The Dream Cycle Mythos

Often with a benign curiosity we look to the dreams of men.. Never pondering with any real significance upon the world that exists within our sleep and perhaps it is best left this way. For the things I have seen and heard I cannot unlearn. Though I will do my best to relay them here in hopes that it may provide my own mind with the smallest bit of clarification that I have been seeking for months and have yet to find. This is a personal documentation of the past year of my life as it has been... Please bear in mind when I say a year that I am referring to solar time such as that of a calendar yet time as I have seen it has been much longer. Perhaps even decades as though I am yet to reach the age of 30 my hair is streaked with grey and my skin cracked with wrinkles. I live alone now in a remote and small town where I am no doubt referred to by the local people as an eccentric and perhaps very strange fellow. It is not by chance that I live in such a desolate area for it imperative for my own safety and the safety of others that I am alone with my own diseased mind. It is not my intent that these writings be found or read by any one other than myself. Should you happen upon these writings you would be wise to abandon your reading at this point to save your own sanity and let what I know die with me. It began in the most modest of ways.. I had studied many years in processes of the human mind. It was my goal you see to help people who were besieged by their own minds and unable to help themselves. I have always held a keen interest with the mind and its secrets. Upon graduating close to the top of my class from psychiatry school I soon found a small practice and due to a close personal relationship with one of the local asylums top doctors I would occasionally receive some of the reformed patients upon their re-entering society. All was going very well and I had begun to earn a modest living at the job I enjoyed so much. Then one day that all changed. I received a phone call from my doctor friend at the asylum and he asked me if I should like to visit the asylum as he would like my opinion on a particular patient. I of course accepted the invitation eagerly and made off the next eve to see him. After arriving the doctor and I spent a small amount of time discussing the patient of interest. He was apparently found wandering outside a small mountain town a couple days carriage ride from here. His hands and face were covered in blood and he was staring vacantly at the sky. He was locked in the local town jail for one night until they may be able to assess his identity and where the blood may have come from. The first morning the sheriff arrived at the jail he happened upon the man in the cell and noticed that in his sleep he would seizure in very short rapid movements and was uttering something that the sheriff could not quite understand as English. Within a few days he was transferred to my colleague at the asylum and was observed exhibiting this behavior several more times and upon waking up he would slowly stand with his arms folded across his chest very tightly and stare upwards, sometimes uttering strange phrases.. Upon entering the room leading to the patients cell I could not help but shiver due to a rather rapid yet slight drop in temperature... The patient himself was a man of about forty with a ragged and long yellow tinged beard and deep sunken eyes that I could not quite discern the color of. He was a slim fellow with very rigid facial features... It appeared to me as if he had been starving himself for weeks or even months. When I entered the room the man's gaze set upon me and as his vacant stare disappeared a look of desperation and woe filled his eyes (which I could clearly distinguish as green now)... He began to utter strange sounds which I could not distinguish as English but some other dialect or perhaps not even a dialect at all. My colleague excused himself and remarked that should I need anything I should bang on the door and I will be seen to... At that he left me with the man and we sat staring at each other for what seemed to me to be hours. I could not release my gaze from his eyes. They seemed to swirl with a dark shade that drew me into them. All at once the patient then suddenly spoke to me in barely discernable English... His words were minced and yet seemed to make perfect sense all at once. He spoke of visions and dreams which plagued him in even his waking moments. Of unspeakable horrors which tore at his mind until little or nothing remained. When pressed on the origin of his visions he would stop speaking suddenly and stare to the sky with his arms folded so tightly across his chest his hands would turn pale with loss of blood. After several hours with the man I returned to ask my colleague if I could spend the night in his room and observe his sleeping moments.. The doctor reluctantly agreed under the condition the man be restrained. The first night I observed the man I was astounded to see him in total sleep state open his eyes and stare at me when suddenly with a voice so loud I had to cover my ears lest I fear I should go deaf he began uttering strange words that I had never heard before... even from him... The attacks were frequent yet lasted only minutes and the man would close his eyes and lye down once more... By the morning I was exhausted. After at least 50 episodes the sun had stared to flood into the man's room from his thickly barred window. I rose from my chair and was about to ring for the orderly to open the door and permit me leave from this room when all at once I heard a large intake of air from the mans chest and turned to see his face a pale green color and his eyes rolled back into his head... His hair seemed to take on a life of its own and began to whip and twirl as if there was a fan under the mans head... I rushed to his side and knelt over him... Looking back now I curse myself for such a thoughtless action for as I knelt before the man his eyes flooded with a black liquid and I felt something that I had never imagined any human could ever feel.. It was as though a hand was coming from this mans body and grabbed my forehead... Then it began. I felt a fire coming through the air and seared with a cold burning sensation that seemed to scorch to deepest part of me. Then I was gone... My physical body could or would not contain me any longer... The horror I found when my mind retreated from my physical self could not be explained... The forms of unspeakable abominations grasped and clung to me and the eyes? those empty vacuous eyes that held nothing but death and pain... I tried to scream, but no sound would come... I was somewhere else now.. It felt as though I had plunged to the deepest depths of the black ocean only to find the edge of time and space... I was being pulled in every direction at once and if I could have I would have removed my eyes to offer some relief at the horrors that surrounded me... All the while the voices... those unexplainable voices that entered my brain though not through my ears were deafening me with sounds of torture... Through it all one voice came to me in clear English and silenced all things surrounding me. The voice was not one of man nor woman... It simply was. ?Inna sogoth... Mortal you are not known to this world. The one before you had not the capacity to accept the things it saw and thus was an unusable host... Your kind is frail yet here you have come and here you shall stay.. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."... As quickly as it had come to me it was gone... I woke to find several men standing over me including my colleague who understandable was very pale and full of concern.. Not wanting to alarm anyone I told them that I had been lying there watching the patient and had slipped and fallen when I heard him make those terrible inhaling noises. The look in my friends eyes told me he most certainly did not believe me but accepted my excuse anyways... As I steadied myself I looked over to see the patient lying still strapped to the bed... I asked if he was alright and they informed me he had died shortly after I had my little accident. I didn't know what to think... All I had just experienced was too much at the time for me to accept it as a reality... Though the feelings at the back of my head told me otherwise... I left for home shortly after regaining consciousness and was terribly relieved to be back at home in my own manor... I spent the day running errands and trying to distance myself from the events of that morning though the back of my mind could not move past them... I had a very troublesome sleep that night... If I slept at all. Visions of the things, shapes and forms I had seen plagued my dreams and that voice... Filled with an emotion I had never experienced before in my lifetime simply replayed itself over and over in my mind... The last thing it said to me especially. I had no idea what it meant but I had the feeling that it was possibly the key to all this horror... The next couple weeks passed without anything substantial and I began pushing the thoughts of all of it out of my head finally and then one night after a rather indulgent evening out I was found once more in my sleep... I felt the sensation of drowning and through the blackness I could see eyes... staring at me... some angrily and some appearing to be full of sorrow but all were intently looking to me... Then it happened... I looked down to see lights and what appeared to be a city... There were buildings and apparently manmade structures that existed here... As I descended upon it there was a shrill shrieking noise that pierced my senses and flooded my body with pain. ?human... the city of r'lyeh holds him... dead but dreaming... Cthulhu fhtagn? It was then that I arrived upon what I guessed was the city of R'lyeh... I spent an immeasurable amount of time there... Most of it I spent in the darkest shadows hiding from the forms that moved through the alleys and buildings... I had no idea why I was there or what brought me to that place... I just wanted out... Then it happened. I came upon a large open area and in the middle of this area was a circle with strange symbols inside of it... One was a star and also some partially formed triangles... When I stepped upon the circle I was suddenly awake in my bed.. Covered in sweat and trying to catch up to my breathing... And the sky opened and giant tentacles came from it... Something was coming out.. I screamed in horror and fell to the floor and then I saw it... A giant arm first and then the head of it... It was that of a sea monster... An almost human face surrounded by tentacles and emitting the smell of the dead.. It was then that my mind finally shut down... and visions of the apocalypse haunted me... The world is a sea of flames and cloud... Unspeakable horrors befalling all of mankind as it walked among us... I spent much time in that world of death... So much now that I am unaware of life's true reality... And still they come to me... Dead but dreaming?They come to me... As I sit here now and prepare to finish the last of this testimony I cannot help but think back to that patient and hope for my end to come soon... Perhaps I will get in touch with my old friend at the asylum.. I'm sure I would be quite the study... Still it calls.. It finds me where I hide and I can no longer run... Death is waiting and I have many miles to travel...

Submitted by Sexy Gargoyle — Apr 26, 2025