The oldest dream I can remember is from when I was a little boy, about five or six years old: the dream about the witch and the forest labyrinth.

My memory begins as I was walking toward a huge dark tangled mass of trees and bushes. I was walking down a path along the fence-line between a flax field and a pasture; the town was somewhere behind me; I didn’t look back. I entered the trees and followed the path onward. It wove and wound through the thickets in such subtle contortions I quickly lost any sense of direction.

But on I went. Indeed, it seemed I was being drawn forward, and fast: I seemed to be floating at a speed between walking and running. The grass and twigs and leaves were tramped flat underfoot; the route was well-worn by whatever deer and cattle and schoolchildren like me who found their way here and couldn’t help but go onward, for the foliage grew densely on all sides.

The path forked in places, which I picked at whim, for each seemed to lead endlessly onward – except some, which ended suddenly, whereupon I would have to turn around and go back, like all the others before me. Occasionally I noticed doors seemingly embedded in the greenery, deadwood amid its living brethren. Most of them were closed and I left them so, simply took note and carried on.

As I wandered the endless trails, I noticed the tramped grass underfoot had become woven into a thatched carpet; it seemed the forest path had somehow become the long meandering corridors of a mansion-like house. But it seemed there was no way out, and I would never find the way back into my own head.

There became an urgency to my passage, for it seemed if I lingered anywhere, something started to accumulate in the air, as if I were being followed by a cloud, a miasma of noxious vapors, and it was catching up with me. I remember stopping once to see what would happen. The mist gathered like a presence, gaining density until it was able to coalesce into shape and that’s when the dream became a nightmare: it was the hag.

Bone-white crazy-face, blazing eyes, her hands were claws, like the talons of some horrible bird; it didn’t become real until I saw it. I screamed and fled, bolting down the pathway as fast as I could, mind crazed with blind animal fear. I ran and ran, and sometimes it seemed I lost her, but as soon as I felt safe, there she was again, popping from the woodwork like some hideous cackling jack-in-the-box crone. And on I ran, but she was always right behind, the sour stink of her breath on my neck; it seemed she was everywhere.

Somehow I found my way to the downstairs of my parents’ house. I barely recognized the rooms for all the trees and bushes; the furniture was mired in undergrowth. But I knew where I was now. I ran upstairs and down the hall to my parents’ bedroom. The floor was covered in moss and leaves fallen from the huge branch that had burst in the main window. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door and realized I cornered myself. The hag would follow me here and there was nowhere else to hide. I could jump out the window, but it was a two-story drop to the cement pad below. I got into the shower and closed the curtain.

Then I looked up and saw not the ceiling, but a round hole of light some distance above me, as though I was standing at the foot of a well. And then I realized that I was. And it was while I was staring into that light I somehow started floating up into it. Floating up into the light and back into myself and that was how I escaped. I woke up and I was lying in bed and the sun was shining through the window down upon me. And then I started shaking with cold trembling relief; I escaped just in the nick of time, bare seconds before she would have caught me.

###

The next dream I can remember occurred about a year later. I was lost underground, dreaming my way through an endless series of caverns and limestone passageways, trying to find my way out. There was a brief lucid moment when I recognized something from before, and then I realized that I was again lost in the house of the forest: the layout was the same, but this time the trees had been transposed with rocks and tunnels. And then I was going helplessly onward, because there was nothing else I could do.

At some point I found another little boy crouching by the wall, hunched over like he was sick. At first he didn’t seem to notice me. I must have asked if he was okay because then he said, “I can’t see anything. I don’t even have eyes.” And then he turned his face to mine, and I saw smooth pockets of skin where his eyes should have been.

I continued onward without him and eventually found my way into a long rectangular chamber with a dinner-table at one end, and a pair of couches around a fireplace at the other. This I immediately recognized as our living-room, despite the dank limestone walls and the moss coating the upholstery. The table was set for dinner, but the food was covered in mold and dust. The fireplace was likewise full of dead cinders, like a pile of old bones, gray and ancient cold. But I was relieved, for once again I found my way home.

Then I heard voices echoing down the corridor I came from: strange chittering, buzzing voices. They were coming this way and I knew immediately that I had to hide. I ducked behind the lump of sofa, which in the dream was a slab of rock, and I cowered there behind it, trembling, hoping they wouldn’t find me. The fireplace burst into flames when they entered the room and I could hear the skitter-scatter click-clacking of their many feet. They were laughing and dancing, running back and forth across the room. The firelight cast their shadows upon the wall: weird inhuman shapes, leaping and frolicking. They were making these horrible sounds like a kind of singing: a hideous piping warble.

When I dared peek around the couch and saw them I almost cried out – they were giant insects the size of small children. They scurried around the room, climbing the walls and crossing the ceiling as easily they did the floor. It took me a moment to realize they were playing a game of catch, tossing something back and forth amongst themselves. At first I thought it was just a lumpy leather ball, but then I got a good glimpse as it passed through the light and I saw with horror that it was the severed head of the boy I met earlier in the cavern passageway.

I ducked back behind the couch and just crouched there quaking terrified. After a while I resolved I had to escape before I was found. Remembering how I escaped in the previous dream, I waited until the fire died down, then hobbled over to the fireplace and got into it and started climbing the chimney. Up the long dark tunnel and emerged back into the daylight of myself.

###

About a year later I awoke one night to find myself standing at the top of the stairs: I opened my eyes and saw the steps descending into the darkness of the ground floor.

My body was poised as though I had been about to descend at the moment I awoke; but also I had the impression, based on muscle fatigue, that I’d been standing there for some time. And I stood there awhile longer yet, my body like a statue of itself standing upright. I felt the eternity of that moment, the house still and silent in the night all around me. I remember I wasn’t at all alarmed to find myself like this; in those blurry first moments after waking, I felt only a calm acceptance of the situation. I was probably dreaming about something right before that, but my mind was like a blank slate, wiped clean by the opening of my eyelids. And I looked down the stairs into a seemingly denser darkness than was here upstairs.

And then I realized something had gone down the stairs ahead of me – it had swooped past, and it was the speed and suddenness of this thing that startled me awake. I stood there listening, my head tilted slightly. Whatever it was, it seemed to have been subsumed by the shadowy silence below. The idea of going down there to investigate filled me with fear. My whole family was asleep. Nobody would wake up if something happened; they were too far gone; for we are a people who sleep soundly, and with their doors closed.

My fear grew the longer I stood there; I thought I felt an immanence rising from the darkness, an atmospheric gathering, condensing, coalescing in the air, slowly growing into a manifest presence. I had a vision of a huge swollen mass that occupied the entire living room downstairs, like a gigantic puffy worm beetle, something with a human face embedded, and a gleaming smile. It was that hour of night when anything could happen.

I went back to my room and closed the door and got into bed. I didn’t roll to either side or onto my belly, as I might have done; instead I lay on my back, so I would be ready in case something came through the door. However, it was more likely to come from the closet, which seemed so similar to an elevator with its folding doors; that thing downstairs would just slither into the fireplace and emerge up through there. I lay there terrified, waiting, wondering, listening to the darkness and the silence, a silence that became so loud I thought I could hear it subtly contorting, as though that emptiness was trying to shape itself into something, but not quite being able to, and eventually I drifted back to sleep.

###

A strange thing happened one night sometime either before or after that; I am not sure exactly when it was. For reasons now unknown, the bed in my room was moved from one side of the room to the other. This must have been done chiefly for the sake of variety; I don’t remember being troubled by this; it didn’t seem to have been inflicted upon me. Nonetheless it did then happen that I awoke in the middle of the night floating over the spot where my bed had previously been and was now an empty space of floor. I was just barely awake enough to say that I was at all; I remember turning over and that’s when I became conscious enough to realize that there was nothing underneath me, but not conscious enough to be alarmed or even perplexed by this.

By some miracle I was floating upon thin air, suspended at an elevation slightly higher than that of the mattress; it should be impossible and yet it was so. I fell immediately back asleep, unconcerned about either falling or how or why this could even be. I simply forgot about it, and I don’t think it ever happened again (or if it did, I was unaware). Perhaps it was just a dream or a hallucination, something that happened to someone who wasn’t even really awake.

###

It turned out I was sleepwalking more often than that, I just didn’t know about it. Apparently it started after we moved into the new house; they said that not long afterward my parents and sometimes even my sister would hear various little noises in the house at night, which at first they thought were just the usual sort of house-settling sounds. Occasionally there was a soft thudding sound, which my dad joked was the thing that goes bump in the night. But if it wasn’t bogies, it might be intruders – however, when they went to investigate they found it was me, sleepwalking.

It was really spooky, they said, the first time they found me walking around in the dark, like a little robot zombie, making obscure gestures and performing seemingly meaningless acts. I was unable to open doors or climb stairs, and so my somnambulant self was confined to roaming the open areas of the upstairs where I could moved safely and unobstructed, sometimes walking into things. That thudding sound they heard was the sound of my head colliding with a door or wall.

After the first few times they became accustomed to this, perhaps annoyed, and when it happened they simply guided me back to bed, and if I happened to waken I was invariably confused, but with a sleepy child’s blithe compliance I’d go back to bed and immediately drift off once I was under the covers, and they’d go back to their room and do the same. They didn’t tell me about this for a long time, and I remember even as a boy I found it rather unnerving that my sleeping self was going about and engaging in activities I had no recollection of. 

After a couple years during which this condition persisted they took me to see a doctor. He checked me over and said I was healthy. He said it probably had something to do with the move; I missed the old house and the sleepwalking was a metaphor of something, trying to find my way in the dark. However, it was to be considered a good sign that if I couldn’t open doors and abstained from stairs, then I still had at least that much survival sense, even at that level of operation, and thus wasn’t much risk to myself or anyone else.

The doctor recommended bunk-beds, if my parents could afford the expense, because their son was not as likely to go wandering around the house at night if he had to climb down a ladder first. “What if he falls down and hurts himself?” my mother said, and the doctor said, “He probably won’t because otherwise he’d have fallen down the stairs already.” And so that is what they did, because it seemed worthwhile and would be a nice gift for the kids.

###

For my part I thought getting bunk-beds was a great idea. Several of the other kids at school had them and this was much to my envy. Now I had one and not just me but my little sister too. I started sleeping on the top bunk immediately of course, which was just brilliant: if anything under the bed was gonna try grab my ankle and drag me under, well haha, I’m way up here.

But one night I awoke and saw the moonlight pouring through the window lit the space of wall between the bedroom door and the closet door; it perfectly framed the shadow of the tree in the backyard and its restless branches shifting in the wind. Those branches crisply etched shadow like a webwork of veins or shattered glass, and within that shifting juxtaposition of lines there seemed to form or become perceptible a vaguely anthropomorphic shape: a tall and narrow upright bearing, but vaguely insectile, skeletal, like a praying mantis wearing a tuxedo.

As soon as I thought this it seemed to crystallize itself completely and step forth bodily into the room. I heard a faint metallic sound, a subsonic screeching squeal, not unlike the unoiled hinges of an opening door. And there it was, this pale thin being hunched over; it was so tall its head touched the ceiling. It stood looming over my bedside and stared down at me lying on the top bunk frozen with abject terror. And I stared back at it, hypnotized by those cold black eyes and the feeling of intrinsic malignity that comes from being faced with something so utterly alien. And that’s all I remember. The overwhelming fear I felt must have blotted out my consciousness and I was mercifully granted the black release of sleep and forgetfulness.

It was also while lying in the dark of the top bunk that I first had visions of those beings who dwelt in the world below and they beckoned me down to come join them and partake of their sinister delights. But also I knew that this vision was a window on Hell if there ever was such a place and those beings were the damned: they were demons, tempters, corrupters, deceivers, urging me to commit their same sins and taste of that knowledge. They came to me then and they’ve been with me since.

It was around this time I started researching heavily into black magic, Satanism, and the occult, and my impressionable young mind was so saturated by these topics that it opened a window whereby they could approach me. And so that was what they wanted me to do was go all the way to the ultimate. I would be eternally stained, forever exiled from the Kingdom; but among the elite who had done and known what it was like. This vision was recurrent for many years and like the one before it was chiefly just a molten static picture hold: those beings never did anything except watch me and radiate menace.

The only other vision I remember from sleeping on the top bunk was of a castle on a misty mountain, a dreary scene of a gray and green. I was always on the ledge overlooking the drawbridge in this dream, and up there with me was two or three huge gray snow leopards reposed with regal calm, they kept watch with a certain feral indifference. They sat so still they looked like statues, but I knew they were alive because one of them turned its head and looked at me. I always had an erection during this dream but I don’t know why, and since it was before I started masturbating I was afflicted with this pleasant tumescence, but knew not how to alleviate it. These visions ceased when I shifted to the bottom bunk a couple years later.

###

As I grew older and lazier and less fearful of oneiric phenomena I started sleeping on the bottom bunk. I remember dreaming I had awakened one morning and lay in bed groggily, half-asleep, half-awake. The bedroom door was ajar and I could hear the voices of my mother and sister talking in the hallway right outside my room, just out of sight, but I knew they were there because I could hear them talking and at the volume of that proximity. And they were saying exactly the sort of things that they would. Upon waking for real later on, I remember marveling at how accurately a dream could mimic reality, that I thought it actually was them.

However, in the next moment I turned my head and looked from the slightly ajar bedroom door to the wide open closet door and saw instead of hanging garments it now opened onto a vast desolate plain – a barren wasteland suffused by a yellowish haze of drifting smoke and mist. Merely by looking through the doorway into that desert realm I was somehow drawn wholly into it, my vision telescoping forward until I suddenly found myself standing on the edge of a great black hole on a plateau in this wasteland. It was boiling and bubbling deep down within like the pit of a cauldron and drifting out with great noxious billows of a miasma-like steam-cloud.

And then I saw there was another being here, a tall spindly cloaked being like a giant insect praying mantis. It started chanting and waving its arms and dancing – yes, it did a crooked little dance, jumping and floundering like a broken puppet, all the way around the rim of that great black hole. It was calling out to some force or agency it sought to summon and it seemed to be working: I could feel it rise, the swelling immanence, like a rapid shift in the barometer, there was something coming and it was gonna get here fast…

Dimly I realized this whirlpool conjuring was something happening on another planet or in another dimension, and this mysterious being was some sort of black magician who had brought me here to offer as a sacrifice to this force or agency – which would be a horrible doom for me and doubtless this bastard would be granted some magical powers in reward, and so I thought well fuck you and yanked back into my body and popped up in bed, eyes open, heart pounding, panting and frightened. That was a close call I thought and it was here potently established that dreams are a type of astral travel and there can be danger in these things.

Inexplicably after that I moved the bed back to the other side of the room and started sleeping on the floor. I don’t know why I did that, except perhaps as some kind of protective gesture. Sleeping on the floor took the pleasure out of sleep, and I was no longer able to remember my dreams, though I continued to dream vividly for many years. I remember some nights I would awaken, lying on the floor with the pale moonlight pouring through the window, and I remember being awash in that light.

…

Nemo Arator is a student of surrealism. He seeks gnosis through dreams, intoxication, and objective chance. This story is from his unpublished book To What End.