There are things in this world we were never supposed to realize, things working behind the veil of reality, playing with the perceived natural order. For our minds, for reasons unknown to us uses only a portion of its own potential having set its own boundaries inside reality perhaps to save us from our own madness and insanity. We continue to play with perception and expand what was never meant to be expanded and explore the outer reaches of our minds capabilities. One day however we will all discover a world we so wise-fully ignored in ignorance and be forced to bargain for our sanity in the face of wicked evil things. We will purge whatever rational thoughts we had with the suffocating feeling of inevitability and as time passes, we will ignorantly expand the boundaries of our minds. We will be able to perceive more the world that was always there pulling at the strings of superstition and madness. Crawling over the skin of our brains with pointy crabby fingers, toying with our perception and we will finally know what the eerie feeling of when something didn't feel quite right meant, what the goosebumps on your skin was for, we will realize it was this world of horrible things playing with our sanity.
I also would be in ignorance of these boundaries if not for the passing of an old professor and close friend. I came into possession of certain belongings with many curious oddities. Professor Isaac had been like a father to me always looking out for my well being and helping me along in college. He never had a son so I felt closer perhaps because he viewed me as the son he never had. He was a very decorated and weathered historian and throughout his lifetime had traveled the world many times over. In the event of his passing however he left me some very curious things in his research and manuscripts. He was in the midst of an unfinished personal project that I have also become intrigued with.
The more I have delved further into those spaces Prof. Isaac had explored before me, spaces that did not like visitors I felt perhaps the passing of Prof. Isaac was not as natural as the doctors had claimed. He was in good health at the time of his passing and the doctor's found no specific medical reason for his untimely death just the futile explanation that his heart had stopped. He was 65 years old and they blamed it on old age. I have never quite accepted that answer, for Prof. Isaac had always eaten healthy and exercised daily. It just didn't quite add up. A curious death yes but even more curious were his seemingly wild findings and theories of this personal project of his.
It began with him exploring the realm of dreams, an area of study he was never interested in for he thought all sciences were grounded in reality and fact, measurable things. Dreams weren't measurable and there was no real way to judge them, however Prof. Isaac had began exploring the possibility that he was wrong about dreams and what they could mean. According to his journal, he had a frequent visitor come to his home and discuss his dreams with Prof. Isaac. His name was William and beyond his discussions with Prof. Isaac, didn't seem very extraordinary. He was a farm hand from one of the local orchards. According to the notes, he grew up home schooled and barely had a high school education. He was 20 years of age and didn't appear to have any kind of impressive background of any sort in theology, anthropology, or even philosophy. Why would Prof. Isaac be interested in this man's dreams?
Professor Isaac's notes didn't say how exactly he came across William but did say it was through a mutual friend. I can't imagine who that would be. At first, it appeared Prof. Isaac took a skeptical eye to this young man and his dreams. William described an unnatural ability to paint and draw with exact precision and detail symbols from his dreams. He didn't know how he was able to do it because he had never been a good drawer let alone painter but somehow the skills necessary for his ability were unlocked and the symbols were oozing out of William with an unnatural yearning to be painted. He couldn't quite understand it and neither could Prof. Isaac. The rather specific detail and seemingly natural ability to transpose the symbols right before Prof. Isaac's eyes won over his curiosity.
William's dreams didn't just consist of just symbols however, he would dream of nightmarish cities that glowed green and had towering monoliths erected at every corner. The streets had streams of foreign murky liquid with that same liquid trickling down from the walls. It was always night and the sky had an ominous green glow to it and the stars seemed closer and brighter. The moon took a quarter of the night sky with waves of blue and green and red streaming passed it. All the buildings lining the streets were short and square built with huge rectangular stones but toward the center of the city laid a huge pyramid built with massive square blocks. William would always walk toward the pyramid in his dreams and could see symbols and hieroglyphs on the walls of the buildings. The streets were always empty but he could hear whispers from every corner as if some unknown society were watching him walk their streets. Once getting to the pyramid is where his dream always ended but with each subsequent occurrence of the dream he had new symbols to be painted and drawn.
He duplicated the symbols he saw very vividly for Prof. Isaac on a piece of paper and one symbol in particular caught his eye. It was of pyramids inside a square frame, three of them with what appeared to be a reptilian creature in front, a dragon with a human body and the head of a snake winding up in a half 'S' shape. Prof. Isaac found it curious because he had seen it before in South America in a tribe deep in the Amazon. He said it represented a trinity unity of mythical creature, man and that of the evil being, the snake which in christian faith is the symbol for Satan. The tribe viewed the symbol as the unity between man's fate and the inevitability of the world's destruction. There was no escaping fate. Prof. Isaac found it curious that this tribe had also developed most of their culture's beliefs around the idea that dreams were another layer of reality and contained hidden messages for us to decipher in order to save one's soul after the destruction of the world. Their characters and form of art had incorporated symbols they claimed were extracted straight from their dreams and this man William who had never left the state had dreamt of the same symbols. How could this be?
I had become very intrigued indeed for whatever peeked Prof. Isaac's interests was definitely something worth exploring. William had become a regular visitor for Prof. Isaac and continued to bring new drawings and paintings from his dreams for him to analyze. It was as if though Prof. Isaac knew something before meeting William and was testing a theory with these dream symbols. Why else would he be analyzing these symbols of William's so closely? Based solely on curiosity was not enough to have William come so frequently. I don't know what Prof. Isaac might have known but whatever it was I also felt there were more to William's symbols than just coincidence. I sought out William to try and further understand what Prof. Isaac knew.
William still lived alone in an apartment in the old part of the city. When I arrived he asked me my business and I told him who I was in regards with Prof. Isaac and his interest displayed some intrigue. For Prof. Isaac had also excited his curiosity about the strange symbols however, never explained the reason for the study to William and could offer no more insight I myself hadn't already obtained. But in talking with him I was convinced of his sincerity about his dreams. The way he spoke of them with terrifyingly vivid detail was unmistakable and almost made me shake at the terrible depictions brought to mind. Horrible cities of square and rectangular blocks with geometry seemingly wrong in every visual sense. Only perhaps a mind in madness could convey such imagery with such clarity. He did speak of a faceless nameless thing that lumbered through the streets with the faint beating of long wings and the sound of clacking hoof steps. I shuttered to think what that may be and sought refuge in the thought that William couldn't transpose a horrible thing like that into reality, but somewhere deep felt a dread stirring in my stomach perhaps tempting me to believe this dream world did in fact exist and had a place in our reality. Perhaps, as with the symbols there were other ways to transpose such things from dream to reality.
I returned to reading Professor Isaac's journals and manuscripts for there was much to read and labor over. I finally made a connection with Prof. Isaac's unknown theory with the symbols and a short passage from one of his manuscripts describing the release of demons from another plane through sacrificial payments of souls. It described a mysterious cult said to exist in the world in the shadows of history, soaked in subtly and secrecy collecting souls as payment throughout the last millenium to pay or open a gateway to our reality. At first there didn't appear to be a connection with William's dream symbols until on I saw written on the margin "perhaps we see in dreams." I believe Prof. Isaac may have been exploring the plausibility of using dreams as a window to see another plane of reality, perhaps one reserved for horrifying creatures and demons like that mass of horror with batting wings from William's dreams. However, I found it very curious Prof. Isaac was entertaining such theories. This felt too abstract and oneirological for Prof. Isaac. Why would he be venturing down such absurd studies? I almost gave up on the whole project until I read a certain entry in his journal concerning a conversation he had with a colleague named Charles.
I didn't know this man, but according to his journal Charles had a brother who was a lieutenant in law enforcement who had come across a supposed cult who had a connection with William's symbols. Upon being in Prof. Isaac's study, Charles saw the paintings of William's symbols and had seen similar symbols before from his brother. Charles explained that his brother the lieutenant had begun getting missing person's reports from his small town in alarming large numbers. It had caused the local town folk to shudder in fear and demand action. They believed there to be a faction of people doing coordinated abductions in the night. There were reports of insane shouts and terrifying screams coming from the woods. Some could hear the soul chilling chants of some unknown group of worshipers and the towns people couldn't take anymore. So the lieutenant gathered all officers and ventured into the swamp backwoods. They had to travel by boat for there were no roads going where the screams of mercy were coming from. Trekking through the murky water in silence, they could hear large fires and soul frightening chants. They could see a reddish hellish glow from in between the trees and hear shrieks of horror. These woods were believed by all the townsfolk for centuries to be haunted and cursed and the lieutenant and his men knew the legends. Some of the men were trembling in fear at just the devilish sounds coming from over the trees.
What they found was something out of a nightmare. They came upon a scene of worship of blood and sex and sacrifice. The worshipers, this cult had the abducted people tied naked to wooden posts as each had a turn with leather straps whipping them until every piece of their flesh were bleeding. Some were still screaming in agony while others were dead at the post still bleeding while still being whipped. Around a large bonfire were others braying and writhing around in a monstrous showing of movement as they danced around the ring of bodies whipping and roaring. There was a group of priests around what one officer called dancing devil flames chanting in some deep horrifying trance. Others were having bloody sex with one another and some were throwing dead bodies into the fire. There was an eight foot granite monolith on the far side of the horrific spectacle with a body hung head downward with a ring of worshipers jumping and roaring around it.
The fear was too much for the lieutenant and his officers for they froze in panic before taking action. Perhaps, the fear had caused some to hallucinate because there were reports from his men that they could hear the beating of large wings beyond the far trees and some saw shining eyes attached to a huge murky bulk of mass which flew up and disappeared in the night clouds in the sky. I find it rather fantastic of them to have heard and seen such things but they did however notice a similar symbol on the worshiper's statues and posts. Three pyramids with a dragon, man, snake unity in front, the same symbol from William's dreams and paintings. If this lieutenant and his brother Charles were to be believed, then Prof. Isaac did have substance to his theories, as absurd as they may have sounded earlier to me. I knew Prof. Isaac, he would not just trust the word of people he did not know. He must have substantiated this story for him to use it as reliable information He didn't leave the name or address of the lieutenant in the journal perhaps it was in his other belongings left at his home after his passing or I would have corroborated the story as well. However, the coincidence of the symbols began to addict me and the more I pondered these correlations the more I also didn't believe it was mere coincidence but perhaps something more frighteningly real. I began to open myself to the idea that these dream worlds were perhaps actually real and hidden in the back of my mind, that conceivably, the creature demons from these worlds were as well. The horror of such a thought only increased when I retrieved a new journal from Prof. Isaac's home and read a curious entry.
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