Shortly after I was diagnosed with cancer something quite extraordinary happened, and it happened in the dark shadows of the night. It started as a nightmare. No ordinary nightmare, a special kind of nightmare. Dreams are dreams, everybody has them. Sometimes they are vivid, sometimes vague. I think everybody in the world, and I mean everybody, knows what dreams are.
I thought I did until one night several months ago. This night was the first step on the road to revelation and discovery. In fact this very first strange step would lead me in the end to the truth, all the truths about my past. That first infant stumbling along this road wasn't an easy lesson. It was a journey that gave me a wretched awakening in terror.
Let me explain. It was just an ordinary night and I was inside a jumble of mundane dreams. These dreams were ordinary from me, many to be forgotten even before waking. It was during one of these dreams in the depths of night that I first discovered the crack, a small fissure into a different reality. Dreams are dreams and will always remain so. This is what I thought. Until I put my hand on the door handleâ¦
After I'd walked through the door my whole perception of the real and the non-real changed forever. You see, I was in a passageway in a vague and very normal dreamlike state. When I grabbed a door handle at the end of this random corridor, it was cold to the touch, very cold. Straightaway something out of the ordinary was happening. The sensation of cold was like touching a shelf in an ice box. At first I thought I'd woken up and knocked over my glass of water. No, this was not the thing at all. The sensations were spreading and not only confined to my hand. My whole body was receiving new stimuli, a new world was opening. I could now feel it along my arm. More than that, I could perceive every hair on it, every sinew and every molecule making that part of my body, all with a stunning crystal clear intensity. It was with the joy of enlightenment more than fear of what lies ahead that I stepped up. After a moment's hesitation I decided my next move. Yes, inside what I thought was a dream I calculated what I was about to do.
I turned the door handle and I could feel the mechanism inside, not a simple sensation like when you're awake, but every single piece of metal touching every other piece of metal. Parts ground in the opening action of the door. The door creaked open, and I could feel the dryness in the hinges as they needed oiling. The wind hit me, and to my surprise it was a cold, damp night. The corridor had been null, dreamlike. Now my whole body, every molecule, was awake. It was ten times more real than any real I've ever known. It was like plunging your face into a bowl of icy cold water, a sensation of being far more awake than ever in any normal existence. I'd walked or been propelled into a new dimension, a world somewhere else other than here.
This was no nightmare, this was super reality. I wanted to discover more about this new found vital space. I stepped into the wet, dark cobbled street. It was lit by yellow, dull almost Victorian lighting. At first I thought it was a Victorian dream but no, there were modern signs, people in the strangest clothing, but not from any remembered past. A bone-chilling light drizzle was falling. I could smell everything that night, the rain, the dirt, food, even at a distance and the most disturbing part of all, the people. This is when a hint of agitation started to disturb me. It was the stench of the people. They smelt dangerous. I was overwhelmed by the smell of aggression. I had developed super senses and I was fascinated. At the same time somewhere in the back of what I assume was my own mind I was very frightened.
Then it struck me. The revelation came to me like a thunderbolt, and I knew without doubt what this strange dimension was. This other reality was a manifestation of my battle with cancer, my fear of a lingering painful death. This was a cancer experience with groups of dark shadowy foe characters hanging round in doorways, under lights, smoking and mumbling. All these dangerous smelling characters represented tumours in near human form. All were malicious-looking, the type always to be cast as bad guys in the movies. The problem was tonight I was inside the movie and these bad guys were very real.
I can only tell you this in hindsight because at the time things were very different for me. At that moment I could not tell if I was awake or not. It would be a complete lie to say I had any knowledge our universe existed. At that moment on that damp night I was alive. Dream did not exist, all my past was gone, and this was living reality in a cold damp street, with every sense in my body on fire. I could hear the locks turning behind me as if someone was forcing me into the alleyway. This made it impossible for any retreat back into soft option dreaming. By then it wasn't important, I'd already forgotten its existence. I turned to face a danger behind me, face down whoever was closing the door. I was shocked to discover no one behind me, the only thing there a graffiti scrawled brick wall. I turned and looked around that dingy disturbing street, discovering only one escape route.
The street was cobbled as if to take heavy traffic, but it didn't seem to be a through road of any kind. It was accessed by one solitary alleyway, narrow and darkly shadowed, off to my left. I could see into this disturbing alleyway from where I was standing. It was dark and wet. In every corner its shadows pulsed with the movement of cockroaches and rats. Beyond I could see a brightly lit street. I ran!
My running was a revelation. As I accelerated every tendon in my legs, every single muscle, and every fibre of my being worked in harmony. I could control my velocity, the drain on my energy, everything including a colossal top speed. Each footfall came with the knowledge of my toes contacting the ground. I could feel the type of stone the cobbles were made of. The sensation was one of slow motion though by now I must have been doing thirty miles an hour. I was faster than the fastest men in the world, and it seemed slow. Where could I push this to? The sticky, damp light rain started to sting my face such was the speed I was travelling. As my arms pumped I could feel the wind rushing between my fingertips. This was the most scintillating experience of velocity and power I think any living man has ever experienced. This was fabulous. I was escaping in epic style.
Fabulous, that is, until I could smell danger bubbling up behind me. They were moving very fast, possessing similar powers to me and were charging after me like a herd of stampeding cattle. It wasn't like one of those dreams where you can't run any faster no matter how hard you try, it wasn't like that at all. I was faster than the wind, moving well beyond the dreams of any Olympic athlete. No, the experience wasn't dreamlike, it was super reality!
I was going fast, very fast. In seconds I was through the dark infested alleyway, clear of all the dangers of the filth-smelling menace. I thought I was away and free, but things in this life weren't simple. I was now moving at speeds impossible in a normal dimension. Grave danger could be heard running behind me moving with increased urgency. It seemed to push its odour of vile stench ahead of it, then I realised the murderous mob were all gaining on me. They had more experience in this world than I had!
The brightness of the street had been an illusion made by looking through the dark infested tunnel of the alleyway. The lights themselves were large and high above the street, but they threw out a terrible sickly yellow light turning everything in that wide thoroughfare into a veiled malevolent threat. The whole street was thronged with dark people offering no safe haven. I was now surrounded by hundreds of cancerous figures all wanting to invade my body. I was in plain view for all to see, and the larger lights on that street made me no safer as they illuminated fresh meat for the mob. I was a magnet for their evil. I was the attraction they all wanted to devour!
At this point I finally realised the predicament I was running into. Panic took over and I pushed my body even harder. The sensation of feeling everything could be described as slow motion, but I wasn't running in slow motion as everything was happening in real time. I understood everything. I'd reached maximum velocity, and at that moment felt more alive than I'd ever done in all my life. This wasn't a dreamlike state, this was living in a place I never been before. It was the most exhilarating thing I'd ever experienced, and I was alive for the first time. The big problem with this crystal bright total sensual experience was, it wasn't going to last. It was life in the fast lane, the fast lane to a painful death as hunted prey.
Everybody I passed on this wide boulevard was dark wearing disgusting, shapeless, greasy clothes with expressions void of anything but maliciousness. Were my stalkers male or female? I could not tell, most seemed to be rat like in their movements and androgynous. They varied in size and colour, some quite tall and thin, others stocky with obvious latent power. The absolute impression this crowd of moving horror gave me was of a mudslide of evil dark flesh running, oozing along the alleyways and streets.
It wasn't the awfulness of their appearance that made them terrifying, it was their unwillingness to slow down, and their constant building stench as they closed in on me with every stride. The rain was now coming down hard beating at my face, and at forty miles an hour felt as if it was going to penetrate my eyes. This would have been a consideration under normal circumstances but I couldn't slow down, not for one second. Where I was running to I hadn't a clue, but I wasn't going to slow.
They were gaining on me stride by stride by stride. My lungs filling with the cold damp air were about to burst, this wet vapour of acrid water drowning me with each forced breath. I forced it out in a fine spray only for this to be followed a second later with the urge to feel that raw coldness fill my chest once again. I knew I could only keep this pace up for another few seconds, a handful of yards gained in front of the poisonous onslaught. The mob would never stop until its cancer consumed the cells of my body.
If there was somewhere to run and hide, a safe haven in this sickly yellow city, I didn't know where to look. Everything was new to me, all the sensations and all the horror. I was looking with the fever of a desperate man for a way out, a bright glass door, the golden door or a subway sign for
Tranquil
Place
⦠None of this materialised. I found not a single friendly face, and with stinging eyes I looked for any possible escape. My eyes searched through the passengers travelling on the filthy blood-red convoys of double-decker buses, but I found no sanctuary. I couldn't see anywhere to go, and everybody in that city knew why I was there. They all wanted a share of my cells.
The first indication of my doom was the weight of rancid breath blowing on the back of my neck, the mob so close I could smell the stench of their breath from broken rotten teeth. A few seconds later I had the sensation of someone touching the back of my neck with fingers made of bone covered with a cold, tissue thin, greasy yellow skin. These horrible hands succeeded in gripping the back of my neck, clawing at it with a frantic desire. I could feel the long yellow nails with their blackened tips digging deep into my neck, gouging out bits of the flesh to be sucked into that horrible mouth with relish, as if this creature had found a fine delicacy.
In my state of total awareness the pain was beyond intense. I was being pulled apart bit by bit by the long talons of not just one but several of my pursuers. All possessed the ability to suck on my flesh and blood as they ran. The pain was unbearable in this heightened state and I could feel cell being ripped from cell, and the intensity of the agony was equal to the intensity of the experience. I had to fight to survive, I wasn't going to stop, and I wasn't going to die, not there, on that damp, yellow, slime-covered cobbled street. With so many pursuers chasing it seemed impossible I would survive the night, or the next three terrible minutes.
Hundreds were clawing at me, not just the original group from the alleyway, everybody in that wide thoroughfare wanted to eat me alive. I was flagging, my breath was coming in ragged lumps and now I couldn't make myself go faster. Without warning they were on me, and my legs losing all their strength buckled beneath me. I was forced hard down onto the sticky, wet cobbled street. I was on the cold and hard floor without hope. The mob piled on top of me and I could feel every sensation of pain as knees and elbows and teeth dug into my body. As dozens piled on top of me forcing my flesh against the harsh stone of the roadway my super senses never abated, bruises forming as capillaries ruptured under the weight of the attacking horde. This was a minor disturbance because they then started to eat me alive.
Every fraction of a second I could feel claws and teeth ripping at my super sensitive flesh. The next sensation was one of the most horrible things I've ever experienced in my life. I could feel fingers penetrating my chest cavity after which these creatures grabbed my intestines in their clawed hands, tugging and sucking as the red-black bloody tubes were ripped out from my body. Other thin skinned yellow hands clawed inside my chest driving their fingers tight around my pumping heart deep inside. More claw hands moved beyond my heart. They grabbed at my spine raising the agony in my brain beyond intolerable. These hands started to tug at my vertebrae with a fevered intensity attempting to rip me into two, three or one hundred pieces. The agony was unbearable, and then more filthy legs gathered around to invade my fading senses and to inflict more agony by stamping on my diminishing body.
Did I wake up? Not for about another minute. During this minute I was diminished until I was barely a skull with a fragment of brain and one eyeball. Then it all faded. This was the longest minute of my entire life, an almost infinite minute of blinding white agony. Shit, it hurt!
I woke from this incredible experience screaming in pain. The bedclothes were soaked with a sickly, sweet-smelling sweat. The bed was so wet I thought I'd involuntary urinated, or worse still soiled the sheets. I suffered the sensation that my whole body had been ripped apart and was soaking its visceral fluids into the linen on the bed. I was convinced everything would be covered in blood and ravaged warm flesh. My eyes told me different. The bed was sodden with sweat. It was so wet you could have physically wrung the sheets out, or I could have canoed out of there! I didn't believe it was possible somebody could sweat so much. My parched dry throat told the truth begging my thirst to be sated.