So upon receiving a very beautiful hardcover edition of H.P. Lovecraft’s Collected Works from a friend for my birthday, I was inspired to write something along the Mythos that he created, this is what I came up with (in other words I’m totally ripping off his style)
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It’s in the dead of night, in the dead of sleep when they come. Unspeakable, indescribable horrors that claw away at sanity. As far as I can remember I’ve always been plagued by these visitations. Some of my earliest memories from childhood were being horrified, confused, and screaming in a dark room, not knowing why or how these things came to be, but without the ability to express the horror. My mother dismissed it as simple nightmares typical of young boys. There’s no boogie man, she’d tell me, but she didn’t need to tell me so. For what came to me in my dreams was no man. As I grew older these visions, dreams, visitations, whatever one may choose to call them, grew more frequent. I am forced to say that they have now, at the age of 20 reached a peak, for if they continue, I shall not.
There is only so long a time one can withstand the sweet lull of sleep, without giving in or losing one’s sanity. I tried this method for quite some time before they sought to medicate me. Feigning insomnia out of fear I became a walking, shambling corpse of a man, so naturally my peers and relatives grew concerned but none would hear my reasons, or simply dismiss them as a symptom of the remnant of the overactive imagination that plagued me as a child. I agreed to be medicated at first, hoping it would quell the visitations. They did no such thing. In fact these damned pills can be acclaimed as the cause of my present state. They’d place me into so deep a slumber that no matter how hard I struggled and no matter how deeply fear gripped at my heart and mind, I was not able to wake until the medication ran its course. Sleep became a prison. A prison in which one’s inmate is the incredulous inviting insanity which burrows itself deep in the hearts and fears of every man. Deep-rooted, these fears were so primal I can only assume, nay assure you that the first man, in all his simplicity and creativity, and those before him we’re familiar with these fears.
I find myself indulging you in the scenario of my sanity, or lack thereof, but not the symptoms. Bear with me, whoever may read this, for even an attempt to ascertain the apparitions the haunt my REM state cause me to delve in to a series of shakes and shivers, but I must endure.
The dreams start out as normal, or at least what I must assume a normal dream starts, for how can one know the texture, realism, and wakefulness of another’s dreams? The dreams they start normally, indistinguishable from reality save a few minor occurrences. My dreams, as you’ll soon see are often incredibly bland and monotonous, an attribute I feel added to my decaying sanity, you see they became so commonplace I could no longer differentiate what I’d experience in a dream and what I’d experience in my waking hours. As I’d go about my dream day, things would grow darker. Not in the same way the day grows darker as it turns into night. No, a darkness that is … almost tangible. Everything turns darker, deep down within its core; its essence emits a glowing blackness. Skin begins to feel thick and slimy. Movements slow as if walking through mud. Things: buildings, people, vehicles anything material slowly start to dissolve into the blackness. The process is slow sometimes, and other times it happens instantaneously. Everything dissolves until I am nothing more but a consciousness floating along in the dream space. But nay I am not alone. There is something there. Something physical in this realm, though I lack the ability to exist physically in this realm it is able to. It has been here a long time. Eons and eons it has existed, long before man and his gods.
At its presence my conscious beings to quake. A sound so soul crushing and mind numbing that all attempts at thought become incomprehensible. Pain, oh the pain, not of the physical but mental anguish. The screams of those you love, and those you’ve never meant echo in the quake. The screams pierce one’s consciousness, enveloping every thought, feeling and emotion. And then they’re there in a flash of light. Laughing mocking, tormenting my feeble existence. Laughing at my humanity and mortality. Toying with my sanity. I have never been able to lay eyes upon them without waking, even with the unwanted aid of medication. Their voice, if that’s what one could call such a sound, drives one into a cacophony of emotion. And yet, as I go through the highs and lows of my existence; they merely scoff as if my consciousness is a waste of life.
I feel this is all I will be able write. This asylum’s windows grow darker and I can feel the medication coursing through my veins. If I am visited again by these entities I will no longer continue this existence. I refuse to live when creatures so old, cruel and powerful continue to dwell in the darkest depths unknown to man. I have seen them. I have heard them. I have felt their cruelty. I have felt their scaly laughter probe my mind and heart’s desires, fears and secrets.
