Stardreamer

For some, the nightmares that are spawned from the thoughts of the slumbering terrible old gods, are a burden to the mind; a succubus or an incubus of evil from which deliverance may only be brought by waking up screaming and sweating: though for even those very same dreams of abnormal terror I yearned and prayed for every evening, and then, every day. A dream of corruption would have mellowed my soul, and eased the mind, but the strange and scraping winds and cosmic currents had disposed me of the normal ability to vision and dream and see the things when we close our eyes and open our minds every single night.

You cannot say that I was a hermit. Though some may consider sharing my place with two acquaintances, both continuous users of opium and herbs, a life of loneliness. Being a devoted user myself once, I knew that the plants and leaves will lift up the soul for a while and ease the pressure of the everyday veil of monotony that pressures so hard and, even willingly on our eyes, and that when under it’s influence, the person is often let alone in the mazes of his or her mind; mazes of the subconscious that is not even safe for its owner, as the Minotaur always lurks behind the last corner, growling and drooling, wielding the axe of nothingness and apathious vengeance.

Not that they were castaway’s from the social circles or lost souls of the financial circles of hypocrisy, but wealthy and educated young men from noble lineage of lords and counts. I knew how the boredom of the ordinary and satisfactory could numb the senses and the body, rob you of your questions and curiosity, and in the end, leave you sitting on your golden throne of everything material, with the empty mind that was sacrificed for its privilege.

Sons of fathers of futile power, or at least powerful in the circles of men of politics and wealth, the gentlemen had grown weary of those glamorous parties, the social mockery of care and the ways what their lives were planned even before they themselves were born, by their parents. As for myself, I was never that cursed with comfort of a financially secured future, and knew not the exact boundaries that these men felt. Boundaries of the mind I did know, and thus we found something vaguely common with those, who had sought freedom from voluntary slavery, and had ironically found another master in those pipes that let out the drowsing mist of narcotic sleep and pleasure.

Accommodating myself in their spare room, I often held long and weird conversations with them, for their way of life was almost decadent, flooded over with quests of pleasure and folly, aided by their wealth that their fathers quietly sent as pay-off for exchange that their wretched sons would not return home, black sheep of the nobles, now practicing a life not suitable for them.

If they drifted on the planes between the drugs and dreams, I heard them mumble to themselves, and speak to those beings of the radiant night, that only dreams hold and hide. Why did I torture myself, I did not know. The dreaming mind is what I lacked, and maybe I hoped somehow to ‘smell’ the visions of others and ‘taste’ its aetherous presence. Like a shadow of a shadow, I felt locked behind a gate, behind which keys are being made for that very same door, and it baffled me to a point that I grew desperate of not being able to even dream of nothing.

Pressure of the ordinary day forced me to start taking pills to fall asleep. It felt absurd that I, once a great experienced dreamer, should now take modern medicine to bet forced through the gates of Aether, and so for a week, I decided not to administer them. On the first night nothing particular took place. Sitting on my bed and staring out of the window into the space, lightless and endless, I grew curious of a strange sparkling point in the midst of everything.

I stared and stared at it for hours, only waking from a sort of a trance to remind myself to blink my eyes that had grown sore. A somewhat relaxing sensation flowed over me when investigating the star; eyes steadily fixed upon it, my rhythm of breathing flowing as a stream – steadily and with it’s own sullenous pace, and the thoughts seemed to be carried along with the ‘stream of the unknown star’: for the semi-hypnotic influence it placed upon me made it able for me to find the exact spot and placement in the constellations, sometimes even when it was daytime.

Light headaches began to haunt me everywhere, curiously disappearing and then vigorously re-appearing, bringing along their deviant servants: fatigue, fever and short-temperedness. Still even more angst was thrown into the mix of it by the fact that I had suffered from it when I had still been a young boy in our family house in Devonshire. Although after the extensive examination of my blood and physique the doctor’s called from London discovered nothing out of the ordinary, suggested to my parents that I was faking the whole thing in order to receive attention. Certainly the head-doctor I then was being forced to visit, learned some thing I didn’t dare to say of to mother and father. I can’t say I was saddened by his premature, and also out of the ordinary departure from our world on that night I had the most engulfing nightmare of my young life, for he suffered from shakes and tremblings from the things I described I saw, not dreamed of. The new apparatus to inflict daemonic pain with electricity was not my idea of treatment, and the barbarous design was fortunately never used on me, although that was the gadget he thought was forced to use upon me.

When dreams and it’s darker sides subdued for decades, I stopped having those dreams. Once or twice, during an electric storm or lighting, I did see and get a glimpse of some weird vision, which did not fit under the category ‘nightmare’. Parents always told me that a black panther that had made its accidental escape from a gypsy circus in a nearby village had mangled the doctor. But why, in my vision of touchable reality, was the beast walking on its hooves, and floating in from the above, from star-space, and why did the victim die of horror before that face that my vision had locked myself behind; why did the man decease with a face of ashen, while his insides were torn out as if in contrast with the fear-stricken pale face, with claws, that were as fingers of a behemoth?

The subliminal pressure in my head had now, almost two decades later, began to show first trembling shadows of the signs that they were settling in once again, and the memory of past-events made me anxious and not to say, at least nervous.

Riddled with questions emerging from the past in the most curious way, I spent the days and sometimes nights wondering in parks, museums or libraries. Halfway past the Newbury Park I suddenly felt shudders. Why it happened, I could not guess at first, but then realized, that just behind that small grove of willows the newly built De Charnes library stood: built to fit in the inventory from that disreputable Miscatonic University, that was in danger of crumbling down: the topsoil had begun to drop from underneath the foundation – explainable with the fact that the old and ancient building was too close to the river that ran through the town.

De Charnes library… I dared not to look at it again, and marched straight onwards. Certainly the sighting of those books that came in that day from that wretched place had me gotten interested: I should have never bought that – recorded malice of unhuman history – from the old librarian in the fuss of them moving in to the new building. Afterwards it became unknown even to me if the parchment forced me to keep myself awake or did I keep myself awake to keep an eye on my most precious of possessions. I’m glad I burned it – still, it has stored itself into my memory against my will.

Onwards, I walked, through the park. The summer air was thick with aromas from a thousand blossoming flowers… green, violet, yellow… yellow… I felt dizzy and I think I was staggering and tumbling, as my feet didn’t want to subdue themselves under the command of the brain. Falling… into the yellow and green and violet… and lying on the grass I was. Thinking the sleepless nights full of exercises like those long walks had finally come to a humorously pathetic, but unavoidable finale, I did not attempt to get up again for my limbs were on a different opinion.

If there were any other people wandering through the park other than murderers, thieves and lunatics, they all must have been thinking I was a bottle-hugger. A terrible thing to be exhausted to the point of fainting, but the only torn and shaken piece of clarity tells you that you will not, but suffer the burden of physical tiredness awake, eyes open and conscious.

As I lied there, I closed my eyes in hopes to at least rest my eyes, but thru the eyelids something shone. Not the sun, but something else… and when I opened my eyes, I saw the unknown star, bright as the twin-suns that drown themselves into the lake of Hel, blinking, pulsating, like an eye of the storm, an eye of Azag-Thoth…

Never had I heard that name, but only once in my years as a graduate in Arkham, when I shared a room with a fellow-student, who had been haunted by dreams of something viciously malicious; something I wished to take upon myself for it was about then that I stopped having vivid experiences on the matter of aetherous reality. In his nightmares he once mentioned names like Nahab, Keziah, and that name that must not be uttered…

Too great became the light, and too suddenly. Sharp and painful, it penetrated my closed eyes: I saw through them, and when I raised my two shaking arms to cover the lidless eyes, I saw through them as well, as the unknown star showed its might thru flesh and bone, mind and matter. Suddenly, so fast that I felt, as I had never even been on Earth, I existed through something else, for speed was too mundane to be described by normal standards of measure. And I dreamed.

Countless eyewitnesses admitted the next day, that they did not see a comet falling ‘from’ the sky, but falling ‘into’ the sky. The whole northern area of Newbury Park was scorched flat, with the exception of a glass-bottle that had left it’s remains melted, and also the cracked stones; both obviously suffered from great heat. Astronomers observed an unusual increase in the activities of the northern lights during the next three days over the city.

But none dared to speak to the fellow or husband, or friend next to him about the strange nightmares of distant landscapes, towering cities and the forms moving in the midst of them. For in their forced upon dreams, they dreamed of a dreamer, without sleep.