most dangerous

I’m in a skiff skimming through a river. The waters are wooded, almost like a swamp, but it as all clear, no algae, or lily pads, mostly just driftwood and sunlight and me.

The dream started with pokemon card tournaments actually, I seemed to frequent them in this dream world. There was some sort of drama or scandal. Something sinister, cultish. Bad enough for me to throw my hands in the air, give up on everything and get on my tiny boat to take to the waters. It’s a very silly origin to my travels there but it makes me smile in hindsight.

Just me on the water, everything is dead silent. No birds, no signs of any life whatsoever. I stumble on to what seems like an abandoned office building. It can’t have been too long since it was deserted, or even built because everything was still intact. The gray carpet was dry, there were no paint chips or rubble, the TV screens were still mounted on the wall.

Desks, seats, appliances. Fully furnished, no signs of life, no sounds whatsoever but the ones I was making. I looked around, explored the rooms, settled in there. I watched films, I tried on dresses, I ate well, and eventually this is what the dream turned into.

I’d boat from place to place, all equally perfectly maintained, and live in there freely. Never ever once encountering any signs of life, until the last one.

Suddenly there were people.

Sometimes I dream of people, I don’t see their face, or hear their voice, or even stranger still, they look entirely different, I often look entirely different, but I recognize their essence. I know who they are. I know it’s them, and I know it’s me, despite looking nothing like I do in “real life” when I look at mirrors within dreams.

There I am having the time of my life, and suddenly, there is my family.

I remember everything so clearly but as soon as they come up, it’s like someone is walking through a hallway in my head and turning the lights off one by one.

I feel my mind being wiped.

I don’t know how much of it is “real”, “legitimate”, “valid” but it is the reality of my actual lived experience that there is within my mind, an environment of sorts. A space, a habitation. Sometimes it’s a cavern with sparkling crystals embedded within the surrounding rock, sometimes it’s a white room with a very long table and tens of seats, other times it’s wherever I need to be to run away. And in all these spaces there live people, entities, amorphous or otherwise, animals, concepts. We interact, they’re all better attuned to different things than I am, different modes of being. I seek their aid and council often, we make deals and agreements. Some I’m aware of, some in my control, some I know nothing about, some I never agreed to. When I say I hear voices, or when you’re reading an entry in this here apocrypha and you see quotations

“like this”

“𝖔𝖗 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘”

“5*† 8¶8* )‡98;698) ;46)”

It’s what I’m hearing, or experiencing in that moment as I write, or experienced at the time of whatever anecdote I’m sharing in that instance.

When decisions need to be made I confer with certain people or entities, when I can’t handle something or shouldn’t experience a thing, they do it for me. It’s quite effective, utilitarian even, it’s just that, it’s not always up to me. I’m not always aware or in control, and it often gets out of hand.

There is someone up there, who doesn’t talk much to me. His job, is to take away memories that may be harmful. Sometimes, when I try hard enough to remember something I’m not supposed to I see him wiping a chalkboard, and when this happens…

I cannot quite articulate with words the clarity and emptiness of mind that I experience.

It happened just then, as I was trying to recall the rest of the dream.

It’s frustrating, but I know it’s for my own good, and so I admire and appreciate him. Though I can’t quite remember his name.

In my teenage years I was quite preoccupied with the sentiment that I don’t think I really have a personality of my own. I was always playing a certain character depending on my environment, depending on what I thought would please or agitate appropriately in whichever environment I found myself in. I was always watching myself think, and thinking about watching myself think, and watching myself think about watching myself think. So on and so forth into infinite layers until I or someone else shut it down as the awareness became far too distressing.

From toddlerhood I was always too acutely aware of the silent presence behind my thoughts. If I can hear myself and others think in my head, there must be something behind those thoughts, watching them happen. I could spend hours in a near comatose state, endlessly gazing within the infinity mirror that is consciousness. At times I regard it as quite a useless practice and huge waste of time. So what if I can see that I can see that I can see. The world is still outside.

I couldn’t help myself though, and because of it, I always felt fake in my simple basic interactions. When you look at me, there are hundreds of pairs of eyes looking back at you, observing you, making note of your micro expressions, the crumb at the corner of your lip, the slightly irritated skin under your nose, the mucus still in your tear duct, the mite on your eyelashes, the color of your tongue, the pulsing of your carotid, the lilt in your voice, the contraction of your iris

Is it the same for you, dear reader? I would be terrified to learn this of someone I was interacting with, looking at one person and knowing i’m dealing with several invisible creatures, enemies, demons even. Always watching, always talking, always arguing.

I’ve forgotten myself over the last year and a half, almost two. Now it’s no longer contained. Now when they whisper to me I respond out loud before I’m aware of it. I laugh out loud in real life at the funny observations someone might make in my head. This process that was once infinitely internal has started to permeate the outside of well, me.

I lose moments in time, I’m told I behave quite differently or strangely, I watch myself from behind my eyes, do and say things I otherwise wouldn’t. I lose agency of my body and what’s done to it frequently. It is at times..

“𝖓𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖙𝖒𝖆𝖗𝖎𝖘𝖍”

Yes but, I love everyone I live with in my head I really do. A therapist once gave me an assignment, to read a book called No Bad Parts about this very thing I experience. The book insisted, that none of the people in your head, no matter how vapid, villainous, or vile they may present, are actually bad. At their core, they all simply wish to protect you in their own way. The entire reason we came into existence was because you were being torn apart as a child, no one around you would help you, so we came to do what no one else would.

I, or one of me, is capable of eating a man, bones and all. Another one, isn’t even much of a person, just a frenzied mass of violence capable of horrible things. But because of this, no man is a threat to me. No man would walk away unscathed this time, as they did when you were a child.

And so

“and so, darling?”

Y’know, a big deterrent sometimes writing this blog, is that I’m afraid someone I want to care about me will read these and run for the hills, knowing how uhh how so the kids say it?

cooked.

knowing how cooked i am. but!

the freedom i experience putting my shame out there for the world to see is… Im losing the word, someone give me the word please.

“euphoric”

yes!

and better still, imagine if someone read all this, and still decided to love me. In our entirety. horns and all.

that would be…

“ɿʍʍԹՇՄʅԹԵȝ!”

Though I must say, I don’t know if I’m the real one. Which is at times a bit distressing.