Dreams

Last night, I dreamed I was in hell. I didn’t know it was hell at first. It actually seemed sort of like paradise. There was the sun, a beach, beautiful women, and yet I knew that something wasn’t quite right. I couldn’t quite figure it out, but I knew I had to escape. So, I did. I’m not sure how. Can’t remember that part. All I know is that there was some sort of door back to the other side and I made it through.

Of course, doors go both ways, and because I knew that hell was on the other side, I felt like I had to stand guard and keep others from going through, fooled by False Paradises. But they wouldn’t listen, and they went through one after the other, and in some tragic incident I again can’t quite remember, I got pushed through again and the door disappeared. I was trapped in hell forever.

It wasn’t all bad. I mean, it was still a False Paradise, but if I just made myself stop thinking I could convince myself I could take it. I still knew, though. Knew that it wasn’t right, that despite the beauty and the bikinis, that it was wrong . . . all wrong. I blinked, and suddenly, the beaches disappeared and I realized I was actually in a sewer, surrounded by my friends from life, and we were all doomed to literally clean the sewer for eternity. My mind had simply invented the beach because it couldn’t take the reality.

Of course, cleaning a sewer is a meaningless task. That is the horror of it. You keep scrubbing and more shit keeps flowing. What I remember even more than that, though, is the utter hopelessness of it all, the knowledge that this was it, this was Forever. It was unbearable. I could feel my soul breaking apart, my very essence crumbling in the face of it. And so I tried to escape once again.

This time, I didn’t look for any hidden doors. There was a set of stairs leading downward from the sewer, and so I went down them. It got hotter as I descended and I could see a glow. As dream metaphors go, this one was pretty obvious, not to mention embarrassingly literal.

I rounded a corner, and there he was, the devil himself. I told him I wanted to leave, that I wanted to go home, that I didn’t belong. He laughed at me.

Somehow, I acquired a handsaw and, yes, I attacked the devil. He had a humanish face, more or less, and I sawed right through it. It fell away to reveal a stereotypical devilish demon face, all red and glowing with hot fire. And so I sawed through that too, right through the middle, cutting his head in half horizontally. Of course, it just sort of repaired itself like a fiery liquid metal terminator, and I again felt the hopelessness of eternity, the hopelessness of knowing that nothing I did would – or could – make any difference. It was an awful feeling. I’m still affected by it even now.

The devil actually told me he was impressed by my fervor, by the lengths I was willing to go to escape from hell, and so he offered me a deal. He offered to send me back, with the caveat that when my life was over, that I would return to hell forever. No bargains, no trying to escape. To sweeten the deal, he even offered to let me live 16 human lifetimes. The catch was that at the end of each lifetime – roughly 80 years – he would take a digit, a finger or a toe, to remind me of my ultimate fate, of my inescapable damnation.

I agreed. It was the only way out. Even if it was temporary, I did the math. 1,280 years. That’s how long I would have on Earth before I would have to return to hell. Sure, I would lose some fingers and some toes, but I figured I would adapt. It wasn’t ideal, obviously, but what other choice did I have?

I blinked again, and suddenly I was back in the real world. I had escaped hell, and had a long, long life – or 16 lives – to live before I would have to go back.

But it didn’t matter. All I could think of was hell. I could taste it. I could feel it. It was everywhere. It was life without Hope, life without meaning. I knew that an eternity of hell awaited me, that no matter what I did, no matter how long I lived, it was nothing compared to the Forever of hell. My soul broke and my will crumbled, just as it had when I was in hell itself. Hell is a state of mind. I realized that then. I realized it, and knew that I had no way to defeat it.

I panicked, and I did the only thing I could think of: I summoned the motherfucking devil. He appeared. He was annoyed, obviously, yet curious. What could I possibly want from him this soon in our deal? I suspect he knew, knew all along. That was the game. The torture.

I somehow acquired a chainsaw this time. We were in a bar, and we were talking around a pool table. I lunged at him with the chainsaw and again I sliced through his skull horizontally, but this time I just kept cutting and kept cutting, his skull sawed into tiny pieces, and as they tried to reassemble like the liquid metal terminator, I kept cutting, not giving them a chance to reform, and as the bits of his skull, the bits of Satan, fell to the surface of the pool table, I furiously tried to push them into the table’s pockets. Somehow, I felt like each pocket would hold them separately and they wouldn’t reassemble. It was awful, terrifying, just complete panic and desperation, an impossible fight against Fate, against Damnation, against the permanent ruination of my soul.

And that’s when I woke up. There was no resolution, no salvation, other than to escape that realm of consciousness, to obliterate my dreams and return to my waking life. This is a true story. 100%. That dream happened, and it remains vivid in my mind. Part of me worries that it’s real, that this is the delusion, that I’m already damned to hell, that I’ve already been there and that there is no escape, not even in waking.

Prediction: Bears 28 Lions 17