#v1als

Have 800 words of the Darkling being awful. (Also posted on AO3!)

Ligeia: loss of love, mourning, delusion.

After a week it was clear that Genya Safin would live. Good. He hadn’t meant to kill her.

when I was 4 I could read at the level of a 10 year old and adults Lost Their Minds every time they saw me reading a Big Kid Book and they would quiz me incessantly on where I learned to read so well and if I could ACTUALLY understand it... it drove me mad like shut up and let me read!!

I remembered how the other week we were talking about dreams that weren’t dreams, and I thought I’d submit this one to you because even though I’m used to having strange dreams that are definitely not normal dreams, this one was different to any I’ve ever had before and not gonna lie, I feel really creeped out.

In the dream, I was walking across a large field with my partner. There was some kind of tall crop in it – wheat, I think – and it was swaying in a light breeze. The sky in front of us was blue and clear, and while everything seemed a little bit surreal it was perfectly pleasant. At some point I became aware my partner had stopped walking, and I turned to see he was standing a few paces behind me, pointing back the way we had come. I looked at him questioningly, and he simply said, “Look at the clouds.”

I looked, and the sky behind us was filled with strange clouds. They were, from what I could tell, mammatus clouds, and while they were a steely grey they seemed to be giving off their own glow. I looked at them and for a brief second had a normal reaction – “wow, those are beautiful” – but then a split second later I experienced what was probably the most undiluted existential terror I’ve ever felt in my life. I can’t explain how I knew it, but I know the sky was upside-down. As in, the entire sky, atmosphere and all, was upside-down, and the entire sight was inherently wrong, and the only way I could describe how it felt was that I felt as though my mind was physically breaking trying to comprehend what I was seeing. “The sky is upside-down”, even in the dream, did not seem like an adequate thought. I knew it was more than that, but my brain simply didn’t have the words. Everything was just wrong, and the sky was incomprehensible.

I dragged my eyes away from them and found I had completely lost my balance; I was suffering from severe nausea and vertigo and could barely stay upright. I looked towards the clearer sky to try and ground myself, but whereas before the sky had been blue, it was now night time. I remember seeing the stars look as though they were spinning, like in those long-exposure photographs turned into gifs, like this one, but much, much faster. The dread I was feeling managed to intensify, and I became aware of a loud, low sound that was completely surrounding me. It sounded like steel settling, like perhaps a large cargo ship settling in the water. Just that one long, low note, impossibly loud. The field still existed around me, but everything was now inky black. Despite this, I could still see everything clearly, and could even differentiate between the individual crops.

I lost my balance then, but woke up before I hit the ground. This is where it somehow gets even creepier. When I woke up I was laying on my back, which is a position I never sleep in. I felt sick and the bed felt as though it were moving, like I was still spinning or perhaps still had vertigo. The most unnerving part was that my body felt entirely wrong. I felt simultaneously too large and too small for my body, and I couldn’t think properly. My thoughts didn’t come to me in any normal way that I was used to – instead of thinking in words I thought only in brief pictures and flashes of feeling, and I couldn’t remember where I was or even who I was. I could still hear the loud tone in my head, and then suddenly, like someone flicked a switch, it all stopped and I abruptly remembered who I was.

I described my dream to my partner, and he told me that just my descriptions made him feel nauseous. Even recalling it now and remembering the imagery, I feel sick and have the beginning of a headache. I have no idea what it was, only that it wasn’t a dream. I have never experienced anything like it, and I have never felt so removed from my body before. It was like I had ceased to exist and was simply a transmitter for a load of vague concepts and emotions that didn’t even feel like mine. It’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever experienced. 

Good lord. That sounds disturbing, and also brings back some very unpleasant memories of my own. I’ve had dreams myself that have been similar in the way that they’re completely incomprehensible, and the imagery in them is something which I am firmly convinced cannot come from anywhere in the human psyche. The vastness, the way things react and move, the fact that nothing seems to follow any kind of human logic or imagination… it always made me feel as though I was seeing something that I shouldn’t be seeing.

Practice My Confession // Angst-Fluff Prompts