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juushikaI have violent dreams with such regularity and detail that I'm beginning to wonder—why?
I just woke up from a dream where there were a number of person to person battles, ranked to determine the best fighter—nothing special, very video game-esque. Each fighter had his or her own choice is weapons, and they were all rather unique. There was this female warrior that everyone was anxious to see play, because she was an black horse favorite: her fighting style was so unique that she seemed unlikely to win, but she was fun to watch and somehow, she often won.
Prior to this fight, I'd been present watching the other battles and rarely interacting, like I was some sort of coach. But when they brought this girl in, I was her. I chose my weapons not to kill, but to incapacitate and to maim—a garrote, what was essentially a boxing glove, and strapped onto my back a bag, about three feet long and filled with packed material (wool, mayhap? who knows, it was a dream; the thing could still do damage)—that was my final weapon, and I would swing it around to build momentum and then hit people with it, doing more force than I could do with my fists and at a longer reach, so that they couldn't attack me.
The guy I was ticketed to fight was a personal and longstanding rival, and not in the pleasant sort of way. He hated me, I disliked him and was afraid of his over-eager violence. I was already on edge because I had lost my previous tournament fight because the casing on my big bag had broken and, with my fists alone, I'd been unable to do enough damage. There was so much energy and combativeness before this fight, based on our rivalry and on the popular opinion of whether I would be able to come back from my previous loss.
His weapon of choice was a knife and a sword.
We got into a verbal altercation before the round was supposed to begin, which both of us had been expecting. We hated each other. I was sitting at my home base, and he had come to me. The altercation turned physical when he tried to attack me with his knife, but I looped the garrote around his wrist, twisted the blade away from me, and kicked it free. I tried to use my padded punching glove to hit him, but his torso was too strong and my punches felt weak, like I was fighting against the air to get to my target. I shrugged off my pack, swung it once, and slammed it into the side of his neck. His head snapped back, he went tumbling to the ground, and his neck and clavicle blossomed a rich stung red.
With him down, I could stomp on him rather than punching, which was much more effective. I dug into his stomach, but when he started to rise, I kicked under his chin. That movement, in the suddenly impossible way of dreams, got us rolling through the hall that we had been fighting in, him on his back curled up like a goddamned hamster wheel, me the hamster in the middle stomping and kicking to keep moving us along.
But there was plenty to keep the improbable rolling carnage from making the dream funny. As we rolled, as I beat him, his flesh caved in: his chest fell in on itself and gave under my feet when I kicked it; the flesh of his cheeks grew swollen and then began to slough off as we rolled. It was like kicking a bloated decomposing corpse, the flesh almost fluid beneath me, peeling away in chunks to splat on the floor.
The sound of his lost flesh sticking to the ground woke me from the red-eyed haze of violence and the comfortable wave of my motions. I stopped kicking him, and we came to a stop. He unrolled from his ball, arms flung wide over his head, chin tilted up. I stepped off of him, and in a moment he rose. He was a map of bruises and missing flesh, more corpse than man, his cheekbones rendered to bone, his arms falling loosely from broken shoulders, leaning forward over his concave chest.
I had stopped beating him because I was hoping they would count this match as a win for me even though the fight had begun early and taken place outside the ring, and I knew they would disqualify me were he actually dead.
I have nightmares more often than any other sort of dream, but "nightmare" for me varies, and is often as simple as a repeated image or action of event. The repetitions are so small and so frequent that I become trapped in them. It happens in my waking thoughts often too, and makes for a unique sort of sleepless disquiet. I have more traditional nightmares too, but historically only rarely and not so violently. And then here these are, a rash of violent detailed dreams (I had another the other night where I died at the end, and they come a couple times a week in this sort of detail). I don't know why. I haven't been particularly stressed, or angry. I do have low impulse control, for violent acts as well, but I've still never really hurt anyone nor wanted to. I no longer have frequent desires to hurt myself. And yet, these dreams.
I've never subscribed to a belief that dreams hold portents or even that they are deep and useful delves into the subconscious. Generally, they come from something in daily life, a collection of images or memories that the brain dredges up in order to think over some more, or out of habit, or by chance. Normally my dreams fit into those realms quite nicely. These, however, do not. They are remarkable, inexplicable, and frequent. And while they don't quite worry me yet (every now and then I wake up upset as a result, but mostly I don't let them bother me), they do make me wonder why they keep occurring.
I just woke up from a dream where there were a number of person to person battles, ranked to determine the best fighter—nothing special, very video game-esque. Each fighter had his or her own choice is weapons, and they were all rather unique. There was this female warrior that everyone was anxious to see play, because she was an black horse favorite: her fighting style was so unique that she seemed unlikely to win, but she was fun to watch and somehow, she often won.
Prior to this fight, I'd been present watching the other battles and rarely interacting, like I was some sort of coach. But when they brought this girl in, I was her. I chose my weapons not to kill, but to incapacitate and to maim—a garrote, what was essentially a boxing glove, and strapped onto my back a bag, about three feet long and filled with packed material (wool, mayhap? who knows, it was a dream; the thing could still do damage)—that was my final weapon, and I would swing it around to build momentum and then hit people with it, doing more force than I could do with my fists and at a longer reach, so that they couldn't attack me.
The guy I was ticketed to fight was a personal and longstanding rival, and not in the pleasant sort of way. He hated me, I disliked him and was afraid of his over-eager violence. I was already on edge because I had lost my previous tournament fight because the casing on my big bag had broken and, with my fists alone, I'd been unable to do enough damage. There was so much energy and combativeness before this fight, based on our rivalry and on the popular opinion of whether I would be able to come back from my previous loss.
His weapon of choice was a knife and a sword.
We got into a verbal altercation before the round was supposed to begin, which both of us had been expecting. We hated each other. I was sitting at my home base, and he had come to me. The altercation turned physical when he tried to attack me with his knife, but I looped the garrote around his wrist, twisted the blade away from me, and kicked it free. I tried to use my padded punching glove to hit him, but his torso was too strong and my punches felt weak, like I was fighting against the air to get to my target. I shrugged off my pack, swung it once, and slammed it into the side of his neck. His head snapped back, he went tumbling to the ground, and his neck and clavicle blossomed a rich stung red.
With him down, I could stomp on him rather than punching, which was much more effective. I dug into his stomach, but when he started to rise, I kicked under his chin. That movement, in the suddenly impossible way of dreams, got us rolling through the hall that we had been fighting in, him on his back curled up like a goddamned hamster wheel, me the hamster in the middle stomping and kicking to keep moving us along.
But there was plenty to keep the improbable rolling carnage from making the dream funny. As we rolled, as I beat him, his flesh caved in: his chest fell in on itself and gave under my feet when I kicked it; the flesh of his cheeks grew swollen and then began to slough off as we rolled. It was like kicking a bloated decomposing corpse, the flesh almost fluid beneath me, peeling away in chunks to splat on the floor.
The sound of his lost flesh sticking to the ground woke me from the red-eyed haze of violence and the comfortable wave of my motions. I stopped kicking him, and we came to a stop. He unrolled from his ball, arms flung wide over his head, chin tilted up. I stepped off of him, and in a moment he rose. He was a map of bruises and missing flesh, more corpse than man, his cheekbones rendered to bone, his arms falling loosely from broken shoulders, leaning forward over his concave chest.
I had stopped beating him because I was hoping they would count this match as a win for me even though the fight had begun early and taken place outside the ring, and I knew they would disqualify me were he actually dead.
I have nightmares more often than any other sort of dream, but "nightmare" for me varies, and is often as simple as a repeated image or action of event. The repetitions are so small and so frequent that I become trapped in them. It happens in my waking thoughts often too, and makes for a unique sort of sleepless disquiet. I have more traditional nightmares too, but historically only rarely and not so violently. And then here these are, a rash of violent detailed dreams (I had another the other night where I died at the end, and they come a couple times a week in this sort of detail). I don't know why. I haven't been particularly stressed, or angry. I do have low impulse control, for violent acts as well, but I've still never really hurt anyone nor wanted to. I no longer have frequent desires to hurt myself. And yet, these dreams.
I've never subscribed to a belief that dreams hold portents or even that they are deep and useful delves into the subconscious. Generally, they come from something in daily life, a collection of images or memories that the brain dredges up in order to think over some more, or out of habit, or by chance. Normally my dreams fit into those realms quite nicely. These, however, do not. They are remarkable, inexplicable, and frequent. And while they don't quite worry me yet (every now and then I wake up upset as a result, but mostly I don't let them bother me), they do make me wonder why they keep occurring.
