Violet Nightmares

Hey, don't get abducted by dream monsters, ok?

Photo by David Trinks on Unsplash

Exhausted today. I spent most of last night in astral travel into a client’s dreams. Well, kind of.

Not her dreams exactly.

No one really knows what dreams are. Are they your brain trying to clean up the day’s unfinished business? Or trying to process things you couldn’t handle consciously? Who knows. I don’t, not for most dreams anyway. When you dream that you went to the grocery store in your underwear and a giant snake ate the last of your kid’s favorite cereal, I’m assuming that’s just your brain trying to efficiently combine all your anxieties in to one low budget flick. I don’t get involved in those matters.

The dreams I am interested in happen outside your head in wild realms that no human should ever visit. And most don’t, mostly people get baited into one of these places in one way or another. Humans aren’t very good at awareness of anything beyond their own daily lives. It’s just not wired into them to be tapped into the other realms out there. Some develop those skills, witches, shamans, brujas, _some_ mediums, and the like, but generally to the exclusion of more useful pursuits. You can be practical and good at engineering your environment for survival, or you can be tuned in to the worlds outside this one. We can’t all be the village mystic, someone has to plant and harvest the food. Practical matters, matter. And that’s fine. Until you’re snatched away into a dimension of ghouls that only eat eyeballs and think yours look especially tasty.

It’s not common, thankfully.

So how do humans get drawn into these worlds? It’s nothing they do really, so much as what they don’t do. My client’s entity showed up in her dreams as a mere shadow, at first. She’d be dreaming about work and there it would be, a dark figure standing behind her boss or lurking next to the water cooler. Just standing there, barely distinguishable as a being at all. She said at first, she would wake up in the mornings and wonder about the shadow, but not think too much about it. There were more pressing worries. No money for bills. A kid to feed. That kind of thing. But that was her first mistake. Seeing that ephemeral shade was the moment to recognize she’d left a door open and to close it. But people aren’t taught these skills. So she let it go.