For the longest time I was one whose dreams had been turned to nightmares, visions, night terrors where I would lie paralyzed with fear by something that terrified me until I could not move. What it was that scared me I cannot tell, it was so horrible that I refused to remember it.
I cannot remember how many times I had this nightmare. It was throughout all of my teenage years as a recurring nightmare and hardly any day passed when I did not wake up in a cold sweat, every single morning spent in quaking terror. These terror quakes were noticed by everyone at school and so I was not popular. It was there that I got my nick name -- SPAZ. My life was a living Hell and so it was no surprise that to deal with my fear I got into the Metal and Horror. I learned from Lovecraft that the greatest fear is fear that is of the unknown, and that is what made me so scared of the nightmares that I had been having -- they were nightmares of the UNKNOWN.
The reason they were unknown is because I could not describe them but I thought that if I could become a writer then I would be one who could describe the nightmares. Then they would not be unknown and I might not be scared as much as I was when I was scared of them. But despite my efforts to describe and document the details of the nightmares of my sleep I could not describe the nightmares, especially the nightmare where blood came from my mouth to drown everyone. hat could this mean? It was a dream of apocalypse, a nightmare of destruction where I was the one who brought about the destruction. I could not describe how or why or who or where but there it was -- the unknown, the indescribable, the alien -- it was like something Lovecraft might have written about in his stories about dark alien gods. Was I a dark alien god? Or was I dreaming that I had met a dark alien god, perhaps even Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth or Azathoth or Nyarlathotep? I remember H.P. Lovecraft wrote stories about dreams and nightmares, in particular the Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and maybe in those years before I had read of the horror I had been influenced subconsciously by it. We are all influenced by the things we see and here -- there are subliminal messages on TV and radio and even in the magazines. Could it be that -- yes -- I was walking through the bookshop, past all those books with hundreds and thousands of words in them -- and they were all influencing me without my even having to read them or even look at them for a little while? It could be. It is a big wide dark and horrible world in which anything can happen.
It was then that I had my first of many nervous breakdowns. I had the nightmare I cannot describe hundreds of times each day. I would wake up screaming each time thinking of the blood that comes out of the mouth and thinking of people drowning in blood that I cannot describe. During that time the only person who listened to me was my brother Charles whose name reminded me of Charles Dexter Ward, who was another character that H.P. Lovecraft wrote about. This was not by accident. I could not explain why two people so similar should have such similar names but I wrote it down complete with many equations trying to explain it in the mathematics since that is what happened in the Dreams in the Witch-House. The page disappeared from my diary. This was not a coincidence.
My terror quakes got worse that day and even this day I am still having them although as I am not at school any more they don't call me 'Spaz'. That is a small mercy and I am relieved. But not from my nightmares. Although they terrify me every night and I still wake up screaming from horrors I cannot describe I have started to make a sense of it. I know what is wrong. What I am afraid of is a fear of the unknown -- and there is always the unknown. And the unknown is always there, influencing my thoughts like Nyarlathotep, only without a name so it is even more terrifying. I have learned from my nightmares that the Great Old Ones do exist, but they are no mere demons or alien gods -- THEY -- ARE -- THE -- UNKNOWN!!!!
Thanks to my bro Chuck for editing this one!