My Best Nightmare, Ever

I have good dreams, I have bad dreams... but the best of the best is a proper nightmare that has actual context. It was years ago, but I remembered it clearly and wrote it down as fast as I could when I woke up (after episode two). This was a cerebral experience I'll never forget.

 

CHAPTER 1: WHAT THE FUCK?

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I found myself in a familiar place, though I couldn’t quite place it at first. Hearing my mother’s voice among the background murmuring, the fog lifted and things began to take shape around me. I was at my grandparents’ house, and—contrary to reality—both my grandmother and grandfather were still alive, but my uncle had just died, and this was the wake of his funeral. I pieced it together bit by bit and simply accepted the reality I was presented with as it unfolded naturally. The smell of coffee in the air made me realize that this was the typical alcohol-free cake ordeal one could expect from my family.

“Hell,” I thought to myself, “these people don’t even get the point of a wake.”

As I walked around the house, mingling with the crowd, I spotted my grandfather through the living room window. He was standing outside on the veranda with some strange-looking characters I had never seen before, and they appeared to be drinking brandy.

“You sneaky bastards,” I muttered to myself and hastily excused myself toward the exit.

My grandfather and his clandestine rabble of strangers heard me walking down the gravel path around the house and went quiet as I drew near.

“Oh, it’s just you...” my grandfather uttered as I came around the corner, with a hint of relief in his voice. “Come on over here, boy... I’ve got someone you need to meet.”

“What’s with the cloak and dagger?” I questioned.

“This is an old friend of the family,” he replied, stepping aside.

A short, fat, elderly lady approached me as if to shake my hand, but instead she threw a dusty, old rag over my head and began speaking gibberish. I just stood there for a few seconds, expecting laughter—potentially a bad joke, a pun, or some other typical grandfatherly input.

“You’re fucking with me, right?” I asked, while staring at them through the rag.

“Stand still...” the old lady croaked, handing me an ancient ceramic urn. “And try not to drop this!”

As soon as my fingers touched the urn, reality—as I perceived it—shifted into an acid trip maelstrom of hellish composition. After a moment of confusion, I wobbled aimlessly to the corner of the veranda, dropped the urn, and puked on the ashes.

“What the hell, fucking shit…” I grumbled, wiping the barf off my mouth.

The old lady turned to my grandfather, gave him a consoling pat on the arm, and told the others it was time to leave. Again, I just stood there for a few seconds, expecting some kind of explanation to drop out of the air.

“Tell me I didn’t just puke on my uncle’s ashes!” I blurted.

“No, we just buried your uncle, remember?” my grandfather reminded me.

“Right… and… so…?”

“We need to have a talk,” he intoned somberly.

At this point, my head was spinning, and by the look on his face, I thought maybe he was about to tell me I had brain cancer or something—but of course, it couldn’t be that easy. He told me that our family was cursed and continued to regale me with a tall tale of sorcery and witchcraft. The story sounded something akin to the biblical fantasy of a cultist preacher wearing bunny slippers and tripping on acid in the psychiatric ward of a war veterans’ hospital. I gathered that the men of our bloodline were cursed by “some gypsy hag with a chip on her shoulder” back in the thirteenth century, because of our family’s “alleged participation” in the crusades.

“So, I take it we burned a lot of witches?” I asked rhetorically.

My grandfather just droned on unabated about torment and hellfire, evil objects, and all the crucibles I would have to face throughout my life.

“We have a great and terrible responsibility as guardians of these objects,” he proclaimed, then asked me to follow him down into the cellar.

That dark and dank, rat-infested hole used to creep me out as a child, and it still did. It had this weird way of pulling you in while at the same time warning you away—like something between an ice cream truck and a clown. As soon as I went through the door, a weird, quiet hum kind of drowned out all other sound. I felt strange—almost like walking underwater. My grandfather stood aside and observed as I followed the hum to its source: a crummy old locker filled with strange, random objects, like something out of a fantasy board game. The hum appeared to emanate from a black bottle with an extravagant silver cork shaped like a serpent wrapped around a cross. I could see something swirling inside, synchronous with the humming sound.

Not a complete idiot, I put two and two together and reckoned this had to be one of those cursed objects my grandfather was raving about. Without thinking, I reached out and grabbed the bottle like a moth drawn to a flame. Immediately, reality shifted again into a sickening, confusing nightmare. It was like seeing two worlds at once, overlapped and intertwined in the weirdest way… and I was ill-prepared to handle the experience. My grandfather tried to intervene before I dropped the bottle, but it slipped from my fingers almost as soon as I picked it up, and shattered when it hit the floor. I fell to my knees and blew chunks all over the place.

“What have you done?” my grandfather shouted. “You’ve freed the evil sorcerer!”

“I think I puked on him too,” I whimpered. “Wait… what?”

“The evil sorcerer!”

“You had an evil sorcerer in a bottle?”

“No, you moron, just his soul… and now he’s free to unleash hell on Earth!”

“So, you had this evil, creepy thing sitting here in an open locker… and you let me just walk over here and grab it?”

“Nobody told you to grab it!” he barked.

“Any idiot could just walk in here and grab it!”

My grandfather just stared at me with great disappointment. A flash of light and the following sound of rolling thunder broke the awkward silence, drawing our attention to what was happening outside. I watched as day turned to night in the blink of an eye.

# SCENE #

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I woke up at dark-thirty needing to take a piss. No jump scare or anything, just a slow, boring, yawning welcome back to biology. I got out of bed and went to the bathroom half-asleep, not even bothering to turn the lights on. As is customary in the dark, one sits down on the toilet so as not to make a mess.

While sitting there, doing my business, I started thinking about the dream, and all the unanswered questions. If I freed an evil sorcerer by breaking that creepy bottle… what stupendous malediction did I inflict upon the dreamworld when I dropped the ancient urn before that?

The other question that came to mind was; what’s the deal with the old lady and the rag? She spoke some witching gibberish before handing me the urn, and after that I was able to see and hear all this weird stuff, as if she triggered some latent magical superpower in me. “I’m gonna kick the shit out of that evil sorcerer,” I thought to myself as I stumbled back into bed.

When I latch on to a dream like this, if I fall asleep again fast enough, I usually manage to continue dreaming the same story, but the next iteration is always slightly different. The only reason I wanted to continue this nightmare was to take down the evil sorcerer, using my newfangled, magical superpowers, having given zero thought to what those powers might actually be.

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CHAPTER 2: FUCK THE WHAT?

Walking through unfamiliar territory with my grandfather, I slowly began to understand the situation as it unfolded. We appeared to be tracking a fashion victim through the woods, following a trail of unusually plump paw prints in the dirt, like a pair of bumbling city folk in a cartoon. As is only proper for the setting, it was dark and cold, and there were owls hooting just for the sake of adding unnecessary drama.

Suddenly, my grandfather grabbed me by the shoulder and yanked me down behind a boulder.

“There he is!” he hissed, pointing to a hooded figure in a clearing.

“What’s he doing?” I asked.

“I think he’s starting a bonfire,” he observed, squinting.

“It’s gotta be some kinda ritual thing, right?” I theorized.

“We have to stop him,” my grandfather blurted—loud enough to immediately alert the hooded figure to our presence.

All we could see was a dark and ominous silhouette turning toward us, standing in front of a barely lit fire. He appeared to be holding a sword in one hand and a severed head in the other, and he was monstrously large for a man—really fat, and his head was huge.

“What the fuck do we do?” I whispered urgently.

“Throw a fireball!” my grandfather barked.

“What?”

“Use your magic, boy!”

“I’m not a goddamn wizard!” I snapped.

“Just wave your hands and say something magical,” he insisted. “Trust me, kid, you’ve got magical superpowers you don’t even know about!”

I stood up in disbelief, flipped off the hooded figure repeatedly with both hands, and shouted:

“Cunt!”

I had no idea what I was doing. To my surprise, that demonic bastard started laughing and waved us over. I figured maybe I cast a charm spell or something.

“Come join the party!” he hollered, like we were all old friends.

“He thinks we’re here for the ritual,” my grandfather whispered. “Quick, rush him!”

Without thinking, I darted into the clearing full throttle, like a running back heading for a touchdown. I tackled that bastard with the force of a runaway moose, and he made the cutest little squeaky noise as I drilled him into the ground. I punched him in the face over and over, and with every violent hit, he squeaked like a doggy chew toy.

When he finally stopped squirming, I noticed that he was wearing something like a bunny mascot suit under the hooded robe, and that he was—in fact—not holding a sword and a severed head, but a stick and a bag of marshmallows.

As the fire grew and lit up the area, I saw more and more of these plushy-wearing psychos emerging from the woods. My grandfather pulled up a shotgun and waved it around like a madman, trying to scare them off, but to no avail. It suddenly dawned on me that I knew exactly what was going on…

We had stumbled upon a woodland furry orgy.

A bunch of freaky nerds dressed up in elaborate animal costumes surrounded us, and they were all geared up for a sweaty dry-humping session from which there would be no escape.

“Where’s the evil sorcerer!” I shouted at the furry I was sitting on!

"We are the evil sorcerer," all the furries spoke in unison, like some Children of the Corn crap.

“It’s a trap!” my grandfather roared, tossing me a machine gun.

We began blasting furries right and left, but they kept coming by the dozens, unrelenting in their cute deviancy. The following spectacle could only be described as a beautiful, operatic, slow-motion, action-packed splatter of blood and feathers.

We fought bravely, but we lost in the end. The furries piled up on us until we couldn’t move or breathe. A most undignified end.

That bastard of a sorcerer truly did bring hell on Earth.
An evil, all-consuming, woodland furry orgy!

The Glorious End (I woke up again)!

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No comments on my mental health, please. And, yes... I literally do recall conversations from my dreams. I've heard that's unusual. I also lucid dream a lot, so it's all very strange. It was nice to see my grandfather again, though. :D