Etruscan bronze sculpture of the Chimera (known as the “Chimera of Arezzo”). Artist unknown; ca. 400 BCE. Found at Arezzo, Italy; now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Florence. Photo credit: Sailko/Wikimedia Commons.
In the dream I was waiting on someone or other outside a restroom in what was both an interior hallway and outdoor stairwell to a hotel, when suddenly this man came around the corner and was almost instantly in my face:
he was 7 or 8 feet tall, naked, neckless, puffy, didn’t have nipples or genitalia or a navel, a little orange tinted and freckly. His face stared straight forward instead of really looking at anyone or anything in particular. He rapidly spoke a gibberish sentence made up of very mundane conversation fragments, sort of like “hello listen that’s alright now you’ll have to call them yes we don’t need any” and so on.
I felt this massive rush of fight or flight and for some reason what I opted to do was aggressively reach out and try to dig my fingers into his stomach flesh to hurt him.
But his surface just squished exactly like slow-rising memory foam. Like a stress ball. And he didn’t have any reaction to that before I woke up.
Oddly now I remember I had a dream weeks prior that was kinda similar in that I was coming out of a restroom in the back hallways of a restaurant when a woman approached weirdly fast, she didn’t look obviously weird at first but I thought it was odd she was only half dressed with a shirt hanging open and I think one shoe. I was trying not to look directly at her because that’d feel awkward, I thought maybe she was drunk and she was going to pass by me to use the restroom but instead she swerved to block me, almost making me slam into her.
And now that I was face to face with her I noticed something about her face or head that wasn’t possible, and it shocked me awake, but even though I remembered what it was all day that day I never got to writing it down and now my brain has completely purged the memory.
So I can’t remember what made her face weird, and it’s probably going to bother me forever now, because what I do remember is a realization that she wasn’t really drunk or disheveled; whatever she was just didn’t really grasp how our clothes are supposed to work or what they’re for.
I think a stranger acting unpredictability toward me and not knowing what exactly they want might just be my biggest anxiety?
I actually read all the notes on this and got to thinking about writing a short story about the weird man (and maybe also the weird woman?) not long before I fell asleep last night, and usually I can’t pinpoint when I start dreaming but I was definitely conscious of those very thoughts morphing into this new dream, and this one had the most “competent” monster concepts I think I’ve ever had in a dream for most of my life?? By which I mean they could pass for cool monsters someone thought about on purpose rather than dream nonsense. I kinda prefer dream nonsense honestly but still these weren’t bad. It’s probably also because I was working on Mortasheen really late, too.
So in this dream I was sort of quietly tagging along with a bunch of people hiding out in a mall, like a zombie movie.
A woman looked out a window towards a grove of trees, across the parking lot, and just said something like “she found me.”
Then this came out of the forest, probably the size of a Brachiosaurus, sorry for how messy and quick the sketch is but I rushed to make it while I could still remember the visual:
A huge, distorted, nude woman with wrinkled, dry looking skin, greatly elongated limbs and a long, wormlike neck. She had a serene face, pale hair that cascaded to the ground and very short, nubby snail-like eyes sticking straight upwards from her sockets.
I wonder if this evolved out of me still trying to remember what the
hell was scary about the restroom lady in that other dream? I still
don’t remember. Maybe that’s why just everything was wrong with this
one.
I usually don’t have any dreams that follow logically from any others or from any conscious thoughts, though.
Everyone retreated deeper into the mall, but then a red light started shining through the windows, like the “laser sight” they incorrectly put on sniper guns in movies.
Now outside the window was a different face, very pale with thick, short black hair but on a long, rubbery, saggy dark grey neck, slick and shiny like slimy rubber. Also she was looking inside upside-down. Somehow I got the impression this was entirely different from the one I saw come out of the woods, that this was who the “survivor” really meant by “she’s found me,” and that this one had all her human consciousness intact but still wanted to murder everyone in the mall for personal reasons. (Almost everyone, as I’ll explain by the end)
So then I saw where the red lights were coming from, as the eel-woman’s face stretched open, pushing her human facial features aside like a crinkled up rubber mask, revealing a shallow black sucker with three rotating, red LED’s at its center:
It also became ambiguous now as to whether she actually had long greasy Japanese Ghost style hair.
She trained the red lights on a specific person, I’m not sure who (logically I’m gonna surmise it was that same one again), and somehow this allowed her to smash through the window and shoot her neck towards them.
Now her head opened up a completely different way, into a mouth with giant teeth, vertically split and kinda cute like a moray eel or a chain chomp, moving so fast that the hair trailed behind in the air:
Those other two dreams, the public restroom people, felt absolutely harrowing at the time but in this one I never felt scared or endangered at all, just curious to see what would happen next as a spectator who also happened to physically be there. The eel head woman never paid me any attention and I just kind of stepped out of the way when she broke inside.
But for some reason at that point I stopped feeling so curious, like I’d seen everything interesting now, and that’s how I woke up. Just left those folks to deal with this themselves I guess. Not MY business!
ALT
ALT