Are Things Really Looking Up?

The downside to my massage therapy is the nightmares.

When James said “weird dreams,” I thought they would just be confusing. But now, after six sessions, I’m starting to have nightmares. Sometimes they are okay, with only a few scary parts, and then it goes back to normal, and I only wake up once or twice before falling back asleep and having a relatively normal dream.

But then, there are the nights that I have the really scary dreams, almost like night terrors. I used to have them when I was little, but I guess all the relaxation brought them out.

The worst part is that I have this recurring nightmare. It’s always the exact same, and it freaks me out. I usually wake up in a cold sweat and can’t turn the light on fast enough to erase the images from my head.

It starts out with me walking up this really creepy, twisty walkway, up to this huge house. It’s big enough to be a mansion, but the sign in the yard says “Tomb. Do Not Enter.”

He calls the mansion not a house, but a tomb…

I walk into the house/”tomb”/whatever, and I see James. That’s the freakiest part: that he’s in there.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” he says to me. His voice is different. Like, it sounds the same, but there’s just something about it, some creepy edge that makes my skin crawl.

James holds his hand out to me and I take it. He leads me inside, and I look around at all the gloom. I hear something coming from my side, and I look over at James. He is choking on something, but then it hits me. There is this awful stench coming from somewhere. Death is the only word that comes to mind. It smells like death.

…he’s always choking from the stench and the fume.

He composes himself, then walks me into a room that looks like the sanctuary of a church. There is what looks like a wedding going on, and everyone is standing up, singing a song. Suddenly, they all collapse. I try to go and help them, or at least to see what’s wrong, but James stops me.

The wedding party all collapsed in the room…

“Here,” he says, in his creepy voice. He hands me an envelope, and I open it to find a resignation to a wedding.

…so send my resignation to the bride and the groom.

Our wedding.

Before I can ask him what’s going on, I feel the floor fall underneath us, and I fall to the ground. When I regain my senses, I look around to see that we’re in a room.

Let’s go down.

Well, not a room, exactly. An elevator. I can see from the button panel that the elevator only goes up ten floors. I never would have guessed that this house would even have ten floors, but in dreams, anything can happen.

This elevator only goes up to ten…

James and I leave the elevator, the doors having opened at the tenth floor, and walk down the hall and through glass doors that lead out to a pool. “A pool on the tenth floor of a house?” I ask, but I receive no answer. I look around for James, expecting him to be right next to me, but he’s over by the bar, looking at all the toned and tan men. As I am about to ask, “What the fuck?” I blink, and all of the people that were swimming and chatting it up are now floating face-down in the water, or sitting or standing awkwardly, all of them bloated, all of them dead. James takes out a camera and starts taking pictures of the bodies, creeping me out.

I blink again, and everything is back to normal.

…he’s not around, he’s always looking at men. Down by the pool, he doesn’t have many friends as they are face-down and bloated, snap a shot with the lens.

James walks over to me after ending a conversation with someone who is supposedly a friend, then gets down on one knee and pulls a box out from his shorts pocket.
“If you marry me, would you bury me? Would you carry me to the end?”

As he is speaking, some sort of dark rock music starts playing in the background, sounding horribly familiar, but never familiar enough to place. James keeps speaking:

“Say goodbye to the vows you take and say goodbye to the life you make and say goodbye to the heart you break and all the cyanide you drank.”

Not knowing what to make of anything, I simply say, “Okay,” then let James lead me back into the house. The hallway that was there a minute ago has changed into some sort of a sitting room, with just one picture on the wall, that of a naked woman. Her body is nice, I will say, but it is odd for one to have a picture of a naked woman on the wall of the sitting room of one’s house. Upon closer inspection of the picture, the woman has nasty blisters on her hands. “What are those from?” I ask James, and he tells me, like it’s common sense, “From the money she spends.”

[She keeps a picture of the body she lends. Got nasty blisters from the money she spends.

That doesn’t make any sense to me, but I decide to disregard that and keep moving. I look out the window of the room, only to see a Mercedes-Benz parked in the driveway.

She’s got a life of her own and it shows by the Benz she drives at 90 by the Barbies and Kens.

James leads me into some sort of dining room, and we sit and start eating. Whatever we are eating is really crunchy and hard, so I move it away from my face and look at it. The little cake things we were just eating are filled with diamonds.

I look at James and I’m about to ask him why we are eating diamonds, but he says, “If you ever say never too late, I’ll forget all the diamonds you ate.”

This thing is making less and less sense.

The scene changes from a dining room to a hospital room, and there is a woman on the bed, in a coma. She is covered in some yellow, cloud-looking stuff, but when James and I move closer, I notice that she is covered in cake. The doctor comes in, looks at the woman, and tells the nurse to increase her medication. She does so immediately, but that makes the woman start to convulse and she dies pretty quickly.

The scene changes again to the woman’s wake, and James is still next to me, wearing a tuxedo. I look down at myself and see that I am wearing a magnificent white gown and holding flowers. James loops my arm through his and we walk down the aisle, say our vows, and he kisses me.

Lost in a coma and covered in cake. Increase the medication, share the vows at the wake; kiss the bride.

That’s when I wake up.

Of course, me being me, I have to write down everything that happened in the dream and make it into something; a picture, a random drawing, a song, anything. This time I choose a song, just like I did during therapy.

He calls the mansion not a house, but a tomb.
He’s always schoking from the stench and the fume.
The wedding party all collapsed in the room,
So send my resignation to the bride and the groom.
Let’s go down.
This elevator only goes up to ten.
He’s not around he’s always looking at men
Down by the pool he doesn’t have any friends
As they are
Face-down and bloated, snap a shot with the lens.
If you marry me
Would you bury me
Would you carry me to the end?
Say goodbye to the vows you take
Say goodbye to the life you made
Say goodbye to the heart you break
And all the cyanide you drank.
She keeps a a picture of the body she lends
Got nasty blisters from the money she spends
She’s got a life of her own and it shows by the Benz
She drives at 90 by the Barbies and Kens.
If you ever say never too late
I’ll forget all the diamonds you ate
Lost in a coma and covered in cake
Increase the medication
Share the vows at the wake
Kiss the bride
If you marry me
Would you bury me?
Would you carry me
To the end?
Say goodbye to the vows you take
Say goodbye to the life you make
And say goodbye to the heart you break and all the cyanide you drank
So say goodbye to the last parade
And walk away from the choice you made
And say goodnight to the hearts you break and all the cyanide you drank
To the last parade
When the parties fade
And the choice you made
To the end