it was very very brief. like... less than 20 seconds long i’m pretty sure. maybe less than 10. i was in my room and there was a white cockatoo squawking in abject panic at an empty corner. (in the premise of this dream, loud talking birds were thought to be able to perceive things that humans could not, the way that people sometimes talk about cats being able to.) and i wanted to calm this bird down so i figured, hey, i’ll walk into the corner it’s squawking at to show it there’s nothing to be afraid of.
and then the moment i did my ears were filled with static, and then my vision started to also fill with static, and -
okay bear with me a second here
it was like i saw a vision of bart simpson, yes the cartoon character, being made to dance around, feebly, by an unseen force. i say feebly because he had this look of abject misery on his face, and because his movements were slow and weak and exhausted, like he’d been doing this for hours or days. this was being done to him as a form of torture.
but i wasn’t just seeing it, it was filling up my whole brain, like - the neurons that up until now had allowed me to perceive things and instantiated my thoughts and stored my memories and personality, were all being overwritten with this moving image, and that if i didn’t force myself to wake up soon my whole mind would just be tiled over with it and there would be nothing left of me
but that’s not really it. i’m pretty sure the thing about being overwritten was something i made up after the fact, in order to massage this dream into a shape i could describe to other people, and then it eclipsed the memory of what was actually going to happen to me if i didn’t wake up. all i remember clearly is the weird image and the sense of absolute terror and the needing to wake up as soon as i could, and something being - like, iterated, over and over, expanding with each iteration, and the more it expanded the closer it got to [overwhelming?][something] and i couldn’t understand what it was going to do, or if i could i do not now remember, i know indescribable is a cliche but i literally cannot describe what i knew it was going to do
but it was somehow tied up with the image and the repetition of the image and of the terrified sounds the bird was making that i was still aware of even though all my perceptions of the outside world were being rewritten with this image and
there was, a command prompt, in the corner of my vision, maybe, i don’t know what that means
but it feels like it was important
but i remember the sense of the vision bearing down on me, like my field of vision itself was flexing inward with the weight and the pressure of it, and pushing my thoughts out of my brain, and i had to scream while i still could so someone could pull me out of the corner i was stuck in because the vision of bart simpson being tortured was cutting off my ability to control my body
(i think even at this point i knew the bird was still screaming)
and i couldn’t scream, and i couldn’t wake up, i don’t think i fully understood i was dreaming but i think i still realized that “waking up” was something i could do and i had
to
wake
up
and i did
and the room was dark, it was five in the morning, and i put on a goofy youtube video to settle my nerves and i fell back asleep.
i thought over the nightmare when i was properly awake the next morning and figured i couldn’t possibly translate it into something as upsetting as it actually felt. not a traditional nightmare, though, pretty cool. kind of slenderman-era somethingawful vibes? like, golden age of creepypasta when people passed around cursed spongebob frames or w/e. solid B+ nightmare.