New Dream Adventures of Raven Knight

2017, 05-04

Voices in the Night

I am lying in my own bed, completely unaware that I am dreaming. I am just lying there in the dark, but it feels like there is someone there with me in the dark. I stay still, I don’t really want to let whoever it is know that I am awake. I lie there for a bit longer and I think I am about to fall asleep when I hear a voice. It is a male voice speaking loud and clear, the voice also sounds like it might be mechanical or a recording, or maybe a digitally altered voice. It says the same thing three times in a row. “Go kill yourself. Go kill yourself. Go kill yourself.” I can also feel something in the room moving around in the darkness, I can’t really explain how, but I feel something there. And I become very angry at whoever or whatever is in the room with me. I respond to this anger by letting out a stream of expletives that is way beyond the words I am normally likely to use, focused mostly around the ‘F’ word. “F$@% off, you f$@%ers! F$@% you! Go f$@% yourself, you f$@%ing piece of f$@%! F$@% you and the f$@%ing horse you rode in on! Did your f$@%ing horse come up with this plan? It’s way too complicated for a f$@%ing idiot like you!” My cursing continued for a bit longer, repeating the part about telling them to go f$@% themselves. I can practically feel a presence of someone standing right beside my bed and moving around me, but then I wake up and all is normal.

Dead Flesh
I am in my own room at night with the lights out, but it is darker than it normally is. The shadows seem to be pressing in on me from all directions, pressing in with an actual physical force. For some reason I become especially aware of my own breathing… and it seems harder than normal to breathe. It is almost painful to breathe. I hear something around me that sounds like voices whispering, I hear the voices but they are whispering too quietly to hear what they are saying. Dead flesh. The voices are talking about dead flesh… yuck… A voice in my ear speaking. Look around, do you think this is real? It isn't! A voice in the other ear. You think you're real? You're not, nothing is real. Another voice right at the back of my head… All you are is an accidental bit of electricity sent through a mass of brain tissue at just the right way to imitate a conscious mind. A pulse of light through the dark, there and then gone completely. A flicker of energy contained in a mass of dead flesh. The voices are all around now, I can't really tell where they are coming from. You are a chunk of dead flesh, animated for a brief time, dying from the day it is brought into existence. You didn't exist before this slab of meat was created, nor will you exist after it decays. The flesh could crumble tonight… or tomorrow night… or 20 years from now… or even longer, but it will break down. Anything I can try to do, am I really going to con myself into thinking it matters? I tell the voices to shut up. DEAD FLESH! You are not a conscious being… DEAD FLESH! You are a chunk of matter waiting to decay… DEAD FLESH! Pathetic physical mass of DEAD FLESH! Should I treat this flesh as a temple? DEAD FLESH! As a garbage bin? DEAD FLESH! What does it matter? DEAD FLESH! It will only make a difference of a couple short years… DEAD FLESH! If it makes a difference at all, that is. DEAD FLESH! All you are is flesh. DEAD FLESH! Flesh is all you are. DEAD FLESH! Go ahead, make up fantastic tales of far off worlds! DEAD FLESH! Use them to comfort yourself… DEAD FLESH! To keep yourself from realizing that all of life is puny and worthless! DEAD FLESH! And when the body decays into DEAD FLESH! It will be as if you never existed at all! DEAD FLESH! Look! DEAD FLESH! It's started already! DEAD FLESH! I look and see there are bugs crawling on my arm. I brush them off, and underneath the bugs my skin is turning a sickly gray color, the color of decay. DEAD FLESH! DEAD FLESH! DEAD FLESH! The voices keep going, I want to get the gross stuff off. I go to the shower and turn on the water, run it over my injury. DEAD FLESH! DEAD FLESH! DEAD FLESH! The flesh itself washes off of my arm to reveal the bone beneath. The bone itself starts to crumble, the voices keep chanting and chanting… DEAD FLESH! DEAD FLESH! DEAD FLESH! Then I finally wake up in bed… and the first thing I think to say is, "Come forth to me now, all ye seekers of the dead flesh." I speak this into the darkness before I stop and sit there wondering, "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?!"

Fusion Healing
I am in a strange place with MoSh, it looks like a house, but it is a home I don't remember ever seeing before. I look around and I see there is a bedroom there, there is a woman there I don't recognize. MoSh clearly recognizes her, though. MoSh goes over to her and starts trying to talk to her, but she seems so despondent, not even turning to look at MoSh when he speaks. MoSh looks over to me and says he needs help to heal her, he's not sure what to do. He's not sure how to help her. I know healing spells, so I go over to the woman and start using a song by Evanescence called My Last Breath. She is paying no more attention to me than she had been to MoSh. Completely unresponsive. I look back over at MoSh, not sure what to do. MoSh is the one who knows this woman… my energy is needed for healing… so what would be needed is a combination of MoSh's and my energies, maybe that would get her attention. I go over to MoSh and I say we have to help her together, he says that is ok, he will do whatever he can to help. So I fuse with MoSh… somehow this seems completely normal, in fact nothing here has seemed odd enough to trigger me to do a RC… I/MoSh go back over to the woman, who has been completely oblivious to anything happening, she is still staring off into the same distant nothingness as she was a short time ago. I go for the same song, trying to work it again. "Hold on to me, luv… you know I can't stay long. All I wanted to say is I love you and I'm not afraid. Can you hear me? Can you feel me in your heart?" Now she seems to be responding, she reaches out her hands and I/MoSh take them in my/his hands. She is now looking into my/MoSh's eyes, no longer gazing into some distant abyss. A white light radiates out of me/MoSh, the light flows through the woman, making her entire body glow and seem to float a bit off of the ground. She seems oblivious to the fact she is now floating, but she has not gone back into her trance, she is completely fixated on my/MoSh's eyes, looking so intensely as if she can see all the way into my/MoSh's soul… I wonder which soul she sees… or does she see both? The two of us/them are lying down on the bed, this is going somewhere I don't belong, so I pull out of MoSh. The spell is complete anyhow. They play around a bit on the bed, the woman is still glowing with the white energy. I am hit with an unexpected loneliness… an emptiness in my heart that goes all the way into my soul. A voice is speaking behind me, the voice is cold and emotionless. Soul? What soul? You have no soul, fool, there is no such thing as a soul… you are nothing but a mass of dead flesh. A chance gathering of matter, a figment of some other dreamer's dream, of someone else's mind, and soon when my body decays I will be gone. I turn around and demand to know who is saying that. I notice MoSh and the woman turn to stare at me. I guess I am acting really strange now… A voice in my mind keeps repeating, "You are DEAD FLESH! You are DEAD FLESH! You are DEAD FLESH!"