i told myself i wasn’t going to wake up at 4 AM if I didn’t have to anymore but I just had the weirdest fucking dream and I need to write it down somewhere before I forget because it was some Studio Ghibli shit and it was god damn terrifying. I don’t know if the single chocolate chip cookie I had before bed was enough to cause this or if my brain has just been under so much stress lately it finally just went “fuck you, suffer” but LORD. This has some storytelling tropes that @cohobbitation knows fucking terrifies me too.
so the premise of everything was that for some reason in the human world it was raining near constantly and there was so much water that the world, as a whole I shit you not, was becoming more and more flooded out and it was assumed no one knew as to why. Now I say “human world” because there was also a “monster world” that humans just used to make up scary monster stories to make children behave but they were mostly unaware that these things they would end up telling as stories would eventually manifest themselves into a new monster over time to populate said world.There were also stories of people that were half monster, half human that could walk between the worlds freely but as a human you’d never know because they were very good at making themselves look like everyone else to blend in. That’s what I was but I had run away from the monster world because it’s miserable and terrifying there and had been passing as a normal human for a long time because I didn’t want to be part of the issues the monster world caused for the humans. Also, notably, being a hybrid in the monster world was just as bad because you weren’t seen as a “true monster” and were often considered a sub-race, forced into slave labor or servitude of some pure bred monster, which is why many hybrids left to hide amongst the humans.
I was going to some odd school and it was the lunch period, so we were all sat up on the rooftop watching the waters as it slowly consumed everything. By now the humans had created some methods to try and fight or avoid the flood waters, like building high walkways made of extremely sturdy metal to get to and from places or water proof structures that were meant to eventually be able to be submerged because no one knew if this would ever stop and the humans were getting ready to have to deal with having an entirely water planet. However it was while we were up there, talking and eating, that we started to notice that the waters were receding. Sometimes this happened and the flood waters would disappear for maybe an hour while it continued to rain but after some time they would come back to exactly how they would be. Liquids did not like to follow the laws of physics in this dream world, nor did they like to always be in the same place.
Now, with waters like this both good and bad things were often kicked up and left behind when they’d go away. Little waterlogged treasures or, in my unfortunate case, bodies. There would always be the body of some poor soul that would be there waiting, and while many people used the time the water was gone to go down to ground level and scavenge I did not like to because I always ended up finding the nightmare fuel. Today I decided I would go down with my friends because maybe it wasn’t so bad but just as we were getting ready to go back inside and go out some of the school bullies cut me off from the door, taunting me by saying “don’t look now but I think you’ve found something” and pointing towards the water where there was, in fact, a really pale naked dead woman just floating on by before something drug her beneath the water again. They laughed and slammed the door in my face, locking it too, so I had to take the long way down.
By the time I got to the soggy wet ground the waters were just a trickle, there was no body, and my friends had already wandered off to do their own thing so I followed suit and started to look for stuff. As I wandered I started to notice these long black strands of hair were being pushed towards me from somewhere and started to clump around my feet, prompting me to try and find the source LIKE AN IDIOT and as I came up to this weird stairway like structure where it seemed to be getting the worst one of my teachers (who was wearing the face of someone from my old job, one of the really cool coaches I worked with) came up behind me and scared the shit out of me. He wanted to know why I was sneaking around like I was, being all careful and ready for the jumpscare that eventually came from someone else, and by the time I had looked over to tell him I was trying to find someone the hair leading me to that spot was gone and the stairs no longer had that edge-of-your-seat feeling of suspense to them. Not seeing anything he just shrugged and said “Well I found something cool, come follow me so I can show you” and we departed.
After following him some way to a thing that felt more like an abandoned parking structure than anything and we were going downstairs instead of upstairs and this was a concern because the waters would be back soon. Being the half hybrid thing I also started to get this feeling of “we shouldn’t be here” because I recognized we were coming up on one of those liminal spaces where the worlds overlapped each other and made it very easy for monsters of hybrids to appear. As we were going downwards I tried to explain to him that maybe it was a bad idea to be there but he didn’t listen and before I got really frustrated with him we happened to pass by the ONE car in the entire building (it was my IRL car? Somehow?) and these three guys standing around it. They weren’t trying to break in or anything they were legitimately just standing there trying to figure out how this car hadn’t been washed away in some of the initial flooding because it was covered in algae and barnacles and other things to indicate extended submersion and while I was asking them what they were doing Teacher Guy wandered off again.
That sense of dread was really growing so I went to follow him again down into these wide tunnels but just as he was turning a corner I stopped because I realized we had fully passed into the monster world now, which had made me lose my all human appearance. I had weird bird features on my face but the most noticeable bit were my legs and feet, which were bird feet from the knee down that had three taloned toes on the front and one on the back ankle bit. The exact moment the worlds passed through one another forced me to reveal my true self and I knew we were both in a lot of trouble now.
I ran to try and catch up to where Teacher Guy had gone but as I came up on the corner he had turned I started to hear these noises of pain and wet, crunching sounds and the shadows that were cast up on the wall I could see showed me that the “Guardians” had gotten to him.
These Guardians have been some of the most terrifying things I have ever dreamed up, not because of how they looked but because of how they kill someone. Basically, they looked like oversized tall terracotta pots with lids that were very innocent looking at first but if you were a trespasser then suddenly they’d have these two mile long tongue-arms that would come out from just under the lid, wrap around a victim and squeeze all the blood and guts out of them like a sponge before shoving the mangled body into them to digest. Dream me was terrified of these things and I don’t blame dream me for that fear at all.
Just before I could turn around to go back the way I came before the Guardians found me too my watch alarm that I had set to let me know when to return to a safe place to avoid the waters went off, alerting the Guardians just around the corner that someone else was there. I bolted up a nearby emergency staircase as I heard the clanking of angry pots coming after me (they moved by cartoonishly bouncing after people, how that didn’t break them I don’t know) because thankfully they couldn’t go upstairs but their tongue-arms followed me up most of the staircase.
Eventually the Guardians couldn’t chase me anymore but I reached a part of the stairs that was going to have to force me to run by more to get to this pipe I wanted to crawl up that would lead to some upper walkways of the monster world area where I thought I would be safe. I couldn’t go back to the human world with the rains starting to pick up because whatever liminal space I popped out of was going to put me miles underwater and I wasn’t about to deal with that so I thought maybe I could wait it out somehow.
But I had to run by eight Guardians that I know would trigger the minute I got anywhere near them but they can’t climb up pipes so I thought that was my best bet. Steeling myself I eventually darted to the other side of that small room and lept onto the pipe bolted to the wall, starting to climb up it as fast as possible. All the Guardians were pissed off down below, angrily and loudly hopping up and down while their tongue-arms tried to catch up to me. I out climbed the appendages to the walkways I wanted to be on and started to run across them towards this massive open room I had never seen before but the Guardians followed me down below and what they had done was grab on to the walkways and were going “hand over hand” to keep up with and try to catch me so I had to constantly stay moving to avoid them.
This massive room was sort of like a super large work room that had these huge turning wheel generators in them that a lot of enslaved hybrids were working at. They were either in or on the wheels making them turn and the machines were pumping water up into these pipes that went to what I could only assume was the human world to cause massive, MASSIVE amounts of rain and water.
BASICALLY the monsters were flooding out the humans on purpose and I can only assume it was because they wanted to kill all of them so they could live in the human world instead. I discovered this and wanted to stop it so I ran all across the walkways, with the Guardians hot at my heels and causing a scene down below which was drawing attention to myself, until I was able to get onto one of the generator wheels and try to mess it up somehow. But this was the point in the dream where the Guardians had managed to catch up to me and yank me off of the wheel towards the ground below and I woke the fuck up because I did not want to see what happened after that.
This was the singularly weirdest dream I can vividly recall in recent months. Even right now as I sit here typing this out I can hear the sounds the generator wheels made in my head and the “roo-uwah, roo-uwah” noises the Guardians made whenever their tops would open when they bounced. I don’t know if it means anything and I hardly doubt it past being just a weird ass dream but... Good lord it was a fucking trip.
