Dream Journal Ultimate
Date: 6/24/2020
By ItsABlackCat
This dream was long, strange, and skipped from place to place. It started with me running through a city, some sort of park, I think. It was urgent that I got to where I was going as soon as possible. I ran past a small playground with a kid and his dad playing in a sandbox. The dad looked up at me and nodded, and I tried to nod at him, but I was running so fast and was so tired it probably just looked like I was spazzing out. I also ran past the grassy area, surrounding a worn-looking road, and a junk yard place. There was a run down building, small, with broken windows and nothing inside, really. It was basically a ruin. Outside was an ancient parking lot, a rusted truck parked vertically across two spaces, missing a wheel. Two others were flat. A few tires were stacked by the side of the ruins, and another tire was on its side in the middle of the parking lot. There was a guy there, older, with a dark farmers tan and a bushy white beard, which came down to the bottom of his neck. He didn’t have much hair that I could see, though he had a hat on. He looked like a biker dude gone to soil, he was still strong but had a tired look about him. He was covered in grease and had a wrench in his hand, and he, too, nodded at me. This time I slowed enough to ask him about something— I asked something along the lines of, “where is it? Have you seen it?” The dude seemed confused but jerked his thumb over his shoulder, chewed something (chewing tobacco I think), and grumbled in a gruff voice. I thanked him breathily and took off again. My lungs burned but this was urgent enough that I pushed through the pain. Eventually I reached a strangely deserted parking lot, in the middle of this grassy, abandoned area, which connected to a worn road. This road lead to slightly more populated places, there were a few families walking down the sides of the road, I remember there was a brunette mom holding a young toddler’s hand. There were a few buildings on the other side of the road but still not much. Most of the city was far behind me, in the opposite direction of where I’d been running. I reach a point where there’s another parking lot, and a small garage shop place next to it. The shop is closed, but there’s a few cars outside, most of them broken down. In the parking lot a single man is working on something, he seems suspicious. The guy is pale as fuck, and that’s coming from me; his skin was quite literally the color of snow. He had brown hair and a very short brown beard and mustache, a blocky face with a square chin and beady, darting eyes, and a thick neck and thicker torso. He was wearing a red hoodie, ripped jeans, boots, and a beanie; I went over to see what he was doing and my blood ran cold. He was tinkering with a device inside of the hood of a car, a silver Honda. The regular stuff had been completely removed and in place of, you know, CAR parts, was a strange bomb. It had swirling green bottles of stuff attached to it, and at the top it was linked to an infinitely swirling hourglass filled with regular colored sand. I didn’t have time to stop him, he’d already activated it and Jesus, I don’t know how to disarm a bomb, okay? Instead, I starting running back, my suspicions confirmed; I knew this was coming, I came to confirm it before I warned everyone. I pull out of my pocket a megaphone and start shouting for everyone to run as fast as they can towards the main city. I don’t stop to help anyone because I have to warn people farther ahead and besides, there’s not much I can do, I’m 95 lbs soaking wet; I couldn’t carry anyone if I tried. The mom picks up her toddler and runs alongside me, lagging slightly behind. I continue yelling until my throat hurts. As I get closer to the city area I realize I’m approaching a lake, separating this run-down area from the main city. The lake is where I know I’ll be safe, because if I follow the shoreline I’ll get to the bridge where I can flee to the city. The city is outside of the explosion’s radius, I knew that for sure. Most of the people I’d seen wandering around nearby were already to the lake— after all, I’d been zigzagging around in order to warn everyone, while the people I’d warned had simply run in a straight line directly towards safety. Luckily, the bomb’s purpose was to destroy a facility nearby (which was doing important, probably illegal government things, by the sounds of it), so it wasn’t set in a heavily populated area. I keep yelling for people to run, and as I’m closing in on the lake, I see my brother right by the shore, waiting for me. He knew what I did, so when he sees me, he doesn’t need me to tell him to run. He’s just a bit ahead of me, maybe twenty or so feet, when the explosion happens. The ground shakes, and you hear the explosion super loudly; like you’d expect a bomb to sound, only slightly different. Once the ringing in my ears goes away (and it goes away pretty quickly, considering the situation), I can hear the sound of a whirling wind, and a slightly crunchy noise, like collecting rocks. It’s the sound of millions of pounds of sand swirling out from the bomb. I push myself to the limit, but my limbs are tied to the ground with the impossible gravity of nightmares, and I’m going too slow, I know it, but I can’t push myself any faster— I feel something hit my back, hard, knocking the wind out of me. It’s painful, but with the adrenaline pumping through my veins and the fear pushing me onwards, I barely notice the pain. The force throws me forwards a few feet, and I land with an “oof!” on the sparse grass. I push myself to my feet, trying to catch my breath, and try to keep running, but I’m not fast enough; I feel something warm and rough rise against my ankles, fast, and smell sand all around me. The sand flows forwards like water, like a tsunami of the desert, spilling out onto the grass and rising quickly to my waist. I struggle through the sand but it builds and soon it’s so thick I can barely move. I push even farther, and see that I’m almost to the lake, where the sand is sucked down by the water. Several people, the ones who didn’t make it to the bridge in time, are swimming in the water, to avoid being swallowed whole by the sand. The sand rises to my neck, to the point where I can barely breathe, and I can barely push through anymore; and I think, “I’m going to die. I’m so close, almost there, but I’m not going to make it.” Then, my brother runs forward, and as the sand closes over my head, leaving me in suffocating blackness, I raise my hand towards the surface above my head. I feel warm, sweaty fingers close around mine, slipping, and my body inches upwards. The dream skips forwards. I’m underground, in a sewer. My brother is with me, and we’re silent. We’re both covered head to toe in sand, except for our feet and ankles, which have been washed ‘clean’ by the sewer water. We’re hurrying, my heart is beating fast, and for a second I actually, legitimately worry that it’ll beat out of my chest. My brother, reading my mind, assures me that I’m fine; he’s whispering. We continue until we reach a large, rectangular room. There are a few big tanks surrounding what seems to be a large pool. The sewer continues on the opposite side of the pool from us. It’s like a maintenance room or something. At least, that’s what it seems like at first glance. But when I observe it more closely, the place seems much too strange to be a regular sewer ‘room.’ The tanks contain the green stuff I saw in the bomb. I can see a tiny droplet the liquid trickling out from a small, slightly unscrewed cap at the top of one of them. The room itself seems much cleaner and much newer than the rest of the sewers; its walls are shiny metal, in comparison to the broken, grimy stone brick of the sewers; and there are bright, if not flickering, LED lights in the ceiling, which render our flashlights useless. Also, the water in the center, where the ‘pool’ is, is deep. The pool itself is at least a hundred feet by fifty, if not more, and I’d estimate it to be anywhere from thirteen to twenty feet deep. The only way to the other side of the sewers is through the pool. But, this room seems to be what we were looking for, anyways. It was the whole ‘illegal-government-secret’ thing that the bomb had been meant for. That is, the only REMAINING part of the ‘illegal-government-secret’ thing that the bomb had been meant for. I hand my brother my flashlight and step forwards, trying to get close to the pool to examine it without falling in. I step forwards, and just as the tip of my shoe reaches the edge of the sewer, where it drops off into murky darkness, the lights above our head flicker. One of them pops and goes out, making a sound like a gunshot. Both my brother and I jump at the sudden sound; my foot slips and I fall sideways into the pool of water, windmilling my arms in a failed attempt to keep my balance. I quickly surface from the pool, horror and dread all building in my stomach. Adrenaline is literally everywhere at this point, my heart is racing— I need to get out of the pool. Whatever’s in there is not good. The room is darker now that one of the lights is out, which casts a creepy dimness to the already creepy pool. I can’t see the bottom beneath me, but from the depths, something rises. I swim forwards to try and reach the edge but once again, nightmarish slowness pulls at me, and I feel something close gently around my leg. Slowly, I look down. There’s a long, tentacle-like limb curled around my leg. As it starts to pull me down into the water I realize, too late, that my only hope is the ledge; once in the water, I’d have nowhere to go, nothing to push off of or pull myself towards except dirty water. I kick and pump my arms with all my might, but the tentacle tightens its grip. It doesn’t drag me all the way down, though— only two feet down, at most. It seems to be pulling itself towards me at the same time; it only brings me low enough for me to see what IT actually is. Before me is whatever my brain comes up with in its free time, which is, apparently, the child of a half-demegorgon half-octopus, and a hollow from Mrs. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. It’s size is hard to guess, because scary things tend to seem a whole lot bigger than they actually are. If I’d have to hazard a guess, it’d be that it was maybe ten feet tall totally extended, and three or four feet thick? It had a human-like head, and that’s about where the similarities between itself and I ended. The face was paleish-yellow, like a corpse, and the skin was the slightest bit saggy. It had thin lips stretched wide in a thin smile, and big, thin eyes, yellow or green in color, the water might have slightly altered the actual color. It’s hair was thin and dark, floating above its head. It’s head connected to a long, thin, rubbery black torso, and it’s pale skin faded into it. Where the pale skin and rubbery skin met was rough, as if the rubbery skin was a second layer or scale-like or something. From there, the torso led into several long, spiraling tentacles. It had no arms— instead, it had strange flaps, which made its body seem like a folded up umbrella. It looked at me and then moved. I was afraid it would hurt me, but it seemed to be simply changing form. The flaps by its side opened up, exactly like an umbrella except thinner, and revealed at least a dozen more tentacles instead of a body; the ‘torso’ was just a thin layer of skin covering the rest of the tentacles. The torso’s tentacles unfurled to their full length, resting alongside the others, and the flaps of skin— now loose and unformed— floated up a bit, so that the creature had the bizarre appearance of having a black, rubber skirt protruding from its neck. It tipped its neck back, contorting it horribly, and where an Adam’s apple might be there was another folded up fold of skin, pressed tightly against its chin and neck. That flap unfolded, too. The flap expanded like a balloon, enveloping the head almost, and at its full size looked like a big, round balloon, coming from its neck. It’s ‘human’ head was pressed down against the underneath of its back, pretty much fully hidden unless you were behind it. The balloon-flap pulsed and came towards me, and soon all I could see was the dark rubbery skin. Then, the center opened up to reveal a round mouth. The inside of it, the throat, pulsed grossly. It had teeth lining the inside of the mouth, just like a demegorgon’s mouth. It got so close I could feel it breathing on me. I remember this because this part of the dream was incredibly vivid. I could feel the moist, hot breath coming from the mouth, could slightly smell something rancid coming from deep inside even through I couldn’t breathe. The thing ‘stared’ at me like this for a while and spoke. It told me that select few people were like them. They started as regular people, they explained, but for whatever reason they reacted to the green solution. Even being around it changed them. Their DNA bonded with it and they changed into what they are— monsters, all but mentally. Two more came up from the murkiness, I could feel the water shift beside me; my vision never changed from the big, overwhelming mouth. I told myself that this was just a person; a changed person, an infected person. But I was still afraid when it inched towards me again, and I still flinched back from its teeth. The monster seemed amused but unsurprised when I did so. It continued explaining. I was one of them, it said. I was going to be like them. The ones that were chosen to change were rare, one in billions; I was the luckiest, or the unluckiest person in the world, however you looked at it. The monster explained some more about experiments and whatnot, and I realized I could breathe underwater. The transformation was happening already. And already, I seemed to feel a strange connection to the monsters. They were the only ones like me, in the whole entire world. I rise to the surface with the monsters and my brother is standing where I was standing when the light went out, holding his flashlight towards me. The dream skips forward in time again. I’m still with my brother, but we’re in a mystical jungle. We’re climbing a tree so big that the leaves are as big as trampolines, and we use the leaves like steps, using stems like ropes to climb, and flowers like launch pads, with the petals billowing up into the air and carrying us with them. I’ve started to change. My skin feels strangely smooth, yet sticky. Not sticky like slime, sticky as in, it has a lot of friction. I can cling to the leaves like it’s nothing, can climb the stems even when they’re soaked wet and when my brother has to wait for me to send down another stem for him to climb. Also, I can breathe underwater, in any water, really. When we get so high the air lacks oxygen, I stick my face in large water droplets or streams of water collecting on the leaves and suck in a deep breath. Where my arms meet my armpits itches, as does my neck. My eyes are blurry, even with my contacts; apparently they were, since birth, meant to be for underwater vision, and with this whole changing thing they’ve fully evolved to that point. When we get high enough the leaves are formed in more of a walkway pattern, flatter and straighter. Vines and stems have been obviously tied to make man-made bridges or ladders, and pieces of wood, large sticks and trunks, folded leaves, and woven grass blades make up a pathway that connects to another giant tree. My brother and I talk. We’re at this place to try and find something to keep me from changing fully. While of course I don’t judge the monsters/people any differently, and while of course having tentacles (among other things) wouldn’t be the end of the world, my brother and I generally agreed that I looked much better as a human. Also, I liked having legs. And arms. And a body in general. Plus, I wasn’t the biggest fan of living in the water with only like, five other people for the rest of my life. We reach the other tree and find that it’s been turned into a suspended village of sorts. Actually, more of a marketplace kind of. The woven grass blades, leaves, vines, and wood all make up platforms that cling to the side of the tree, and hang from branches above. Parts of the tree itself have been carved out, making even more space. There’s a side of the tree where several little two or three-room homes have been carved into the trunk, like an apartment complex almost. Vines and stems make sturdy ladders to reach the third ‘floor’ or row of homes, and wooden or woven grass platforms are attached outside of each of the homes on the second and third rows, acting like a little porch of sorts. The fronts of the homes, which would normally be open if you just carved it, are recovered with woven grass or wooden pieces, complete with wooden doors hanging on hinges made of vines. There are strange, gourd-like plants hung everywhere as a light source. They’re like giant, glowing beans. Their general look/texture reminds me first of glowstone, then of a sanded honeycomb. They give off an orangey-yellow glow, and they hand from curly, vine-like stems that are attached to everything from other stems, to branches, to the very tree trunk itself. People carry them like lanterns, too. Giant flowers can be seen all along this village, too. They lay over little buildings as roofs, or sprout from the side of the tree. A few flowers have been tied at the ends, leaving them permanently closed, preventing them from blooming; the inside is used as a building or home of sorts. The stem is curly and glows, and somehow it never dies. There are also flowers acting as parts of the pathway. The petals are seen being used as clothing, plates, and more. Pretty much everything in the village is made up of flowers, vines, wood, or other plants— it’s a secluded place. There are little markets, with stalls set up with twigs and flower petals or the like, where people are selling various things. A lot of the stalls sell food. Some sell what are apparently common goods: strange, colorful fruits, giant slices of a sort of edible root, and even a hunk of meat which came from a bug of some sort. One stall has simply one thing in it; the giant corpse of a humming bird. The man is selling everything from its feathers to its meat, and people are crowded around that stall. They hand the man little orbs, they look like marble-sized water droplets, except solid. They seem to be a currency. The bird and it’s goods are apparently a rarity. Another stall sells clothing made of various natural resources. They’re artfully crafted. There’s beautiful dresses made of silky petals and tied off with colorful, exotic vines and stems; pants made of some sort of leathery material, a dried plant of sorts, with a buckle made of dark, polished wood and a belt of some sort of stem; shoes are woven with grass or formed by leaves, curled into their shapes. The last stall I can remember is selling strangely popular things. Little bits of metal, bolts and nuts, strange scraps of plastic; basically, things that aren’t from around this area. The man seems foreign, too, in comparison to the people living in the tree village, so I’m guessing he’s a trader who came to make profit off of things he couldn’t sell otherwise. People were going crazy over a little chain, which might’ve been a necklace. They offer handfuls of orbs, one man offers a larger orb the color of moss that’s the size of his fist, and he gets the chain. I realize the orbs are some type of seed, and different seeds are different currencies. I remember my brother and I traveling along the outskirts of the village, hugging the tree trunk. We find a small little building suspended from a branch, the lowest building in the village. We have to climb a ladder downwards to get to it and I’m glad I have my rubbery hands for that. It’s made of some strangely stiff leaves, with a wooden floor and a woven rug over top. We go inside and there’s a young, good-looking lady there, she’s maybe middle aged. She has a pixie-cut type of short black hair that curls slightly at the ends, swept to the side of her face, and tan skin, which glows. Her eyes are narrow as if she’s constantly smirking, and bright green. The room is lined with shelves and tables containing weird items. Everything is doubly strapped down and secured, and I realize why after a strong wind makes the entire building rock as it swings back and forth. There are giant versions of minuscule bugs, dead obviously, collected in baskets, and little bits of others alongside them— spider pincers, orangey bug legs, round, black eyes, et cetera. There are also strange plants collected in the same manner. Bottles that seem to be made of clear ice, or something similar, are filled with different liquids. They’re literally basically potions. One bottle, I notice, has the same green liquid that ‘infected’ me inside. The cork on that bottle is chained down with a thick grass knot. The lady seems to already know why we’re there. She tells me I’m gonna be fine, as long as I can pay her price. Then I was woken up by my mom...