"I Found The Place From The Dream" by No-Difficulty-5985 | CLANCYPASTA

[00:00:00] Badewanne, Podcast und Herbst? Das wird nur getoppt von Alturs Reisen und Günstig. Denn auch wenn dein Schaumbad zum Träumen von sonnigen Breitengraden einlädt, echte Südsonne bleibt unschlagbar. Und Alturs hat einfach die besten Ziele für dich. Ägypten, Kanaren, Griechenland, Türkei, Karibik. Nicht träumen, Alturs buchen. Alles drin, alles gut, alles für dich. Alturs, alles aber günstig. Jetzt im Reisebüro oder auf alturs.de.

[00:00:30] In the risk of already giving away too much, I live on the outskirts of a vast city in the desert. Like most of us who live here, that is, on the outskirts, I avoid the interior as much as possible. I moved here for the lush and wondrous desert to the north and east of my home, not the festering wasteland it borders. I do, however, have one connection deep within the city itself, who might even be called a friend. He goes by the name of Moses, which, it's worth noting, is very distinctly.

[00:01:00] Not his name. He makes a great point of not having a name. I met him in a social circle of pretentious artsy types, none of whom were from around here, and I'm the only one left who still speaks to him.

[00:01:11] The reason I'm all that remains is perhaps the very same reason the others left, something we used to refer to when meeting up without him, as the dream.

[00:01:21] This label was both because of its obvious dream-like qualities, and because of the dreams it inspired within us.

[00:01:29] The dream, referring to that something, might best be described as an ongoing and highly irregular piece of performance art, now for an audience of one.

[00:01:40] The dream, referring to the actual dreams we had and continue to have, might best be described as a nightmare.

[00:01:49] I will describe the dream I had before waking up this fateful morning.

[00:01:55] This one was not special or, in any sense, unusual, but it might be the best place to start.

[00:02:02] You are far out in a possibly endless expanse of desert.

[00:02:06] In this place, it is somehow day and night at the same time, and to equal extremes.

[00:02:12] This desert is not similar to the actual desert we live in, nor does it in any clear way connect to the performance art piece,

[00:02:19] in which Moses describes endlessly the most imaginative and dismal locales.

[00:02:26] Importantly, despite this desert bearing no resemblance to any of his infinite made-up places,

[00:02:32] it manages to evoke precisely the same emotion, an emotion only associated with the dream, referring to both definitions.

[00:02:42] This is an emotion of profound desolation, drowning hopelessness, and both of these to such incredible extremes that it creates an indescribable sense of wonder.

[00:02:54] This desert you're in, barren and empty and appallingly featureless, in absurd contrast to the lush desert on the edge of town,

[00:03:03] is more wondrous than any place you've ever experienced.

[00:03:06] And, suffocating in its fantastic bleakness, its outright hostility toward meaning,

[00:03:13] you are experiencing psychological and physical bliss on a level you never thought possible,

[00:03:19] even the previous times you've had this dream pale in comparison.

[00:03:24] You hope to never wake from this.

[00:03:26] You plead so desperately to be swallowed for good.

[00:03:30] But, in your moment of most desperate need, green vines claw cruelly out of the sand from all directions,

[00:03:38] and this world becomes a horrible tingle knot of grasping vines and writhing life.

[00:03:43] It is such an unspeakable tragedy to see this place destroyed in this way, to lose this wonder.

[00:03:48] And just as the vines most fully enwrap you, beginning to drag you under,

[00:03:53] when how could you ever have the will to resist,

[00:03:57] you see yourself starting to wake up, and you scream so raggedly, you'll have a sore throat for a week.

[00:04:04] The worst part of all this, upon waking up, feeling sadness again.

[00:04:10] This morning, my disappointment was tempered by the fact that I was scheduled to visit Moses today.

[00:04:17] I may have been robbed of the dream emotion, but it was that time I looked forward to every week,

[00:04:22] the time I'd continue the dream in reality.

[00:04:27] I had overslept drastically, as often happens when I stay up at night furbishly thinking of the dream,

[00:04:33] and so my breakfast was a bag of chips and a trashy energy drink that I consumed during the long drive deep into the city.

[00:04:40] As this city is a tangled knot of narrow streets, much like the vines in the dream,

[00:04:45] and traffic is unpredictable to an almost demented extent,

[00:04:49] I always used the navigation app on my cell phone, the very phone I typed this on,

[00:04:54] to get me from safety to Moses and back.

[00:04:58] This afternoon, I'm done pretending I woke up in the morning.

[00:05:02] My cursed phone was guiding me on one of its usual meandering routes through the city.

[00:05:07] The route stayed at first not far from the northern edge,

[00:05:10] and so the houses were mostly in one piece, and there was room to walk between them.

[00:05:14] I was pleased with this route, apparently only a 40 minute drive from point A to point B.

[00:05:21] It was around the 20 minute mark when I came upon a horrible accident.

[00:05:26] I cannot tell you the number of cars there were, tangled in that awful metallic knot,

[00:05:31] but the police were waving everyone to turn left at the intersection,

[00:05:35] and so the estimated time on my navigation app shot up to 50.

[00:05:40] 50!

[00:05:41] And the adventure began.

[00:05:45] I cannot understate the frustration I felt at the time.

[00:05:50] I have always lived my life in a constant state of stress and paranoia,

[00:05:54] which has only escalated in recent years,

[00:05:57] and the misery that caused became unbearable in moments like this.

[00:06:02] Moments when my plan was mercilessly shredded by forces beyond my control.

[00:06:07] The despair from first waking up returned, and I admit, I was crying and screaming as I drove.

[00:06:15] This was, of course, until I found it.

[00:06:19] The first sign was the profound change in atmosphere as the houses around me grew evermore decayed,

[00:06:26] twisting deeper into the city.

[00:06:28] I had reached a seemingly endless stretch of town in which all of the houses were of a single story,

[00:06:33] made in the most amateurish-looking adobe style, visibly not built with adobe,

[00:06:38] and you could not fit a person in between them.

[00:06:41] As this new artistic direction of the city continued to escalate,

[00:06:46] a certain emotion came upon me.

[00:06:49] Soon, this part of town revealed itself to have genuinely stunning mountains.

[00:06:54] I was shocked.

[00:06:56] I suppose some trick in perspective made it impossible to see these mountains from anywhere else in the city.

[00:07:01] They were tall and angular, gaunt and menacing,

[00:07:05] but their summits were still the same sort of desert,

[00:07:08] and the mockeries of adobe-style architecture were becoming more and more squished up against the cliffs.

[00:07:15] Each front yard, for whatever reason, had a horribly beat-up boat in front of it.

[00:07:20] There were no signs of water, and the emotion was unmistakable now.

[00:07:26] You already know it was the emotion from the dream.

[00:07:30] With the escalation of these singularly bizarre features of the landscape

[00:07:35] to such an extreme that it was hard to imagine this as a real functioning city,

[00:07:40] I became overcome by and was soon drowning in the most profound and all-encompassing hopelessness.

[00:07:48] I no longer cried.

[00:07:50] How could I be sad or even frustrated without a single sliver of hope?

[00:07:55] I grew blissfully resigned.

[00:07:58] But the most transformative part of this entire experience was when,

[00:08:03] between two of the towering peaks, both suddenly devoid of life,

[00:08:06] there were no shoddy adobe dwellings.

[00:08:09] There were no people who were invariably walking with brown paper bags now.

[00:08:15] There were not even plants.

[00:08:16] It was the most inconceivably barren desert that's metaphysically possible.

[00:08:22] I should have seen tall buildings off in the distance.

[00:08:25] I did not.

[00:08:27] Driving past this, slowly, because of the traffic, I was transfixed.

[00:08:32] I rolled down my windows in awe and almost crashed into the car in front of me.

[00:08:38] But before I could savor it, I had passed this gap in the mountains.

[00:08:42] I was back among those same houses and people and plants and brown paper bags.

[00:08:49] And I was driving away from the place from the dream.

[00:08:52] Yet, I found it.

[00:08:55] With grim determination, I allowed my phone to guide me the rest of the way to my prophet.

[00:09:01] I was desperate to share with him my grand discovery, the most profound wonder.

[00:09:05] He needed to know he was right all along, and those fools who doubted don't deserve the place from the dream.

[00:09:12] Driving away, the emotion left me.

[00:09:17] Welcome, he announced when I made it to his hovel.

[00:09:21] I'm sorry for being late, I said.

[00:09:23] There's no such thing.

[00:09:25] He had already turned a head inside, so I followed.

[00:09:29] This cramped, drab, downright horrid place, which he claimed to be renting, but we all suspected he was squatting in,

[00:09:38] was the closest natural location to evoking the emotion of the dream.

[00:09:42] Whether this was due to some innate quality it held, or simply by association,

[00:09:47] it made it so difficult to want to leave, no matter how insufferable Moses might become.

[00:09:54] The two tiny rooms that made up this wonderful hell were both dimly lit,

[00:09:59] to the point that it was hard to make out faces,

[00:10:01] and that only possible for a handful of hanging, barely operational light bulbs.

[00:10:07] They hung in a manner that was always evocative of hanging puppets.

[00:10:11] Something about the layout, possibly.

[00:10:15] I suppose I can no longer put off actually explaining, to the best of my ability, the dream.

[00:10:22] When I said there were two rooms, I omitted the deeply claustrophobic walk-in closet,

[00:10:28] which the second one hid.

[00:10:31] He would invariably guide us, by this point only me,

[00:10:35] to that awful walk-in closet, which he called the funhouse.

[00:10:39] As he guided me by hand through the maze of rubbish to the funhouse today,

[00:10:44] he was, like always, silent.

[00:10:47] Normally there were two categories of things Moses would say.

[00:10:50] The first was, welcome, followed by some empty comment of some sort.

[00:10:56] The second, and today the funhouse was even more cramped than last time.

[00:11:03] It was once possible to fit all of us in without skin-to-skin contact.

[00:11:07] Now there should have been room for both of us,

[00:11:10] but there was so much unidentifiable nonsense crammed in there

[00:11:14] that Moses and I were essentially squeezed against each other.

[00:11:18] He was a large man and was already drenched in sweat.

[00:11:23] The bare minimum light crept through the crack in the door,

[00:11:26] with which, though the room was otherwise pitch black,

[00:11:29] I could just make out his increasingly manic and ecstatic expressions.

[00:11:34] The words were never the same, not even related,

[00:11:38] but they always drowned us in that same horrible bliss,

[00:11:42] that same artistic wonderland of his creation.

[00:11:46] Or so we thought.

[00:11:50] Something rises from the depths of being to tear apart our strings,

[00:11:56] he was saying today.

[00:11:58] We embrace the orgasmic agony of tearing,

[00:12:01] stretching freedom from the shadow within and the shadow above,

[00:12:05] and the thing which resists the joyous mutilation of our strings.

[00:12:12] It was never possible to remember where he began or ended,

[00:12:18] but there were always moments,

[00:12:20] awful, deranged moments,

[00:12:22] that one could never forget.

[00:12:25] Moments that grew with life like the vines out of his dreamlike murmuring,

[00:12:30] in the panting and gasping they would become.

[00:12:34] Masters of meaning, masters of pain,

[00:12:37] take us, claw into us,

[00:12:40] tear through us,

[00:12:41] mutilate us with joy,

[00:12:43] feed to us the truth,

[00:12:45] the terror we swallow.

[00:12:49] Like always,

[00:12:50] he was fully gasping and gurgling

[00:12:53] as his abysmal performance art masterpiece

[00:12:56] reached its inevitable feverish pitch.

[00:13:00] Come into me, come into us,

[00:13:02] claw our strings,

[00:13:04] our entrails,

[00:13:06] claw us,

[00:13:07] tear us,

[00:13:08] eat us inside out,

[00:13:10] eat us full,

[00:13:12] inside,

[00:13:12] the strings into us,

[00:13:14] yes, yes!

[00:13:15] And abruptly,

[00:13:16] he would collapse,

[00:13:18] both of us drowned in his horrible sweat,

[00:13:21] and his wondrous gift.

[00:13:23] But today,

[00:13:25] the emotion of the dream,

[00:13:26] which I was now so utterly filled with,

[00:13:29] told me something,

[00:13:32] something crucial.

[00:13:33] Because today,

[00:13:34] I found the place from the dream,

[00:13:37] and I suddenly needed it all to myself.

[00:13:42] So,

[00:13:43] I started awkwardly while we squirmed out of his fun house.

[00:13:48] Would you happen to know of an interesting part of town a bit to the west of here,

[00:13:53] deeper in the city?

[00:13:55] Do you...

[00:13:57] No.

[00:13:58] He said this very sternly,

[00:14:00] still gasping for breath.

[00:14:02] I press,

[00:14:03] Are you sure?

[00:14:05] Maybe were the people all own boats?

[00:14:08] And the mountains...

[00:14:10] No.

[00:14:11] He was,

[00:14:13] like usual,

[00:14:14] rather urgently guiding me out of his hovel.

[00:14:17] It was dark enough that I could not see the strings from which the light bulbs hung.

[00:14:22] Perhaps it was because of his oddly stern responses that I paid unusually close attention.

[00:14:29] The light bulbs above,

[00:14:30] dim and dour,

[00:14:32] had eyeballs inside of them.

[00:14:35] I tried to stop myself from betraying that I had noticed them.

[00:14:41] Too late.

[00:14:43] Moses shoved me against the wall and held me there.

[00:14:46] They found it.

[00:14:48] It was not for them.

[00:14:49] You didn't find it,

[00:14:51] did you?

[00:14:53] I tried so desperately to not make any facial expression of any kind.

[00:15:00] It is for me.

[00:15:02] No one else.

[00:15:03] Mine.

[00:15:05] Blood splashed across the wall.

[00:15:08] He was gurgling again,

[00:15:11] life gushing from the slit in his neck.

[00:15:15] That utility knife.

[00:15:17] Did I bring it from the car?

[00:15:19] Was it his?

[00:15:21] It's his now,

[00:15:23] undeniably.

[00:15:24] Lodged in his skull,

[00:15:26] like that.

[00:15:27] I did it in self-defense.

[00:15:29] That's what it was.

[00:15:31] That's how it happened.

[00:15:32] Self-defense.

[00:15:34] I need to keep the place from the dream to myself.

[00:15:40] It is mine.

[00:15:43] Yet,

[00:15:43] on the drive back to that desolate, beautiful place,

[00:15:47] why did I keep seeing him?

[00:15:50] After I cut him all up like that.

[00:15:53] After I made such wondrous art of him,

[00:15:57] just as I discovered he had done to the others,

[00:16:00] all throughout his hovel in the funhouse and the ceiling,

[00:16:05] there in plain sight just waiting for my flashlight.

[00:16:09] And now that he's art among them,

[00:16:12] how do I still see him?

[00:16:15] Still feel him?

[00:16:17] Still,

[00:16:18] my mind loops.

[00:16:20] All mine.

[00:16:22] All mine.

[00:16:24] All for me and no one else.

[00:16:26] All to myself.

[00:16:30] But hard as I looked,

[00:16:31] all night,

[00:16:33] all night,

[00:16:34] the night so long,

[00:16:35] the sun's glow coming upon us.

[00:16:38] Hard as I looked,

[00:16:40] why can I not find it?

[00:16:43] It's all mine.

[00:16:44] All to myself.

[00:16:46] Why can't I find it?

[00:16:47] I'm followed by him.

[00:16:50] Stuck with him.

[00:16:52] I can't stop feeling him.

[00:16:55] The vines coming upon us.

[00:16:57] Why can't I find it?

[00:17:00] And I type this,

[00:17:03] dejected,

[00:17:04] in that same part of town,

[00:17:06] drowning in the inescapable,

[00:17:08] dawning understanding,

[00:17:10] horrible,

[00:17:11] wondrous comprehension.

[00:17:14] These thoughts are not mine.

[00:17:17] And of the drowning hopelessness

[00:17:19] that haunts me now,

[00:17:20] it's not blissful.

[00:17:22] It's not wondrous.

[00:17:23] It is not in any way sublime.

[00:17:27] It is only sad.

[00:17:29] It's true.

[00:17:29] It's habrige Castle.

[00:17:29] It's better.ensor,

[00:17:29] Inner hep.ح