Pink Orbs and the Cloudy Coaster
A Recurring Fever Dream
I’d like to thank my friend, Ben Ulansey, for inspiring and encouraging me to make a post here. I find it appropriate to share a story about one of his favorite topics: dreams.
I have this recurring dream. I started having this dream when I was very young and I have it frequently in my adult life. I have shared this dream with few, but it is a constant topic of thought.
There are a few peculiar aspects of this dream worth noting. First, as I mentioned, it is a recurring dream. Common examples of recurring dreams include: teeth falling out, public nudity, chasing or being chased, and natural disasters. Some point to unresolved conflicts, accompanied by symptoms of anxiety and depression while others posit physiological phenomena as possible causes of these repeating dreams.
“A recurring dream is a dream which is experienced repeatedly over a long period. They can be pleasant or nightmarish and unique to the person and their experiences.”
Another bizarre fact of this dream is that it’s a fever dream. Although there are no common fever dreams, they do tend to include specific aspects such as spatial distortion, threats of danger, and the experience of illness. As for what causes fever dreams — there is evidence to support that an overheated brain interrupts cognitive processing. Additionally, disruption in REM sleep is speculated to be what leads to these unusual dreams.
“Fever dreams are one of the possible symptoms of fever. In multiple studies, sleepers describe their fever dreams as bizarre, negative, and emotionally intense”
The third abnormal and most interesting feature of this dream is that it is a two-part dream. They are two separate dreamscapes that I ping pong back-and-forth from. They always happen together — never one without the other. There is no start and no end, just a feedback loop of disorienting events.
During one half of this two-fold dream I find myself on a boardwalk floating among the rolling clouds. Many things are absent from this familiar setting. There are no sandy beaches or salty sea winds. I cannot hear the cacophony of crashing waves, jubilant screams, and obnoxious seagulls. This boardwalk has no carnival games, ice cream stands, or Gravitrons, but it does have one amusement ride. An uncompleted rollercoaster, that has come to haunt me from an abandoned save of Roller Coaster Tycoon, pokes ominously through the clouds. I walk across the boardwalk towards the entrance to the ride line. I step up a short stack of stairs and smack into an invisible wall.
“Did I just walk into a mirror in the fun house?”
The answer becomes clear to me when the ride starts. I notice something is changing about my surroundings. My vision becomes warped as I notice myself stepping up the same set of stairs. It seems as though the very fabric of space-time is being pulled and stretched. At this moment I notice others around me stretching like rubber bands. This rollercoaster is unlike anything I have experienced at Six Flags. The patrons of the park tend to be friends and family who are trying to tell me something important. The words come out reversed and jumbled like I’m speaking to Laura Palmer in the Black Lodge. Sometimes the stretching subsides and the message becomes more coherent. There’s something wrong and I am being trusted to fix it.
“What’s happening?”
I begin to panic.
“What am I suppose to do?”
The rollercoaster starts again. Pulling, stretching — this time is harsher than before. The rollercoaster stops and starts again — growing in intensity each run. Each cycle feels like the first. I temporarily reminisce on memories of running through empty lines like clockwork. Meanwhile, my distant cousin feeds me unintelligible ramblings of calamitous events.
The ride begins gyrating out of control until the chaos nears a boiling point. The elasticity of this dreamscape is being tested as it transforms into an abstract painting of confusion, fear, and absurdity.
“What’s causing this?”
I grow weary and wonder how much longer I can hold on.
“How do I stop this?”
The ride escalates with severity as I expand in accordance with everything around me. Holding on for my dream life, helplessly enduring the ride — I never see the park map torn to bits.
I wake up in a daze.
“Did my fever break?”
At this moment, I am met with the fourth odd detail of this experience. My skin turns to Styrofoam and my bones to cement. I want to believe time passes at the normal pace, but it feels like I’m sitting on the bottom of the ocean. My head and heart pound with the sound of soldiers marching in the distance. Sweat streaks down my face as I dissociate. I convince myself it’s fever symptoms or side effects from the antihistamines as I slowly drift back to sleep.
I verse jump into a new setting. This dream takes place in an ill-lit, foggy space with pink hues shining throughout. Like the inside of a vacuum, but made of flesh. I flit around and find myself suspended — floating about this lonely world. Confused and afraid, I scream into the abyss. I am welcomed by planetary bodies, varying in size. They hover towards me in a sinister fashion — slowly without a sound.
“Did I just summon a Beholder and it’s minions?”
If it is, this one has no eyes and a dim light radiates from within its own pink fleshy form. Whatever it is, I reduce it to a blobby orb of energy and matter. The visual aspects of these characters are heavily outweighed by the auditory. In response to my feral shriek, one of the blobby orbs let out a shattering howl that reverberates off of the vacuum walls. Followed by the noise is a shockwave that encompasses the orb’s formidable power. As a result, the orb swells a size larger. Shook by the experience, I enter a state of paralysis. It is now apparent to me that the last dream was only a side-mission to this boss battle.
“Was this the danger I was being warned of?”
Before I can ponder the question, another orb lets out a thunderous cry that rivals the first. This blobby orb subsequently disperses a ripple of force and inflates larger than the first orb. Then, the favor is returned by the first orb — sometimes even a third or fourth blobby orb chimes in. The competition roars on until this womb-like echo chamber is crammed with a choir of unpalatable spheres of belligerence and pandemonium. I imagine a board room full of overwrought world leaders, all on the verge of having a tantrum — someone’s threatening to slap the big red button.
Similar to the boardwalk, this becomes a perpetual cycle of lunacy. The vacuum is becoming too small of a container for the orbs of energy. I am broken by the series of horrifying events. The orbs become even more tumultuous and amass to astronomical sizes. The dreamscape is nearly bursting at the seams. Just as I am about to reach the culmination, while bracing for impact with the event horizon — I wake up in a daze.
I can present psychological and physiological side effects of fevers, over the counter medication, and interrupted REM sleep as possible explanations for how these dreams manifested, yet I am still left wondering about the meanings of them. These dreams are evidently grotesque, and I have spent countless hours trying to understand them. I can’t help but to chalk them up as a reaction to living on this bizarre, Pale Blue Dot that continues to get more and more strange by the minute. I was born at the end of the last century and started having these dreams at the beginning of this one. In an odd way, I attach them to the albums released by Radiohead at that time. Products forged from the ubiquitous entropy of this new age.
I have formed untold interpretations of this recurring fever dream, but they build nothing more than a fountain of wonder. The type of mesmerizing wonder that one experiences during stellar events involving celestial bodies or deep meditative stints within a subconscious locale. Simply, an obscure interaction with the pervasive corporeal and incorporeal properties of reality. It certainly assembles an insatiable wonder-machine. Perhaps it is this cycle of wonder that makes even terrifyingly comfortless dreams like these so tantalizing and whimsical.
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