Old Nightmare

This is pretty gross but it’s based on one of my worst nightmares as a kid. I’ve had a few worse dreams than this, mainly about living shadows but I don’t have the artistic skills to capture the essence of a dream shadow.

In this dream, I was walking and suddenly there was a wall of vegetation in front of me with the suspended or floating mass of what looked like the skinless body of conjoined twins. The two heads had one face between them like a mask with only one eye. Other than the face, they looked as if they’d been skinned alive but the lower half of their body was roots/bamboo/tubing. They were still alive and were moving and trying to talk. Their one eye was rolling around the face which looked fat, cartoonish, and friendly. We stood there awkwardly and then I woke up.

Or did I? Maybe my whole life since then has been my mind’s feverish delusion to escape.

I think at the time I’d been reading about Greek mythology, specifically the Graeae aka the Gray Sisters who shared one eye between the three of them. I don’t know if that was what sparked the dream or why my mind added the rest.

My all time worst nightmare was with a werewolf/demon that appeared over my bed when I was in second grade. Thinking back, that looked nothing more than a red wolfman, like a were-Irish setter. That scared me for months but, in retrospect, it was just silly.