Cotton Eye Joe madness, possibly Hell

Date: 5/3/2020

The dream was a very short dream since I’d woken up in the middle of the night and fallen back asleep again. In the dream, I was in my parents’ room, locked in. There was an extra door between their bathroom door and the door to the hallway but that was locked too. Even their closet door was locked. From behind each of the doors, the ceiling, the floor, and even the vents, I could hear faint music playing. At first I could just barely hear the harsher beats- the bass and drums solely, and an occasional actual note. I recognized it but couldn’t put my finger on the song. Mostly I was looking down the vents and in the cracks of the doors to see where the hell it was coming from. And it was obviously coming from multiple places because the radios, or whatever was being used to play the song, weren’t in sync; they were slightly off from each other, like failed rounds. It’s almost as if a bunch of people had planned to play them all together, but hadn’t pressed ‘play’ at the exact same time. As time went by the songs grew louder. When I put my head to the vent again I finally recognized the song as Cotton Eye Joe. It was kind of creepy, drifting softly up from the vents, the bass and drums echoed all around me, the man’s voice just barely loud enough to hear. Then, it grew louder and I could definitely hear it. At first I didn’t mind but the song, which was playing on repeat, quickly started to get on my nerves. Not to mention, the lack of syncopation- how every different place had the song playing at a slightly slower or faster pace- was driving me nuts, especially because of how rhythmically accurate I tend to be (I’m almost like a perfectionist in that sense). As it got louder and louder I eventually tried to use my parents’ pillows to block out the noise, but when I went to slam one over my head and ears, I nearly knocked myself out; something hard inside of the pillow bonked my head, and I sat up seeing stars and feeing a small trickle of blood come down from my skull. I think, my parents are going to kill me if I stained their pillow with blood, and turn it over in my lap. There’s no blood, thankfully. However, I do see a zipper going down the center of the pillow, half hidden by a flap of the fabric covering- something I hadn’t noticed before. I slowly unzip it. Inside is a medium sized radio. The switch is off, and the dial is stuck on one station. Slowly, as if in a daze, I flick the switch on. The radio plays Cotton Eye Joe at a slightly different pace than all the other Cotton Eye Joes which are now blasting from all over the room, like a chorus of the same guy singing overlapped verses. Horrified, I try to turn the radio back off, but now the switch is stuck. I look through my parents’ room to find something to unstick it with, but to no avail; even after a full swing with my dad’s hammer, the thing won’t budge. If anything it just grows louder in volume. I chuck the radio at the window as hard as I can and it doesn’t break, nor does the window. The station crackles for half a second before the song returns, so loud I almost jump. On the window, there’s a red splat, as if the radio had left a bloody mark where it’d hit the glass. I go over to the splat, wincing at the loudness of Cotton Eye Joe, and touch it with my fingers. It’s warm. I smell it. It smells like a mixture of coppery blood and burnt wiring, and maybe a bit of something else I can’t place. Slowly the dream progresses with Cotton Eye Joe slowly taking over anything. Soon I end up in a corner with a pillow over my ears, rocking back and forth, hearing Cotton Eye Joe burst from every orifice of the room like a chorus of demons calling to me from Hell. Their voices seem almost mocking, and the world is pulsing. I can’t breathe. I can’t hear. I can’t think. All that exists is Cotton Eye Joe and a thousand others the same. Near the end of the dream, I remember thinking something like, “Is this my damnation? Is this purgatorial warning, a sign? Am I even alive, or is this a dream? Or a nightmare, rather? This must be the beginning of the end of my judgement, and I must have failed. I only beg forgiveness from my future self.” Right before I wake up, I realize that this IS a dream. I’m mostly just like, oh thank god, so I can wake up! And I do that thing where you ‘scream’ WAKE UP at yourself in the dream until you come to in the real world. And it works- I wake up. I fully consider this a nightmare, it scared me more than a decent amount of my “actual” nightmares, and they had murder and shit. I would say I’d like to know what this means but in all honesty, no, I don’t. I’m just going to sweep this under the rug where I put the rest of my dreams which come to me from Heaven or from Hell.