#autobiographical

Autobiographical poetry is a form of verse that draws directly from the poet’s personal life, experiences, memories, and identity, blending storytelling with emotional truth. It uses poetic language to explore the self in relation to time, place, and personal transformation. Key features include personal narrative, as the poet writes about their own life—childhood, relationships, trauma,…

From around age 8 to 25 I had frequent recurrent dreams set in a semi-stable world. I say 'recurrent' but it would be more accurate to say 'serialized'. There were stable locations, stable characters, and events were remembered by both myself and the populace.

Unfortunately, some of these recurrent things included monsters. I can remember five pretty clearly to this day, and while its probably a mistake to give form to nightmare demons, I've got some pics worked up to demonstrate.

The Forever-Hunter

A vaguely humanoid creature about 12 feet tall and at least as wide. I remember it being pale white-gray, with clawed hands and feet, long ape-like arms, and no head, just a massive set of interlocking fangs that stretched from shoulder-to shoulder. It wound up basically looking like a D&D gray render, but it was chasing me long before 3rd ed got published.

The forever-hunter, as the name I've given it implies, would lock onto a target and then behaved as a supernatural persistence hunter. It would trudge in the direction of whoever it was hunting at about human walking speed, and it would always know where you were regardless of distance. If something was in its way, it would smash through it without slowing. This included people.

It was not difficult to escape the Forever-Hunter because of its speed, the problem was all the people it was killing while trudging towards you. Fortunately, its lock seemed to break when I'd wake up, so most dreams I was fine.

Red Threadworms

My grandfather's house existed in the dreamscape, and everything around it was innately hostile. The minor threat were Red Threadworms, which lived in water. They were about half an inch long and looked like very fine red thread, thus the name.

If you touched a threadworm, it would bite in and start boring into your skin. This was immensely painful, and did not wake me up. Most forms of injury or death would wake me from a dream, but for some reason, the red threadworms could cause me real pain.

The People that Aren't People

Between Dream-Tulsa and Dream McAlister there was a small town that had an amazing flea market and a lot of interesting shops and restaurants. Everyone there was friendly and helpful to a fault.

During the day.

When the sun went down, every person in the town would undergo a complete psychological shift, becoming a sadistic, murderous, uncanny parody of a human being that would immediately start hunting any strangers in town. Each one had their own flavor of sadistic cruelty, and they weren't mindless or zombie-like. One of their few weaknesses was that their cruelty was also directed at each other and they'd often turn on another not-person when an opening presented itself.

They also could not leave their town's city limits, which I used to escape more than once.

Mockers

Mockers were another looks-human type of monster, but they were psychologically rather than physically sadistic, and would demean and humiliate anyone they encountered in an effort to draw them into a fight.

Fighting a mocker was basically impossible, because you'd get that too-heavy time-slowed dream effect if you tried. Which would give them more opportunity to bully you for your efforts. Every so often you'd hit hard enough to cause harm by going for the face, but then the whole head would just tear free and fall off (they were yellow and black inside, like bundles of woven insulated wire) and roll a short distance away.

The Mocker's body would then grow a new head, while the one on the ground continued its abuse.

The Bear-Demon

The pond out back of my grandfather's place, in my dreamscape, was surrounded by a deep trench, mostly to keep this creature contained. It was a massive bear with black fur and claws made of rusted iron. Thick bared wire wrapped around its body and limbs, also rusted. and its head was just this massive antique diving helmet. Occasionally, if it was enraged, you could see teeth gnashing and smashing against the glass trying to get out.

If you came anywhere near the pond, the bear-thing would rise up out of the water and begin pursuit. This usually wound up landing you in the trench, where the bear could chase you until you ran out of steam.

The tree is quite large, and my phone doesn’t want to focus on the moon. C’est la vie. It was a gorgeous and wonderful evening. I’m on the road visiting with family, hence today’s brief post. A note to my future self, though: I want to talk more about the perils of not sharing health stories, and of not embracing health education. That’ll be for another time.

The first segment was a standard speed dating set up, but with some major organizational problems. We were divided into A and B groups and the B groups were supposed to change tables and rotate. Simple enough, right? Except there were 4 more Bs than there were As. So every single rotation, every three minutes, me and the same 3 other extraneous Bs would just wander about before reconvening with each other. I only got to meet maybe 11 people out of the 30.

Three minutes is insanely fast. If I was designing the thing it'd be 10 people, ten minutes each. That was just the first segment, however. The second part was "bingo" with a list of character traits. One of the traits was "still uses tumblr" so I'd tell people they could put me for that. And I'd say, "do any of these apply to you?" But I had trouble task switching from social / conversation mode to trying to get BINGO. It was hard to balance both. Most people seemed to struggle.

Then the third segment was group hang, which was a horrible idea. We were in groups of ten people and so maybe three people in each group would do the talking / have a conversation while everyone else watched. Did I mention it was so so loud? I feel like I've been screaming for 2 hours. Though mostly I just watched other people talk.

I felt there were maybe 2 people interested in me, one of which was purely interested my photography career. Which is not something I love talking about. We'll see how many people I match with. I put "yes" to at least 12 people (a couple I didn't even speak directly with) just based off of reading name tags. That means the total number of matches I get is the total number of people who decided to be interested in me, period. But I mean. If even one good friendship comes from all that, that's enough to make it worthwhile. And if none come from it... I've learned something also.