They crawl into your mind through the screen door on your temple, cut away the intellectual
fabrics, the stringy meat, scoop away the thick acidic liquid that drains down your neck. And
then they plant their worlds within you, within that warm meat nest you call a brain.
Your thoughts do not interfere with their lives, their tumor-sized worlds of curly aluminum
sounds and twisty-popped hard-ons, but their lives interfere with your thoughts, confuse you,
take control. They screw with your hello my name is Paul, my name is Paul. No Roger, Philip,
Martin. They want the real world to be cricky-chaos like in your dreams. They want you to do
sickening things when you are unaware, get you to night-walk into your roommate’s bed and
fondle the woman he is sleeping with, his girlfriend/pet. They get you to slide your nose your
tongue against her sweat-smooth parts, dig your fingers deep-deep.
They applaud you when you are bloody on the ground. Your best friend kicking your naked
body in the corner, beating your senses into water-wave lines. And his girl’s scream-cries
echo in the stale wood room.
They have me alone. All alone in the apartment with them, all alone and they take time away
from me. They let confusion ravage and I have to go to work to work for money, I need to eat.
But it is not morning yet. Has it been five hours? five months?
When I am asleep, I dream within their tumors/worlds. I sex with a woman who is there. She
has the body of a goldenhand beetle, spiked neck and white breasts emerging from insect armor. She lays
me down and pulls me into her body into her stomach, we melt together, become each other. I
am insecty and feminine, caress my plate thighs and stare at myself, fondling within the
plastic-pool mirror.
I play with large faceless dolls in the closet.
Sometimes I wake up and do not realize it. My apartment shifts from green to blood-colored.
My neighbors are yelling at their children through the walls.
When I sit, my body becomes with the couch. My skin goes to a plaid fabric with beer stains
and jumping spiders and silver fish. My television is a hole in the wall. I let the couch dissolve
me, suck me down-down to its intestines, take my nutrients. Sometimes I resist and walk the
apartment as a man-shaped couch.
I go to the toilet, standing high above the porcelain, urinating a thick ooze from my shank. Their
worlds shutter in my mind, vibrate, my blood rushing into them. They make me sit down, pee
sitting down like a girl. My penis becomes a vagina. The urine still thick like snot, clinging to
some of the crunchy hairs. I need to wipe it away with an old shirt since there is no toilet paper
to be seen.
I try to eat. The cupboards hollow and made like crackers, crumbling when I open. No food, no
food in my kitchen, my refrigerator. No sun swinging through my windows.
I curl up into a ball. They want me to go to bed to sleep, they want me to dream so that they can
interact with me. I want to go to a doctor, get these tumors these parasites removed. See the
doctor’s face when the worlds are discovered.
They invent dreams. They know what reality is but prefer not to live within it. They enjoy the
passion the intensity of the mind dimension. They gang rape me when I am not looking, when
not attached to myself. Sometimes I go outside of my body to escape them. I crawl out of a
window and onto a balcony. I insist that I can fly.
I awake in piles of slick black blankets. A tick-tock spider is above me, eighty-pound spider,
glistening outer shell of checkers, gadgets, clock-wheels, staring down at me. Smiling.
They take things from my brain and put them inside of my real world, put my dream-things to
life: my Japanese-speaking shoes, my dog made out of two-thousand cockroaches, my wife who
changes into a scary large creature when she wants to hurt me or win an argument, my book with
no periods, my place of flesh-things. They turn my body hairs into little wire-people, shrieking,
trying to free themselves from my arm. They hurt me, make love to me.
Sometimes I will break into my skull and try to steal their worlds away from them, but the tumors have molded well into my brain, become part of
me and I cannot rid myself of them without ridding myself of myself. They stay. They love me,
they love to strap me to furniture and pile dead bees onto my soft stomach skin. The crispy bug-pieces scraping against my chest, all the way to my neck, getting in my mouth, between my teeth. They love to
watch me squirm.
On cold days, they give me breasts like a woman. They want my nipples to go hard and erect.
They want something for nothing, they want to use my body for undescribable things, give me a dozen more penis-like limbs and fuck them all, they don’t
care who I am I could be anybody. Nobody hears when the phone is ringing.
In time, I will kill myself. Probably/hopefully. I try to call the police for help, but I go dizzy. I
don’t know what to say, I say wrong number and hang up. I begin to think I am crazy. I begin to
think the dream people don’t exist, that I am just out of my head. Sometimes I think I am asleep
and can’t wake up, sometimes I realize that every little dot of material—every crumb of flesh of
rock of carpet of food—is a world of its own with its own societies and prejudices, its own
sexual standards. The worlds within my brain-tissue are quite perverted, quite the dirty old man
masturbating in public places.
I decide to fade away for awhile, close my eyes and try not to think about them. I go into my
closet and wrap myself around the color black, rocking distorts their grasp on me. And I think of
nothing, just blank, and they find me boring and go back to molest their own.
They are very fond of molesting, doing it religiously. But they would rather do me than their
own kind. Who wants to rape a sister a brother?
I wonder where I am going sometimes. I wonder if I shouldn’t just let the dream-worlds
encompass me, make me one with them, these aliens in my head (they came from Mars from Venus
within a different dimension/frame-of-thought than we realized, or are there more beings on
Earth than we know of? good hiders or ones that know to put a blanket over our eyes,
pretending to be trees when they are men/women) and I think about going inside out, moving
into the tumors with them. Replacing all my skin with the type that makes up the male penis or the
female clitoris, so that all of my body orgasms instead of just parts, whine-shivering.
Why not give in? I have no reason to fight them. I have no reason to take part in the real world,
nobody from the real world likes me anyway.
If only I could find a girl who has them as well, a lover who understands and goes through what I
do, whose mind is a shower of marbles in the street. I would love to lie down with her, curl up
in the darkness closet with her, and while the dream people are molesting our thoughts, we
would be ignoring them, frenzied and preoccupied by our sensations, our sweating, our
twitching, busy soothing each other, molesting one another . . .
The End * * * Carlton Mellick III is the author of the novel Electric Jesus Corpse from Eraserhead Press, which is basically just a cross between "Night of the Living Dead" and "the Bible" with a bunch of satire, lewdness, and surrealism thrown in. He recently finished the novel, Satan Burger, and is currently working on the novels: Skinhead Girls (not actually about skinheads), Young Adolf Hitler, a split with Jon Hodges (not actually about Hitler), and contributing a couple chapters to Horror High School by T.L. Winslow. He can be reached at mellick1@aol.com.
"The Dream People" by Carlton Mellick III, Copyright 1999
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