HYPNAGOGIA: A Rubberborn story
Shiny black rubber hands.
In the dream: they grow from the shadows. They clump against the walls and seethe in the corners. I know in my rational brain that these are simply the places the light can’t go through, the trunks and limbs and branches of the trees outside my windows, whipping frenziedly back & forth in the wind of a nor’easter. I know that the long black void cast by the slightly-ajar bedroom door is a natural phenomenon, and that the reason it moves slightly back & forth is the intense wind, sneaking through every minute crack of the house that it can find.
The only light in the room is from the streetlights, outside. I need a little bit of light to sleep - the absolute dark, well, that’s obvious, isn’t it, what it does to me -
And I see it, sometimes, even if it isn’t happening, and it fills my head with such a buzzing, squirrelly fear that I can’t focus on anything else - the horrible, evil lift of the black-faced figures from the pooling shadows, their slow, inexorable creep towards my beside -
Feel their creeping invasion, their glossy, shiny hands on my shoulder -
I scream, and my partner screams, and we both jump back to our own sides of the bed. His face is crawling with the crossing, un-crossing shadows of the trees - but also alarm, concern. “Honey,” he draggles out of his sleep-churned mouth - “Are you okay? What’s the matter?”
“Dreams,” I say, and pull the sheets up to my chin. “Just dreams.”
“Just dreams,” mutters my partner, already having loosed himself down the slide of unconsciousness.
“Yeah,” I repeat, eyes as flung-open as shutters in a hurricane.
Outside, the nor’easter competes for attention with the frantic skirl of an ambulance, or a fire truck, or a police car - I can’t tell which. It rises and falls, like a giant with breathing difficulties, lowering itself at our windows. The glass rattles in the frames.
Sometimes I feel like it’s probably haunted. I mean, you can’t have a house that’s this old and not have at least one ghost. Too many past inhabitants not to have at least one snarl of psychic energy, somewhere - probably the basement, or the attic - in any case, neither place me or my partner have ever had to enter in our two years of living here.
Come to think of it, the trouble with my dreams - with the shadows - only started about a month ago, right around the time I came on the rubbrfrk9 tumblr for the first time.
I guess it makes sense that encountering a new fetish would spike some kind of interruption in the normal dreaming habits of a person. I’d never really given it much of a thought, rubber - but something about these pictures, man, they grabbed me, they arrested me, they grabbed me by the chin and made me stare into their endlessness.
It was a dude - single from what I could tell - who lived somewhere in the city. In the background of his pictures, I could see familiar skylines - skyscrapers, even - so I knew that he was local. But in a city of this magnitude, that’s still a near unspannable distance. So I followed the tumblr, I lurked, I scrolled every picture he’d ever posted.
In every single one, he was wearing a full, head to toe, shiny black rubber suit. In some pictures, he had on other clothing to accent it - but in every shot, the rubber was what stood out. And it wasn’t just shots in his apartment, in his bedroom, in the bathroom, in the shower even - it was out and about, on the streets, in broad daylight, or in parks at night time. The night shots, I’ll admit, were my favorite - his shiny, depthless black superimposed on the night’s sallow dark - he was more night than the sky was, at least in the city.
There was, however, a problem, in that my partner was incredibly vanilla. He allowed for my endless fetish-related scrolling on tumblr, even had tried to get enthusiastic about my various paraphilia, but to no avail. We had sex, and we had great sex, but something about “just sex” never got me to the edge where I could truly feel liberation from my libido’s constant demand. I didn’t know how to explain to him my new-found obsession, and thus, found myself keeping it secret from him, like a Catholic with a sin - and just as suffused with guilt.
But still, rubbrfrk9 had awakened something inside of me. Something dark, something shiny, and something mute. It gave me a boner like nothing ever had before, and I yearned to be encased, too, like he was in every one of his pictures. I yearned to be side-by-side with him, maybe even be rubbrfrk10, if that’s how it all was to go down -
But no! I had to restrain myself from these kinds of fantasies. I had a stable, loving life with my partner, and we both had dayjobs, and our parents even knew each other now -
It was just one of those things that would have to be relegated to roleplay.
I did take one step - I went on eBay, and I got one of those old-school gas masks. The ones you see in the films about World War II, with the long rubber trunk and canister. I paid for it, and eagerly watched, day by day, as it inched closer to me.
The day it arrived, I put it on immediately, as my partner was still at work and wouldn’t be home for hours. I stared into the mirror at my blank face, my eyes obscured by the filmy glass of the eyepieces. I could tell from the quality that it was a replica - no one in their right mind would actually use it to filter gas out of the air - but still, somehow, the rubber of the mask felt so good, fitting so closely against the skin of my scalp and my cheeks, under my chin and tight against my forehead.
I don’t know how long I stared at myself in the mirror, standing there with my mouth hanging open inside the mask, breathing in and breathing out, hearing it hollowly, distantly, in my ears.
Shame was what woke me out of it. Shame and fear and regret. I stripped it off of my face (not without some longing, some lingering, foreign despair) and bundled it into a place under the bed, to hopefully be forgotten about. I’d gotten it out of my system now, right?
This is when the dreams started. The goopy, inky shadows, stretching out their hands for me. Whispering, even though stoically mute in their fluid motions towards the bed - these were not zombies, these were not monsters … if anything, they were alien creatures, glistening in the streetlights beneath my windowsill, inching towards the bed -
I yell, and it wakes up my partner again, who is this time less supportive, and more irritated. “Honey, take a pill, wouldja? Or drink some water milk … I dunno, just … sleeping good…” He trailed off, and pulled the sheets up around his chin, turned off, and snorted his way back into comfortable sleep.
I’ve drifted off again into the dream. It seems like, every time I dream lately, it picks up where it left off - the alien faces, the shiny rubber hands, they are even closer to being able to reach me. I can see the reflection of the light on my pale, white skin, in such contrast to theirs - oh god, oh god - am I reaching out to them? To them, as they get ever closer? Am I helping them narrow the gap?
This time, I don’t yell, but I jerk awake in the darkness, teeth chattering even though the heat is thick and filling the room.
A trailing waft of rubber-smell tickles my nostrils, and I sneeze, violently.
Part of me is afraid to turn on the light.
When my trembling hand reaches over to the switch, it flicks it fast and withdraws back to my body as quickly as a mouse to its wall-hole. I almost want to comfort it with murmurs and words of solace, but I too am suddenly brought to a shudder when I realize that the ill-purchased gas mask is sitting on the bedspread, between my knees, staring at me with its blank, glassine eyes, almost accusing.
Of course it isn’t there. It’s still beneath the bed.
I quietly roll out of bed and crouch by the side, jamming my hand into the jumble of clothes, boxes, and other things beneath - yes, I can confirm that it is in fact still where I wedged it. Not on top of the bed, staring at me.
I’m hard as a rock in my basketball shorts. The skin of my face is prickling, almost like I’m having an allergic reaction to something - little, millimeters-big needles sinking into my flesh. It’s pre-occupying, but not intensely irritating. Just feels kind of peculiar, a little rippling wave of heat. I should go to the bathroom and splash some water on my face. I am probably just overheated from the dream.
The dream! Can it be, in fact, that I’m still dreaming? Will I walk down the hallway to the bathroom only to find that shadows bubble out of the faucet, like in every horror movie ever? I’m feeling oblique, fuzzy waves of doubt and vertigo - in the thick of the night, like this, with the wind howling its head off down the street, it’s easy to become slightly unhinged. The rain taps and staccatoes its way along the windowpane - one salvo followed by another, like empty bullet shells from an automatic weapon hitting the asphalt.
In the bathroom, it’s a little quieter. The light is harsh, anodyne - I keep meaning to get a softer bulb. It makes my face look even more pale than it is - a ghast stands before me, one eye half-lidded, the other wide open - I look like I’ve gone a couple of rounds in a boxing ring. My hair sticks up on one side of my head, where it’s mashed flat on the other.
I bend over to splash some cooling water on my face, and it leaves me feeling strangely aroused. My belly sort of drops as I feel the cooling patter of the drops hitting my face - much like, I imagine - the windows of the building outside.
I feel that intense vertigo again, my eyes closed, leaning over the sink, wobbly a bit more than I’d like, when I feel the rumble in my gut tell me it’s time to take a seat on the toilet for a minute or two.
Somehow, I have my phone in my hand, and before I know it, I’m straddling the toilet and scrolling my tumblr feed, instantly navigating to the magnifying glass, searching:
rubbrfrk9, I type in, and feel a long line of drool suddenly separate itself from the corner of my mouth and splat on the tiles below. My screen is instantly filled with the calming influence of rubber - black on black on black, shiny rubber hands and shiny rubber faces.
The sink, the pipes, make a bad metallic gurgle, as though clearing their throat, and in that sound I can hear voices - distorted, but voices, and they are saying
All hail the Rubbered One
And I’m up in a frenzy, pulling my shorts up around my waist, panic striking at my spinal cord. “Who said that?” I say out loud. I grab a fingerful of skin in between two fingers and pinch, HARD, to make sure I’m not still dreaming.
Pain riots through me, blood surges up to fill the injured area, turns my skin blotchy and red. Nope, not dreaming.
And then my eyes wander back down to the phone in my hand. It’s still bright and alert, still filled with images from the tumblr.
Perhaps it’s a .gif, or one of those Boomerang photos.
But no, nothing to mark it as such.
This is the one of rubbrfrk9 outside, in some kind of wooded area. Maybe even in the park near to my house. It could be. He is head-to-toe in his blanked-out black rubber suit, even wearing black, 14-eye Dr Marten boots. Every last bit of him is obscured. He could be someone’s silhouette, rather than an actual person himself.
I can feel my cock start to leak precum at the thought. I feel it dribble down my thigh and join my drool on the tiles.
All hail the Rubbered One, I hear again, but this time, I hear it in my own head.
The drone - for that’s what it is, a rubber drone, rubbrfrk9, according to the watermark on the picture - is slowly, ever so slowly, turning his rubbered head towards me on the small surface of my phone.
I should scream again, but my mouth is clamped shut. It’s just a dream, I tell myself, feverishly. Any second now, I’ll wake up and my partner will be scolding me, the wind will be banging against the walls -
But no such thing happens. The rubbered man is moving, so slowly that it could be all of this is just a hallucination - he is turning his head, staring blankly at me, he is lifting his arm, his shiny rubber hand - he is gesturing to me, he is crooking a finger - he is turning his hand, raising his arm -
The wind in the trees is rustling the bushes behind him.
This is no longer a picture on my phone, this is a portal. There is no screen.
The small bathroom fills with the intense, the overwhelming, plastic smell of rubber.
I see, out of the corner of my eye, the shadows in the kitchen merging, coalescing, black drop by black drop, hearing the whispers in the wind as it surges against the side of the house -
I see that the corners of my phone are being taken over too, by the shadows - small tentacles, writhing, lashing, as the Rubbered One stretches languourously towards me, his arm skewing the screen’s perspective in a tilt-shift manner that makes me dizzy -
All hail the Rubbered One!
“All hail the Rubbered One!” I say, helplessly -
I’m staring thoughtlessly at the wall ahead of me.
The wind is calm, and the storm has passed.
Next to me, my partner is slumbering, tossing and muttering to himself.
My hand reaches out towards his naked shoulder.
His poor, naked shoulder, about to meet the touch of my
In the corners of the room, in the deep of the hallway, the silence rustles. On my bedside table, the image of a wooded area - some bushes to the left, a pine tree to the right, is oddly empty. One might think, looking at it, that it’s a strange thing to take a picture of - a foreground, with no subject.
A smile curves my lips, but you’d never see it.
Not underneath the rubber of my new face.