing him close enough to tell for sure where she went, she drags herself quickly into the nook and shuts the door.
• Despite a lack of lights it’s not totally dark in the cubby. She drags herself to the far corner, behind where the door opens into the space (even though I think she opened it outward) and gasps raggedly, trying to catch her breath and be silent at the same time.
• Moments later the door opens inward, and his face slides in, turning immediately to face her in her corner.
• A little fuzzy here but no force seemed to be used to extract her from the space.
• Trying smaller doors within the cabinet revealed someone’s pantry to her.
• Vauge confusing images of urban exploration type areas go here.
• There was some kind of gathering to which both Ugly Guy and Crawling Girl were to attend.
• There was a decent-sized audience, in a hotel conference room sort of setup, with fancy dinner chairs. I think it might have been a dress-up film affair.
• People start smoking in the back of the room. This causes a wave of coughing to ensue and complaints to be issued.
• At some point in all this, A HORRIBLE CLOWN MONSTER APPEARS! (FIGHT, ITEM, MAGIC, RUN)
• People seemed to scatter. There was much mayhem. Some Beetlejuice-esque antics, with items turning traitor and scaring people witless.
• Fuzziness here.

And of course, the last thing I remember before I woke up. The girl who had been dragging herself by her arms was bying taunted by this horrible clown beast. (Who was visible, invisible, in other forms, and generally everywhere at once, I might add.) He was trying very hard to make her afraid, weak and helpless. Part of what prevented him from attacking her outright was it seemed she needed to make a wish first. Once that wish was fulfilled, he would have his horrible, monstery way with her. Slowly, slowly she stood up on her own, trying to be steady and collect her thoughts.

Friends who had been run off the scene because the buggy thing they were in ran amok with them in it, finally came back on the scene after regaining some measure of control.

They arrived just in time to see the following:
The girl stammered “I wish… I wish… I wish…. I wish I’d stop saying I wish.”
Her eyes widened with horror, and frantically she searched about for help.
“NO! That wasn’t me who said that! He made me say it! He was moving my mouth!”
As she says this, the horrible (total Stephen King’s mini-series Tim Curry style IT) clown beast is revealed to indeed be holding her jaw, as he’s practically wrapped around her like a cloak.
These friends look on in horror, as the horrible clown monster pulls back his lips to reveal jagged, shark-like teeth, which he then sinks into the back of our heroine’s neck greedily.

(I seem to recall at some point there was a mention of it being more of a “mana” stealing, rather than a devouring, so this was more of a vampire type bite, chomping in to get the best blood flow going.)

Then I woke up and the cat was beating the crap out of my bedroom door. Then end.

I think I’ve been listening to too much Röyksopp lately. For context, I’ve found myself highly enamored of a certain track off their album The Understanding called “What Else Is There?“. It features vocals provided by Karin Dreijer Andersson from an electronica duo called The Knife (whose album Silent Shout has also been on repeat a lot for me) and I have fallen in love with her unique and expressive voice.

That being said, on the with the description. I was in this housing area, all cheap houses, run down and small. Looking on from a short distance, I saw a huge explosion rip through 3 or 4 of the buildings, seemingly at random. I looked to my companions (who defy description right now, just some people, I can’t remember) and ran towards the damage. I’ve dreamt almost this same thing before, I know it. Sudden fire in run down houses, or an explosion followed by fire. It was chewing up the old, dry buildings.

Then it all reset. Same place, no explosion, none of that. I rode in the mind of someone sneaking through these projects, tiptoeing by back doors and noticing as they all swung open by themselves. Screen doors, all, and cats of different kinds peering out from kitchens or living rooms. Sometimes there were people within, all walking away, not noticing that the door was open. The creeping person was a thief and although no entry was made into any of these houses, the big black bag s/he carried filled up. A small rip showed a blue and white striped piece of terry cloth sticking out. Perhaps the dishes wrapped in the towel to prevent noise? Who knows?

Finally coming to an unremarkable house near the end of the rows, the thief enters and discovers an old man and a fluffy white cat. There’s a moment of mutual surprise, then the cat makes a mad dash for the open door, and the thief follows, trying to track it down through these houses while still remaining silent and unseen, still carrying the full bag. The cat dashes under buildings built off the ground, and finally the thief is able to cut it off at an awkward turn near a wall and snatches the beast up, dragging it back to its master.

There’s a short conversation after that, and the old man says he’s not going to rat out the thief. The thief cautions that there may be some dangerous activity.

Cut to a group of about five or six people. Storm clouds are high, thready, and getting darker, turning the sky to a psilocybin vision of broadly patterned marble. The people are holding onto what appears to be the female end of extention cords, which are all tangled together and tied to a central location, looking to be pipes coming out of one of the houses. They stretch the cords into the road, fanning out in an uneven manner over about a 180° area. A stroke of lightning comes down slowly, almost like a weighted streamer: straight down, but wavering in the air. It is viewed from the eyes of one of the group before it hits them. The power goes through the cords and infuses the others. One by one they begin shouting, calling down the lightning on themselves, despite the presence of others on the scene insisting they stop (but too afraid to act).

There was only one left, hesitant, stupid, afraid of the lightning. The others had disappeared, disintegrated or wandered off or something. The one left walked away. It may have come back to the explosion at that point but I don’t recall.

Other points which are unclear to me now:

• Pulling a large revolver on someone who wanted to come into a house where I lived. It was large and dull and akward.
• Yelling and throwing things at a group of young, grinning hooligans who heaped things in the middle of the yard and doused it in gasoline, intending to set fire to the whole property
• Counciling a very angry young man, sharing tales with him. We were both in Civil War era dress. I slowly went from persuading him to stay, to comforting, to seducing. Anything to distract him from this blind fury.
• A master/husband type figure appearing during the “seduction” phase, unperturbed by the scenario.

Also, for your convenience here are the lyrics to “What Else Is There?”

It was me on that road
But you couldn’t see me
Too many lights out, but nowhere near here

It was me on that road
Still you couldn’t see me
And then flashlights and explosions

Roads end getting nearer
We cover distance but not together

I am the storm I an the wonder
And the flashlights nightmares
And sudden explosions

I don’t know what more to ask for
I was given just one wish

It’s about you and the sun
A morning run
The story of my maker
What I have and what I ache for

I’ve got a golden ear
I cut and I spear
And what else is there

Roads and getting nearer
We cover distance still not together

If I am the storm if I am the wonder
Will I have a flashlights nightmares
And sudden explosions

There’s no room where I can go and
You?ve got secrets too

I don’t know what more to ask for
I was given just one wish

Note: These are just what I found online, I know there is a verse or two missing and maybe a few lines wrong. Care to help me flesh that out?

Last night and well into today has been a flight of extreme fantasy, not all of which was enjoyable, but all of which has left me thinking. Unfortunately I’ve waited too long to write this all down, so some details will inevitably be lost in the rapid cognition thought-shuffling of daily life.

At some point, I woke up and said “Ok, that’s it, no more Howlings before bedtime.” The series of dreams felt like a test. Felt like a warning as well. A test of my mental strength and a warning not to meddle carelessly in affairs which are far larger and more powerful than I have previously taken them to be. It’s true, all throughout the documentary by Poke Runyon, discussing the methods by which they employed the Goetic techniques to summon, and to scry, I (drunkenly) scoffed at the notion of some of the scraping and bowing, and alternately at the idea of binding and domineering these unseen spiritual forces. (It should be noted that while the Goetia is amply available[pdf], I have yet to read the work itself.) While reading Howlings, likewise I took a skeptical attitude towards some of the methodology, considering it to be somewhat overcautious and paranoid. Some have argued that the Goetic (among other) spirits are sovereign beings, and some have argued that these works are exercises in confronting one’s own inner labyrinth. (Think highly aware self-hypnosis and play acting as a form of therapy or mental/spiritual growth, if you will.) Either way, those that have studied these things have preached caution, and some have issued threatening warnings regarding the dangers of treating these things lightly and carelessly.

I have always been a skeptic of sorts, and perhaps a bit overeager and zealous when it comes to the thought of finding proofs to these claims and methods. Last night’s dreams felt like a deeply detailed experience designed to caution me against doing or saying things which may ultimately land me into very hot water.

Yet I digress, these dream logs aren’t intended for me to get into the whys and the wherefores, but to chronicle the dreams themselves for future reference and entertaining reading.
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I do most of my dreaming in the morning. That’s just the way it is.
And this morning, I did a LOT of it. Here’s a brief overview:

• Dreamt my dad was still alive because he’d been sent on a Top Secret Mission that involved faking a serious illness, but wound up being marked down as faking his death. I had a hard time coming to grips with any of that, but was still overjoyed to see him. Mom gave him shit for still smoking.
• I dreamt about participating in naked wrastling and sloppy makeouts with some hot girl. The boyfriend was supposed to get involved but he’d wandered off to do something-or-other. A co-worker tried to hump me instead and I politely declined his offer. Still weird. Boyfriend, girl and I determined we should grab a patio lounge chair and run off into the woods since there were so many people around.
• There were several co-worker type people floating around in this unfamiliar house environment. Two of which were apparently dealing coke. I tried to make suggestions on how they could improve their business - but it felt really wrong.
• Meanwhile, my pink nail on my left hand had duplicated itself, and the original nail underneath was all loose, like a tooth, and connected to the underside of the new one by what seemed like really thin clear fibers and pus only. GROSS. I pulled it out, and the finger immediately seemed mostly normal. Still kinda infected looking though.

I know there was more than that but I gotta run and it’s all I remember!

Let it never be said that Twitter is a useless web app. Thanks to Twitter friend doshdosh, I’ve discovered an article which may assist me in refining my goals for this website, such as they are, and increase readership and hopefully feedback as well.

The article on problogger.net is titled From 0 to 2000+ Subscribers in 120 Days. The guest author, Tina Su, writes a blog called Think Simple Now and her passion is helping people improve their lives. The article details the steps she took to make her website successful, and they are all very positive, realistic and easy to remember.

With the assistance of this well written guide, I would like to take this blog, this site, this project and really turn it into something worth visiting, bookmarking, and subscribing to within the next 120 days. I have touched upon this goal before a few months ago but never really followed up. It’s one of the challenges with A) not having concrete goals and B) maintaining a more than full time job.

Hopefully with the help of some of my other authors, and friends who desire to do creative things and use the web for distribution, this site can become a bustling hub of super fun times for all who pass by! Won’t you tag along? It will be quite the wild ride.

The man was busily filling out forms. he had to complete two of them and fax them back to headquarters or he wouldn’t get a lick of benefits. The first one done he slammed the number into the keypad and fed the forms, all at once (beige, pink and blue, as each had to be in triplicate, naturally) through the vertical fax slot next to the pad.

Frowning his way through the second set of forms he looked up through the clear door to his left to see someone behind a desk saying something about preparing for landing. Indeed, gravity felt a little bit off and there was that sickening feeling of his internal organs shifting, like going downhill on a bike really fast.

Not much time then. Some other vague announcement, and as he was feeding the second set of forms, it was announced that landing was nearly completed, and only a select few were going to be let off. The rest were to be left behind on the ship.

NO! was the first and only frantic thought that ran through his mind as the door to his empty holding area whooshed open. Apparently there was to be free run of the ship, even if they weren’t going to be let off. Surely there was a solution here, a way out. Either way, there would be limited resources and securing a position without… hurting someone would be challenging unless it was done soon. No time to consider the inevitable, really.

Scurrying about proved useless. The place was as vague his forms and featureless as his containment area.

A panel opened up to the right. What is this?! A face appeared and disappeared from this opening quickly enough to cause some serious consternation regarding an early departure of sanity. Not a good sign, the only thing to be done was investigate, obviously.

The underbelly had ostensibly more to offer, although that really wasn’t saying much. Pipes and grey corridors, some blinking lights. Not much of a shift from the clean powder blue, spotless glass, and white ceilings. It was a start, nevertheless.

…….
and that’s the last I remember.
There were other dreams about plane rides, some things involving cephalopods that it’s apparently better not to share, uhm, and some other stuff I don’t really remember.

Imagine all the people you know, not as people, but as collections of information, like wikipedia articles of their own lives. Written on what they’ve done and where they’ve been and who they know by everyone else in the world, and constantly updating as their life goes on and more events occur. Now that you’ve quantified this person, it’s easier to detach yourself from the concept that this face is this person, it’s easier to start drawing lines between people, easier to make predictions about the future when it’s all simple facts and figures. The concept of prophecy makes so much more sense when you detach the humanity from the human.

There was so much more to my dreams, but quite frankly I just don’t remember them. I forced myself to remember that, although the details aren’t quite all there from last night. That’s what I get for not just getting up and writing it down right then. I was, however, worried that since I had gone to bed so early I would just go ahead and wake up too much to get back to bed. Starting the day at 2am is a little too early bird for the likes of me.

Man alive is it hard to get a good night’s sleep before a big day! First I ended up staying up until 3am following this Rackspace situation. (And because I couldn’t help following the most traffic I’ve ever had here to date thanks to links from places I’d never dreamed I’d appear. As I told a friend: I’ve died and gone to nerd heaven!)

Then the nightmares started up. I was in this huge, old house. I’d say about three stories, and it was part of a complex of buildings. (This has to be a nod to my friend Amy’s house, since she lives in an old farm complex where the barn et al have been converted to living space.) The family I was with seemed to be a variable cast of mother, father, and various female siblings. The family seemed to live in fear of some horrible spectre, despite the fact that I don’t really recall any hauntings, per se, up until the end.

I - the variable I, always a different character whose head I see through - was trying to talk to the youngest girl, a skinny thing in a white nightgown that would have been at home on Peter Pan’s Wendy. Her dark, wild hair and tired eyes told tales that her mouth did not. I don’t recall if she spoke at all, what I do recall is pleading with her not to go, not to sink into an ominous looking circle of rocks and dirt in the back yard. She insisted she’d died, and had to go back into the ground. The I that I was at the time clutched at a handful of dry pieces of half-bone and reached for the girl in the other. I don’t know when or where that talisman was picked up, but it seemed so critical at the time.

I (and I) lost the battle to save the girl, and she disappeared in a flash of what I can only think to describe as “fuzzy” light. (Think of the filter effect they use on Barbara Streisand.)

THEN the poltergiest activity ensued. It’s sort of a blur but there were tossings and turnings and the family would run out of the house, but ultimately refused to leave.

The last thing I remember is looking up to see someone whom I’d thought we lost to the hauntings appear at the top of a set of sidewalk stairs. He was the only one smart enough to get away, and had come back to check up on things. At that moment, I turned to look in the window to see a spray of blood followed by a limb smack wetly against a window and fall away just as quickly. Carefully peering into the window, the remainder of the family was a sickly blue-grey in the darkness of the kitchen. Their eyes gleamed yellow and soulless. It’s unknown who was torn apart, since there was no body or parts to be seen and the members of the family were inconsistant through the dream. With a strangled effort to draw air I turned away and went to flee with the other, and then woke up.

Last night I dreamt that I was in a big red house (almost maroon it was so dark) with dark green shutters. The house itself was malevolent, clearly had it in for me and my family. I don’t remember the interior that well, but I’m almost positive I’d dreamed some of it. At some point my family and I were whisked - instantly - away from this vile place, and watched from a great distance as it blew off its foundation and landed on a nearby town. Later on while I was thinking about it, the feeling the house gave me was the same feeling I got when I first read about The Mansion in Dutch Hill in The Dark Tower series. (Which I may have mentioned recently that I have been re-reading.)

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