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A Pawn of Fear

Name: Michael Feir
E-mail address: michaelfeir@compuserve.com
Date: 17 Oct 2000
Time: 12:52:08
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Preface:

It is widely believed that we spend around a third of our lives sleeping. While asleep, our minds are often occupied by dreams. These are far from being a completely understood phenomenon despite efforts spanning centuries. Free from constant sensory bombardment and control by the conscious mind, our subconscious mind is left free to play and explore on its own. What it finds on these solitary journeys is what our dreams are made of. Unfortunately for our easy slumber, the experiences our subconscious minds conjure up are not always pleasant. Our darkest aspects can be revealed all too easily.

As a blind person, I have often been asked what the dreams of blind people are like. My first task as a responsible representative of blind people is to point out that I can't speak for all of them, or indeed any of them other than myself. The myth that blind people perceive things in the same way as each other seems to be as prevalent as ever. In my experience, all people perceive things differently from each other. Given this, the best way I know how to answer this question is to describe my own dreams. I frequently have dreams that I can remember. Over the years, most of the bad ones have been left behind.

While attending a creative writing class at university, I was asked once again what blind people's dreams are like. On the spot, I decided to write about the only nightmare which still plagues me from time to time. There was no particular malice in this decision. I got along well with everyone in that class, and regard it as the best experience I had in university. I just felt that it had been entirely too long since I'd done anything the least bit dastardly. I was rewarded for my wickedness. Ever since I took the time to write what you're about to read, the nightmare has lost a good deal of its power to terrify me. Despite this, I still find it somewhat unsettling. Be warned that it is of a very dark and morbid nature. I wouldn't recommend it at all for youngsters.

The path up to the north building is devoid of travellers. I walk along through a kind of windy mist which billows around me. There is no sunshine, even though my watch says it's around three in the afternoon. No birds are around. All that can be heard is the wind blowing through the trees, and a haunting but fortifying music, like the stuff at the start of Silence of the Lambs. the main feature of it is a massive clock's bell chiming on every fourth beat. I arrive at the door, and it screams like a lady as I open it. A clap of thunder ends the music as I go through the door. Walking down the halls of the north building, I can't help but notice how empty they are. I know that everyone has an excellent excuse for not being around. They're all dead for some reason. I've got to see the invisible professor. Never mind that I'm totally blind, and he's totally invisible. I know I'll be able to see him anyhow. This strikes me as frighteningly absurd for some reason.

The walls suddenly seem sinister, and the doorways in them are mouths ready to swallow me whole. Which is the right door? I stop at one and feel the raised letters on the upper portion of the door. Shouldn't they be numbers? Maybe I don't want to read this. I try to pull my hand away, but it's far too late. My hand moves across the letters, which spell out: "Sadistics: Professor Bloodmoney presiding." I don't want to go in, but I'm curious at the same time. I open the door and step into the room.

"Now then, class, this is Mr. Hobbes. His parents wanted him to be a doctor, and couldn't care less about his psychotic tendencies. He was trapped into going here, you see?" As the professor speaks, Hobbes comes into focus. The first impression I get is one of absolute stress, of wanting to do something else! I had to study these books! There was just no escape for Hobbes, or me as him. I am Hobbes, but I'm also still me at the same time. Parents are nagging at me constantly. I know they're not mine, but that's entirely too irrelevant. I feel the sickening stress building up. The monumental force of parental expectation rips me away from my nature. Something has to give, and it does. "Hobbes eventually went mad. He killed his parents with the scalpel they bought him for his seventeenth birthday." I am Hobbes as he slices viciously at his parents. I'm the mother, absolutely terrified as her life bleeds out of her under her son's all too skilful hand. I'm the enraged father, chest torn to shreds, clinging to life with a sinking desperation. The master bedroom is full of bloody trails. They flow under the doorway and out along the hall floor.

Suddenly, I'm a little kid in another room. I hear a scream, and know something's terribly wrong. I know more than the kid does, but he suspects everything as he gets up and creeps slowly down the hall. It's too dark! Which way to turn? I feel the kid's sense of fear and confusion, and part of me hopes that he'll go the wrong way. Part of me wants to scream: "Don't look! Run for your life!" I know for a fact that he's about to die, and there's nothing I can do but go along for the ride.

"Follow the red bloody trail! Follow the red bloody trail! Follow it right to the end of two lives, and learn every gory detail!" The words fill my hearing, sung hauntingly off-key by a church choir to that tune from the Wizard of Oz. And of course, he does. A sign on the door reads: "Innocence has a price!" It's written in Braille characters formed from severed finger-tips. I don't have to feel it. The kid is too stupid to understand it, but I know what it says anyhow. Stepping into the room, the kid and I grasp it all in a shocking instant. Neatly dissected body parts are scattered at random all over the floor. Hobbes stands in the middle of the room, licking his lips in a disturbingly casual fashion. I feel the kid's mind freeze in horror. The little wisdom he has collected in his six years of life is blasted out of him by dread. Unfortunately, mine is still all too intact. I know too much! The kid stands there in absolute shock. Bits of questions barely begin to frame themselves in his stricken mind. His big brother turns to him, bloody scalpel behind his back.

"Hey, Jake! I got something to show you. Wanna see?" Why did Hobbes have to tell me the kid's name? It's bad enough that a little kid has to die! I didn't want to know his name! I don't want to know about his life at all! Of course, a biography of innocent little Jake appears in my hands. I'm forced to read it, despite its uniform dullness. Jake never got in any trouble at school. He was always nice to everyone, always sharing, and always caring. I resent him for leading such a boring life. He deserves to die for making me read that! The thought horrifies me with its intensity and lack of flippancy. My mind is unforgiving on the whole, but concedes that at least it was only one small volume in Braille.

I feel Hobbes's hatred for Jake mounting to an unbelievable level. He gets away with everything, but doesn't even know how lucky he is! Well, not any more! Innocently, just to get his attention off of his dead parents, Jake looks at the bloody scalpel as it quickly penetrates his eyeball and twists inside his skull. I feel Jake's sudden pain, and then nothingness as his intellect is cut and pulled to pieces by the scalpel. But how did Hobbes himself die? Hobbes has been little more than a concept until this point, but suddenly, he becomes physically present. I feel him jump from a bridge, and land in a river. The water is deathly cold. His many layers of clothing weigh him down, and pull him under very quickly. I feel the water filling my lungs, and the life slowly draining away, unwanted. My perspective now shifts back to the class, and I suddenly realise that all of the students are accidental or intentional suicides. All of them have their own horrific and twisted tales to tell, and I know their stories. The sudden feeling of being surrounded by a veritable ocean of death dissolves into individual stories like a chunk of ice falling to pieces. The first-year student who thought a drink was the perfect cure for stress comes into my awareness, his future nicely preserved inside a brain pickled in alcohol. Sitting next to him is a physics student. He was thinking too hard about the laws of motion as he crossed the busy street where a truck slammed into him. The words: "For every anguish, there is an equal and opposite reanguish!" appear in blood on the black-board. I sense the fatal moment happening. The truck collides with him, and I feel his ribs cave in and gouge his heart to pieces. The corpse lands on a sidewalk, and an old man standing nearby says: "These young whipper-snappers! They sure don't build 'em like they use to." The scene peels away from my reality like a layer of dust wiped from a window. I'm back in the room again, ready for more tragedy. I get plenty of it before I am able to continue on my way. I ponder how inconsiderate the dead are being, forcing me to re-live their tragedies. It's as if I don't have an invisible professor to see despite the impossibility of my doing so.

I arrive at the right room. I don't know how I can be certain of this, as there is no raised print on the door. I enter, and there sits the invisible professor, in all his non-splendour. I can see him clearly. This is a fact. I know it is because it's written in a book lying open on the professor's desk. Despite this, I only know two things about the appearance of the learned man before me. First, he is sitting hunched over his desk. Second, he wears his hair in two triangles, like vertical wings sticking up from the top of the back of his head. On his desk is an odd machine whose myriad buttons are scattered haphazardly over its surface. There is a strange old clock on the wall. Its face has words like hunger, pain, thirst, terror, and death, written in place of numbers. The hands are skeletal. The clock says it's now hunger past suffering.

Despite his lack of physical charm, the professor is not alone. A couple in the corner are casually copulating. This strikes me as extremely indecent, but I decide to be polite and ignore it. I begin to discuss my problem with the professor, when my attention is caught by a sudden clink on the floor near my feet. A student who got an F from the invisible professor is busily building a pipe-bomb, and has absent-mindedly flung his screwdriver my way. Out of courtesy, I pick it up and fling it back at him. I aim for his hand, throwing it handle first, but it turns around and slides into his left ear with incredible force. It goes into his head all the way to the handle. "Thanks, man," he says warmly as he pulls it out of the side of his head. I shrug and turn back to the invisible professor, but can still hear the blood and cerebral fluid drip from his ruptured eardrum.

The professor turns on a machine to demonstrate something to me, but it starts to act strangely. "Oh dear!" The professor exclaims as I feel the Braille display he has attached for my benefit. "City traffic lights are now malfunctioning. Casualty count commencing." Chaos reigns on a gridwork of streets which suddenly surround me. All manner of vehicles start smashing into each other. Metal crunches, bodies are hurled through broken wind-shields, and people are carved to ribbons in their seats by flying glass. I feel their injuries occurring as if they were happening to me, although I know they aren't. I'm absolutely helpless to do anything to stop it. "Dread alert! Dread alert!" It intones. No shit, Hemlock! I think dryly, but this switch of my favourite detective's first name with that famously deadly poison jolts me out of my paralysis. Inspiration hits me! "What was that for?" I yell as blood drips down my stricken face. I receive only a mocking disembodied laugh for an answer. I reach over and press a button on the professor's machine. A spark ignites the collected puddles of gas on the streets, and all is washed away in a sheet of flame. This includes several thousand people who would have survived otherwise. As I shamefully withdraw my hand, Kevin's voice from those old cookie commercials says his trademark: "Heh-heh! Oops!"

I quickly reach over and hit another button. "Showers now spraying sulphuric acid." The display reads. Oh damn! I didn't want that to happen! I am paralysed, and must listen to the screams of dying family members. Head and Shoulders, step aside! The cruel pun springs unbidden to mind in the voice of a commercial announcer. The whole trouble is that they can't move aside, and are the first body parts to be melted by the deadly spray. The clock centres itself into the foreground again to tell me that it's now a quarrel of hopelessness.

While all this is happening, the couple in the corner start to argue. It seems the man had AIDS, and the woman is understandably pissed off at having just forfeited most of her life. She wants to kill him, even though the Red Cross was responsible for his acquiring the disease. I feel her rage increasing, even as her essence drains away due to the accelerated effects of the virus. Her hatred becomes a propulsive force of flames beneath her, catapulting her upwards toward the ceiling of the class. She carries an impossibly large safe in her arms, ready to hurl it down at him as if dropping it wouldn't give it nearly enough momentum. I know it contains her future, now locked beyond all reach. The hundred or so combination locks on the front of the safe tell me that she has no hope left. All she has is her fury. The man stands under his former lover, still figuring through some crazed sense of hope that he can prove his innocence to himself and to her. Part of me analyses the case as if I were a court judge. The man is only partially innocent. He didn't deserve to have AIDS, but really ought to have told the woman before having sex with her. Because he was desperate for love, he fails to notice his error, and pleads insanity due to love deprivation and an agency beyond his control. She's long past the listening stage, although I'm left wondering why she's bothering to lug that safe up there when the other guy's almost finished with his bomb anyhow. The plutonium in it really ought to be enough to kill us all.

A desk stands near the sobbing victim of chance. If he'd just go under it, it would protect him from the safe. It's made of solid diamond, and isn't that the hardest known substance in the universe or something? I try to advise him of the urgency of his situation, but he is entirely too caught up in his defence. He pulls a pistol from his side, and starts firing madly at her. The safe deflects the bullets, which have labels on them stating the diseases and cancers which compose them. That's a terrible idea! Even one of those could kill her, and she'd then drop the safe on him. I'm just about to tell him this, when he gets her. The safe falls down out of the smouldering cloud of ashes the woman has turned into. Incredibly, it falls extremely slowly. As it does, the woman's final witch-like shriek fades away. Everything seems to freeze in place, except for the falling safe, of course. The hands of the clock spin around until they both point at death.

While they are moving to their dreaded destination, the student finishes his bomb. He puts it into the warhead of a guided missile which he casually withdraws from his coat pocket. By the time he closes it up, it has grown from the size of a pop can into a mammoth engine of destruction. "Don't you think that's a bit of a drastic measure?" I ask in a highly moralistic tone. Things seem to be going so completely out of control, that it behoves me to say something in order to salvage the situation. "This is a populated area you know. Innocent people could die!" I had seen far too much of that already.

"Innocent people? Populated area?" The student's questions, delivered in an excellent John F. Kennedy voice, drip with sarcasm. "Do you see anyone else around here, wise-ass?"

A sense of utter shame permeates me, and I'm forced to sheepishly admit that I saw no one. After all, I am blind, and the professor is invisible. The lover is still there, but a curtain quickly appears to block my non-existent view of him. As if to emphasise this, my cane suddenly appears in my hand, grown as tall as the room itself. The safe strikes it on its way down, and it falls from my hand towards the prone lover. It catches him full on the head, and he falls unconscious to the ground right under the descending safe. The room trembles. Was he that fat before? Suddenly, the lover is as heavy as your average refrigerator around Christmas time. There's no way I can move him out of harm's way now.

"Hi, professor." The student says with an evil laugh that the professor seems not to notice. "I've finally got my work done."

"And so you see that the final solution is really quite simple in its essentials." The professor wraps up his explanation to me in a voice which sounds like W. C. Fields. Thoughts of the gas chambers of World War II fill my mind. The room seems filled with the hiss of gas and the choked tortured screams of Hitler's victims. He turns towards the other student as I thank him and turn towards the door. Why can't I leave? My feet don't move at all.

"So, you've managed to finish something, have you? Well, bring it here, my boy. Bring it here. I've never quite given up on you, since it's never too late to burn for your mistakes." Hey! That didn't sound right!

The sense of pure chaos and doom is overpowering, but something makes me turn away from the door. I can't get out of this. The missile fires and homes in on the invisible professor. I naturally conclude that it must be a heat-seeker. The safe comes down squarely on the spread-eagled form of the comatose lover, flattening him thinner than paper. I casually inform the professor of his rapidly approaching doom. I advise him to duck, but a pair of hearing aids suddenly appear about where his ears ought to be.

"Fuck?", He asks rhetorically. "I'm a bit too old for that kind of fun, my boy. Besides, you saw what just happened to the other guy who tried that. You see, it falls on the rest of us to learn from the mistakes of others, and burn for our own. That's just the way the sanity crumbles." This line of reasoning strikes me as incredibly wise, and I can only nod my head in utter speechlessness. The missile streaks past my ear, and I reach for it out of pure impulse. It smartly avoids my grasp. The clock bell chimes again. A disembodied scream which belongs to no one in particular and everyone at once fills the room. At last, the missile reaches its destination. The blast catapults me back into consciousness.

Epilogue:

As I stated earlier, the act of writing down what happens in this nightmare of mine has somewhat lessened its power over me. I don't believe I'll ever fully understand what factors in my life contributed to it, or what all of the dream's elements mean. I haven't been afraid of my own death for a long time now. I certainly don't look forward to it, but take it for granted that I'll experience death at some point. Historically speaking, that seems a pretty safe if dower assumption. However, accidentally causing others to die is a thought that does trouble me. The professor's chaotic and sinister machine symbolises this fear perfectly. In trying to do good, I ended up causing evil through no fault of my own. The episode with the seemingly rocket-propelled screwdriver is another element which seems to spring from this fear.

I've always liked things not to be too orderly and in control. A little chaos seems to bring out the best in me. However, I've always been uneasy with the thought of having absolutely no control over situations. If there's any actual theme running through my nightmare, it is this lack of control. Even when I acted, nothing I did in the dream had the result I intended. I was always pushed along to the next horrific experience. Any instances when I briefly had the feeling that I could effect some good only ended up underscoring the sense of complete chaos.

Those who have known me for any length of time might well derive a certain amount of satisfaction to see my cherished ability to twist words around come back to haunt me. Words have been the building blocks of my identity. They have brought me understanding and have made me understood by others. During my school days, I often found that words were the only offensive and defensive weapons that I could use with any degree of competence. Like most weapons, they can all too easily be turned against their wielders. My nightmare is liberally sprinkled with language gone wrong. It is my master, backing me into corners and rendering me helpless.

There are all kinds of theories about dreams and what functions they serve. It is generally agreed that they serve a vital function. Some say that dreams portend things. Others think that dreams are the mind's way of sorting out what we experience. Being a creative person, dreams are certainly essential to me. They have provided me with many useful ideas and insights. I certainly agree that they help to restore creativity. Further, I think that even nightmares may serve a useful purpose. They warn us of things, and remind us that we are never absolutely safe. If nothing else, they provide our pleasant dreams with a foil which lets us appreciate a good night's sleep all the more. On that note, I'll wish all my readers a good night.

Copyright © 2000 Michael Feir. All rights reserved.

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