Dream Journal Ultimate
Date: 11/15/2019
By andotherpoems
I’m with three companions, one being Trent, and we’re walking around town. Everything is not quite right and the sky is grey and kind of dark, and buildings are crumbling, many are vacant. Society must have collapsed somewhat, some time ago. Somehow, pairs of people have begun spontaneously merging into single entities, and Trent merges with one of our companions. The outcome is not great, as these fusions mutate over time. We set out to investigate rumors of an origin, hoping to reverse the process. We encounter three pairs who merged, and have been that way for much longer. They look like their stretching out like warm taffy. They’re in agony. They tell us where to find a pair of people who merged even longer ago, and said they may be able to help us. We find them after navigating a network of alleyways and warehouses full of dazed and tortured fusions, some in a more advanced state of decay than the one that helped us. We find the pair we were told of, in a warehouse among others. They’re barely more than a soup of human flesh, some hair, and unidentifiable appendages and orifices. Doubtfully, we address them with our intention, and ask for their help. From an unseen mouth, they burble and begin to relate how these joinings began as bizarre experiments by a deranged scientist. She was on a team of exobiologists who were studying these fat, grey spider-like life forms that were discovered inside a meteoroid. They found that they reproduced by merging; the new fusion then gave birth to live offspring (similar to angler fish). She began conducting unethical experiments in secret, extracting the “essence” of the spiders and injecting it into cows and sheep. She was eventually successful at creating fusions, and moved on to humans. However, something always went wrong, and unlike the spiders, all of her subjects would mutate painfully. The fusion we’re speaking to is one of those subjects, but they cannot explain how the general population began to merge in this way, outside of the lab. They direct us to where her lab is hidden. It is in a hidden basement beneath an abandoned high school. We travel to the school, locate the basement, and enter. It looks overrun with decay, and nature is taking back the structure. The fusion of Trent and our friend is beginning to deform, having grown long, with stretched out limbs and a long face. The Trent hybrid enters a room and exclaims; they rush out, and when I turn to look, I see hundreds of fat, fist-sized grey spiders scurry out. They don’t seem confrontational, I get the impression they’re fleeing from our flashlights. I go into the room, which turns out to be an office. On the desk is a dusty tape recorder. I play it and it works. A male voice, haltingly: “...we couldn’t have known... ... ...other lifeform... maybe more... contained for now, but...” A female voice, hastily: “widespread consequences my ass... the CDC is attempting to... I don’t care. These lifeforms MUST be studied... my life’s work... ...” The recording stops, it appears too damaged to resume. My third companion insists there’s still hope, that we should continue searching the lab for any clues to reversing the fusion process, or at least halting the degradation. We venture further. Many rooms have been emptied, but we’re even more on guard after listening to the recordings; something other than these timid arthropods was discovered. From the state of the lab, we all agree that this lifeform may have breached containment, and we soon find evidence. We were exploring a corridor when we glimpse movement in a room. We all peer in from the threshold, and in the far corner, we discover the gelatinous remains of a human form, which to our horror is still alive. It moans softly from an unseen mouth. In the room is another old school tape recorder, and Trent volunteers to venture in and retrieve it. We play the tape. The female voice from before: “We made a mistake. We made a mistake, we made a mistake... [sobbing, a pause as she collects herself] ...in our pursuit of knowledge. We believe the partnership is symbiotic, but it is incompatible with our physiology. The hosts all have survived, but... at what cost? And now I... [sobbing] ... ...everyone is infected. We’re fucked.” Unnerved, we examine the journal and scattered notes. We find that a single parasite enters its host and lives within it indefinitely, unless it can be expelled by force. We find no details of how this may be achieved. Determined to find answers, we search deeper. We descend another floor and pass through what looks like a chamber for decontamination. In the lab beyond it, we find stacks of drawers and glass tanks, several full of slimy brown water. Obviously the water filtration has failed. Something stirs in one of the tanks, and I direct my flashlight to investigate. Something that resembles a jellyfish mashed together with a handful of red spaghetti emerges from the muck and presses its body against the glass. It spreads its many tentacles out radially along the glass, feeling the edges, pushing rhythmically on the glass. I immediately know that it’s excited by our presence; it longs to escape. Our other companion opens a drawer, and inside are preserved fetal piglets in varying stages of mutation. In another is a calf. No humans, thank fucking god. We discover more notes here, and find that the only way they could expel the parasite from a human subject, with minimal harm to the subject, was to induce labor with standard induction drugs. Surgical removal was unsuccessful. In this room is an operating table, so we go about searching for the supplies needed. (Evidently, in this dream, I have experience in facilitating labor and delivery). An IV is started, and things move quickly; they roll off the table, and, moaning in pain and horror, squat down and eject the parasite. I can sense its shock as it plops into a bucket, and its frantic energy as I trap it inside. Trent/our friend is doing okay, all things considered, and we make our way out of the lab, eager to get away. We’re hopeful that we can bring this information to other people, to ease their suffering. We kill (or at least incapacitate, I dunno) the parasite by smashing it repeatedly with a bat. It doesn’t move again, but we fill the bucket with ethyl alcohol and reseal it just in case.