Millennial Metamorphosis

Is it a nightmare if you’re not afraid?

When people start talking about dreams, their eyes start to glaze over. Nobody cares. It’s not real, it’s not important. I’ve always thought dreams were your mind telling you at night something you weren’t seeing during the day.

I’m pretty sensitive. I can’t deal with horror, I can’t deal with pain or gore, and night terrors are very much a part of my life. A few therapists back was a Jungian and he told me to draw out my nightmares. One session I brought back like a week’s worth. I don’t recall him asking for drawings again.

So last night I dreamt the world was ending.

There was some disease that was essentially turning people into monsters. The disease would cause their bodies to slowly contort and change into something else, something other. Some of the transformations would fail and they would just die; sometimes in a pool of their own blood, some because the body horror in which they were going through would cause some essential organ or orifice to stop working. Some wouldn’t. The disease usually caused a breakdown in communication very early on due to its nature often just destroying the parts necessary for human speech. The disease was obviously very painful and at any point, contractors of the disease may lash out and bite those around them, and more often than not spread the disease. In later stages, the attacks would just straight up end in the diseased eating others, whether diseased or not.

I dreamt I took care of 2 family members with the disease. One’s communication broke down pretty early on and had to communicate through Morse Code, but I didn’t understand that’s what it was until the other one started doing it, and by then it was too late, the first one was nearly dead and couldn’t communicate anymore. The second one could still draw, which certainly helped because I don’t know Morse Code. I honestly feel that in real life. I have language processing issues, and more often than I’d like to admit, people can be speaking perfectly clearly, but all I hear is “akhdssahlahlkualshakj”.

When the second family member died, that’s about when they started rounding up survivors and putting them in a facility to quarantine them. At the facility, I had a therapist, and there were a bunch of nurses. The nurses were usually the next to fall to the disease. We couldn’t leave though. The military was outside guarding all the exits.

So we all slowly succumbed to the disease as the world died around us. My therapist and I were one of the last people to actually start showing signs of the disease. My therapist looked fine, but you could tell he wasn’t doing great. I looked like a god damn horror show, but I was still all there. I guess even in my dreams I have a high pain tolerance.

At some point, even though he retained his human form, it was becoming very clear that he was dying. He said something about taking a leap of faith and opened a window for me to make my escape. I scurried out of the window and dropped I don’t know how many floors, and landed on my feet in like a crouch. I immediately heard the sound of guns being drawn, and people shouting, and there were already searchlights upon me. When I stood up, I stood as a 7-foot tall giant cockroach man. They started to shoot. I easily jumped over the 9-foot, spiked, steel-reinforced fence; hopped up a tree as easily as it would for a human going up the stairs, and scurried through the densely packed branches of the trees in the forest until they gave up on finding me.

In real life, I might as well be a giant cockroach. I am alone most of the time, and I have been for years. At work and when I was at school, I’m treated like garbage for one reason or another whether it be who I am, who I appear to be, or what I represent to others. My family, I mostly don’t speak to and as of this week, I have no intention of ever speaking to again. My in-laws are more my family than my family, but they would never accept me if they knew all that I was, and sometimes they still slip up and treat me like an insane person and take away my autonomy. Most of my emotional support is through therapy and with my friends online. I slipped up in therapy yesterday and called them my family.

Do you think Gregor would have fared better in the advent of the internet? Just hanging out in his room, shitposting online and making new friends half a world away? Do you think if he fell in love with someone far away he would have still have remained with his family, isolated and abused? Or do you think one day he’d just crawl out of the window and just bounce?

When I woke up this morning, I didn’t have the normal feeling I get after a nightmare. I wasn’t pretty shaken up and needing a hug, depressed or crying or scared.

For once, I woke up unafraid.

Today I woke up free.

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