I had no weapons -— just deep wounds —- which served only to excite their fervor, and dull my thoughts of the future. I had to retreat up a staircase to get away from them. Actually, it was a ladder; a very steep ladder and my sweaty hands slipped to grip the cold wooden rungs. The staircase turned into a ladder; each rung consuming more and more energy to reach. . . And they were still closing in on me. I’d been watching TV -— that I knew -- but I wasn’t really sure where I was. Someone’s livingroom —- not mine. Blackness masked the windows, as though that room was the only one in the entire universe. I could hear their groans. Some deep and guttural; some wet, reverberating with bits of blood and flesh, gargling almost; some were soft, children’s voices, I imagined. That disturbed the hell out of me. So all I could do was run. And climb. As I climbed on that yellowish, slightly slanted tongue of rungs I felt myself descend deeper into darkness; panic began to take over, I could feel the sweat inching its way out of my pores. I tried to climb faster, but it seemed like I was going nowhere. Fast. My hands shook as they reached for my legs. Their sharp nails dug into my heels, I felt the sting of pain spread through my body; a pathogen; a black serpent slithering its way up my leg, up to my body, up to my heart, like a river that travels quickly through land to meet the ocean. I hadn’t even made it far enough up the ladder yet. I screamed the most horrible scream I’ve ever screamed, something primordial, inhuman, (perhaps demonic), some sad, lonely scream from the core of my being, the kind of scream that always erupts out of me when I know that the dead are going to eat. It spread out like roots and a new bloodlust surged through the crowd as they slithered and trembled as a mass; one entity, one being. A mob of solid/empty flesh—junkies -— blood thieves, a dead family; at least they had circumvented so many human issues; starvation was out of the question, for I knew I would never escape alive. It was just a matter of delaying the inevitable. And as more and more of them spilled in through the door into that dark little one room shit hole, knocking over the television, practically climbing over themselves to reach at me, I finally summoned the energy to finish the climb. I pulled myself up grunting, and closed the thin plywood hatch below me. The sound of the flesh orgy bled through; I shuddered at the thought of them. I knew not where they came from, or where I came from, for that matter. I just was, oddly enough. It seemed that nothing existed outside these words, or outside the apartment walls —- which I had never seen before, in my life. Something about the smell of the place echoed childhood memories and dreams. The strange architecture —- the ladder, in particular —- seemed so distantly familiar. The creatures were not foreign to me either. What happened next makes no sense, but I suppose that comes from the territory —- it being me? The ceiling was quite low in the loft, and it was dark. I heard nothing, but felt the presence of something. I felt around for a light source, and found a small lamp, almost instinctively. She appeared to me under the warm orange glow of the light, naked, on a small futon, smiling to me. And in the next moment my clothes disappeared and we were making it slow, my wounds were gone and I had the feeling that I was the only thing left in the universe; the apartment, the bed, the dead and her body being nothing more than mere projections of myself. So I cried. And then I fell asleep. And I had the strangest dreams that night. The first, I find difficult to commit to words. Its contents are so detailed and vivid; beyond words. Beyond the boundaries of anything I was familiar with, beyond concrete jungles and farms, deep in history, deep into the reality of ones I know not. The dreams had tricked me: they all began the same way, in an awakening. Therefore they seemed real; I knew not where the lines between imagination and reality lay —- if there in fact is something separating them at all. I’ve always been under the impression that the individual’s subjective reality is greatly influenced by the imagination. And without an imagination you’re just… dead, tearing at my flesh and eating me alive. *** Regardless, I awakened (in my dream) as a soldier; a Chinese soldier, to be exact. In the duality of consciousness that is lucid dreaming —- where you are aware that you are dreaming —- I knew that I was somewhere in World War 2; Manchuria, perhaps. I knew this not because I knew myself. On the contrary, I knew it because I could identify the surroundings and the uniform I wore. The dream persisted in this fashion: I had a sort of objective perception —- through my own “real” self —- but simultaneously I was that soldier. I cannot remember what my mission was or even who I was fighting. It was World War 2, but slightly twisted. All the colors were washed in tones of grey and deep blue. Even the blood that spilled from the countless Japanese soldiers I shot and bayoneted. I’ve never killed a person, but the stark reality of that brutal dream still makes me feel like a killer. I tortured and murdered so many people. And the rape… it’s too terrible to put on paper... I know not what deep corner of my subconscious (or past?) that venomous serpent sprang from. It disgusts me to think of it —- the poison. All of know of myself (in the dream) is that I had a child; a son. He was probably about eleven. And I became him. I do not remember how it happened, exactly, but at some point in the dream, the inevitable happened: I died. A sniper picked me off. Bang. Dead. That’s it; one shot and I’m bleeding to death. There was no drama, no emotion, no sweeping violins or thunderous timpani, just my son there besides me crying his eyes out; in my dying breaths I muttered words I myself cannot understand, but I knew them nonetheless. And I understood his foreign cries, or at least that which they served to express. And as everything turned red and the ringing in my ears grew louder and louder till it was completely unbearable, I died. And then I became him. I became my son. So I went through my entire life, his entire life, through puberty, through first kiss to first fuck to first drink to first fight to first child and then again another war. Like father like son -— I became a soldier. I’m not sure where this fits in with reality, my knowledge of history and China is very limited, but there was another war, in my dream at least. Now I was a man, like my father before me. This time I was driving in a beat up car, a true piece of shit, with my own son in the passenger seat. Something happened -— an explosion perhaps; an attack of some kind. I reached for my weapon but it was too late. Rifle fire shattered the glass and bullets pierced my throat sending rays of blood squirting onto the dashboard and windows. I clutched at it in vain, a gargled scream choked in blood bubbling from my lips as my son sat and watched in horror. I knew I would die. And he knew this as well, as my final breath faded in the muffled shouts of my adversaries and gunfire. So I instinctively grabbed the pistol from the holster attached to my dead father’s belt as the screaming turned from a dull static to blistering madness in the sudden switch of consciousness. I ran from the car not knowing what else to do, and was greeted by the tail end of a rifle, knocking me unconscious. Forever. *** And I woke up again, drenched in sweat, disturbed by the previous dream; tired; still sleeping or something like it. Life seems so somnambulistic sometimes. This dream seemed more real. More contemporary; I was a cave dwelling cartoon character. It was a boring dream. Nothing really happened in the dream. I didn’t get laid or killed and I didn’t kill anything either. I just sat in my cave, dwelling, playing a broken Spanish guitar with my crab-claws while pining about broken hearts and broken bones. In the dream I rolled up a joint, smoked it, got stoned and started to watch TV. I probably ate something and thought about my ex-girlfriend. It was an extremely depressing dream. So I went back to sleep again, to dream about something else. *** When I woke up it was still the same old boring shit. Just deep wounds and dull thoughts of the future.