Boundless Expansion and Incursion is Horror
(Digital)
My head is crammed full of architecture. The places I’ve lived, the buildings I’ve studied, the spaces I’ve imagined… they’re all riding around on the currents of my brain. The same way most people associate memories with smells and songs, I associate them with environments defined by color, texture, and light.
(I’ve heard that smell is supposed to be the sense linked most closely to memory, but I wouldn't know; I haven't had a sense of smell since I was in sixth grade and a kid smashed in my face in a concussion-inducing sledding debacle. And music, while I like it fine, is often just more noise to me.)
I dream about city mashups and apartment/house monstrosities. Infrastructure that I attempt to decode. Malls. (A clear indicator of the decade in which I was a child). Sometimes, lucidity kicks in and I wonder: how the hell did I come up with this weird fucking place? Once, I was so impressed with a facade in a dream, I woke myself up with excitement. Sometimes, any sense of control evades me and the space expands in fractals as strangers filter in through ever-newly-manifesting portals. If you’ve seen the movie Mother! then you know exactly what I’m describing.
(Why does Aronofsky hate us all so much? Who knows.)
This most recent invasive human contagion nightmare was a variation on this familiar theme. The space started small, a studio apartment. Then it spread every time I turned and grew rooms, halls, balconies, staircases. People flooded in and disappeared into the far rooms of the unseen, unattainable space, impossible to dislodge.
A floor plan sketch doesn’t do its discomfort justice. I don't know what would.
I, Too, Have Been Chased by Monsters in My Dreams
Until I turn around and kill them.
(Digital)
I have all the other standard nightmare fare: the slow motion running, the pervasive darkness, the crumbling teeth, and the feeling of hopelessness. Weirdly, the worst nightmare I’ve ever had, from an affective standpoint, prominently featured one of those 1980s, orange, plastic Halloween candy pumpkins.
The worst dreams I have now involve my dog not listening when I call him and disappearing into warrens and mazes of apocalyptic wastelands. Sometimes, in these dreams, someone has stolen him. So I kill them. Usually in unspeakably brutal ways. There is some dream-analysis truth buried in the fact that when they come for me alone, I sometimes can’t fight them. But every time they take the Bert, I don’t just kill the monsters, I dismantle them.
At an Angle
I had to prop up the head of my bed today because I am middle-aged and broken and can no longer trust my fragile body to operate properly if I sleep like my ancestors once did, i.e. parallel to the earth.
I have… anxieties about this state of affairs:
(Digital)
