by Michael Reed
As I grew older these events started taking place more and more often, instead of seeing a couple pictures I started seeing more and more every time. More pages were available to me. As I see more pictures I could only remember a small percentage of them. It was like an information overload. Instead of seeing only a few I would see dozens or more. Sometimes they would all seem to fit together but most of the time the seemed purely random with no connection. And the frequencies of my dreams were happening almost every night. I started a dream journal and would write everything I seen in my dream upon waking. Most times it was just parts of my dreams like a jigsaw puzzle. I could only remember but a few pieces not enough for the puzzle to become clear.
It got to a point that I would see more than a couple freezes of time per day. Most with no meaning or significant at all, I started to believe these served as sign posts that I was passing on my way to a more significant event. Sort of like checkpoints that I was on the right path. I guess that I was becoming overly confident that this was the way things were supposed to be.
Then one night in my dream as I’m flying thru the dark fog I realized that things were about to change. Usually in the dark fog all my senses were enveloped in the pain and misery. All the bad things in life you could smell, feel, taste, and touch. The fog would smell of death and rotting flesh. I could feel all the agony and pain in the world all at once. My body would become cold with fright. My mouth would become dry and had a bitter taste. I could hear whispers of pain but could not make out any one voice. It was like being in a large crowd and hearing everyone talking at once, but really couldn’t make out what anyone was saying, except they weren’t talking they were screaming and crying. I could hear the pain in their whispers, but they weren’t whispering. It was like the volume was turned down to make it just loud enough to hear it but not loud enough to understand it.
This time it was different as I flew thru the fog the voices were louder and in more pain. The fog was darker. The agony and pain had increased. Instead of whispers it was blood curdling screams. The fog had grown and was more intense than ever before. The fog had no end instead of flying in and out of it I was just flying through it constantly. This happened in my dreams for three nights. I was physically affected by this and on the third day started to become sick. I was later told that I was not feeling well those few days because I was getting ill. I was scared of these new dreams intensity and was afraid to dream about the new fog again. I knew that sooner or later I would get through the fog but it was so negative that I dreaded going to sleep.
On the forth night I came to an opening in the fog. It was unlike any other place I’ve ever seen the book before. It was floating in the air in the middle of the fog. There was a small opening in the fog where the voices were dulled down. I could feel the fogs intensity but it wasn’t affecting me like when I was flying through it. As I started looking through the book I understood why the fog was so intense. Every picture in the book was what I was experience in the fog. Every cry and scream was now clear to me. The pictures in the book were the exact moments of their screams and cries. I do not remember all these pictures thankfully. These were the most horrifying images I’ve ever seen. It was like looking at pictures of war and all its horrible images. These pictures were seared into my brain. With every picture I saw I heard the exact moments of their pain. It was haunting. I woke up screaming and crying.
That dream started what I now call the dark times. Imagine every horrible thing you’ve ever seen or heard then imagine feeling that pain at the same time, like it was your family or loved ones in that pain. It was truly awful. I imagined that’s what hell is. I truly think that night I went to hell. It felt like hell. I cannot get those images or feeling out of my soul. It’s like I’m infected with it. I cannot describe it any further just writing this down was as horrible as when I was there.
The images were the worst things that humans can go through. They ranged from car accidents to brutal murders. They were all about death. Every single image was about some horrible death. I was shaken from this one dream like never before. I was also severely sickened by the week’s events. I ended up in hospital. I was heavily medicated. I had become aware earlier in my life that heavy medications stop my dreams from happening or maybe I just couldn’t remember them. I kept asking them to take me off the medications. I couldn’t remember these new dreams because of the medications. I stayed in the hospital for three weeks. The last week I was there they finally took me off the heavy medications.
I started dreaming again. I started to remember the images again. I would wake up screaming. The hospital staff took notice and sent a Psychiatrist to see me. How do you tell a Psychiatrist the things I see in my dreams and expect not to go to the Looney bin? I mean at this point I was thinking I was cracking up. I think I’m still losing it to this day. It’s taken twenty seven pages to explain this to whoever is reading and you probably think I’m the craziest person ever. How do you talk to a shrink in an hour and not come off as total nut job?
The Doctor asked to go for a walk as we “talked”. He seemed to think that would help open me up as he analyzed me. As were walking and talking I see patients in their rooms and start to notice something different is about to happen. I felt time slow down to a crawl as we passed a room. The second time stopped I knew what was going to happen. This was one of the horrible images I had experienced before. The patient had a heart attack as we walked past his room. They later said his heart had literally exploded in his chest. The family was in the room with him when it happened. I’ve heard that lady screaming before in my sleep. I can still hear her screams at night right before I fall asleep. Sometimes I hear her screams right after I wake.
All those horrible feelings of pain came back to me. Everything I’ve seen and felt and heard in that dream was there in that moment. It was not just their pain but the pain of everyone in that dream. I felt helpless in that moment. When time snapped back there was a whole team of doctors and nurses that ran into that room to help him but there was no helping him. My skin got pale and clammy. My legs gave out and I fell to the floor.
I later woke up back in my hospital bed. The doctors and nurses said that it must have been too soon to be out of bed. And that I passed out from the shock. Later the Physiatrist came to see me. He was still unaware of my real situation. He told me that I had been through an extreme experience and was going through some sort of syndrome usually experienced by war vets after seeing horrible things in wars. He said this was going on before the guy died in front of us. He asked what I went through, what had happened to me.
I wanted to tell him everything, I really did. Like I said before there is no way to explain this without sounded crazy. Do I sound crazy to you? After reading this I sound crazy to me. What do you think a Doctor who works with crazy people is going to think? And besides what proof do I have? Everything I’ve talked about and there’s not one piece of evidence to support my story. I can’t prove a single word of my story. How can you prove something you can’t touch or feel? If it doesn’t smell or taste like anything? If you can’t hear it? How could you prove something like love? You could try to show two people love each other but what proof is there? Maybe an act of love? Could that be written down as compassion or empathy? Could you actually prove it?
The Psychiatric told me that a family member was at my house cleaning up and they found my dream journal. In my defense the journal are just thoughts and clouded images of things I cannot see but feel. The last entry was the bad fog and then the horrible images. These images were crystal clear. The rest of it probably looks like a mad mans scribbling. He said he had looked at it and it was disturbing. That’s another way to say I’m crazy. I told him that those were just dreams.
He said how did I know that the guy was going to have a heart attack. I was shocked. I mean this was the first time I was able to make out enough of an image to make sense out of it while I was awake and before it happened! I said I was feeling so bad that day when I woke
up that I didn’t remember what I had wrote down. I was lying I knew everything I wrote in that book I just couldn’t remember because of the medications I was on. I don’t particularly remember writing that down because there were so many images I wrote in the book that morning. I did remember something about a hospital and kept thinking that it was my death I had seen in the hospital. I kept thinking that I was going to die here in the hospital in some horrible way.
I asked how he knew it was that guy I was talking about in my dream. He said I wrote down the room number with heart attack under it. I asked what else I wrote. I cringed at my own words knowing that I would go through the pain and agony again just hearing it. It’s like hell on earth every time. He told me that I wrote down three pages of vague and cryptic notes.
I had a girlfriend who had decided to go thru my dream journal once. She read it and thought I was a psycho and broke up with me immediately. Since then I would write very carefully not to arouse anyone else’s suspicions. I guess since I had so much to write that I was trying to get it all down on paper before I forgot. He asked if this happened all the time. I knew he couldn’t tell what to make of dream journal. I told him that usually I can only remember bits and pieces but since I was feeling sick that it was probably a feverish state I was in and wrote in it all kinds of weird stuff.
I don’t know if he believed me or not. I got the feeling he thought that I was responsible for the man’s heart attack. He told me to make an appointment with him after I was released. I said I would but I was clearly lying again. He handed my journal back to me. As I looked trough it I knew the dark times had only begun. I had remembered every picture with enough clarity to make sense of them. Could I now do something about it?
CHAPTER 6
The Journal