Death Dreams

You don't have as much time left as you think you do.

“Goodnight, Wesley. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”

~The Dread Pirate Roberts - from The Princess Bride

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The Dream

Black.

Pinpoints of light and the strands that connect them.

Gossamer-fine, yet sturdy stuff.

It’s a pattern. A grid. But this grid is not flat. It’s cuboid. Cubes within cubes, as if a chessboard mated with a multistory maze while going through hyperspace on the Millennium Falcon. It’s my job to find my way through it.

Into it?

Out of it?

Get to something inside it?

I don’t know. There are rules to the maze, and apparently goals, but no one has given me the rule book before they shoved me out here.

Not like I’ve come here against my will. I wanted to run this course. But every time I ask what I’m supposed to be doing, I’m met with the black and the silence and the grid that stretches on and on and down and in.

I’ve figured out how to open some of the cubes now. Some gateways lead to rooms where I do stuff.

Many lead to death.

Often, simply opening a gate sends me Eeeeeeee! down the black hole, there to be vaporized into nothingness as I bolt up in bed, hyperventilating, sweating, glancing around to reorient.

It doesn’t wake me up every time anymore. I mean, I’ve only been doing this
EVERY.
BLOODY.
NIGHT.

and

EVERY.
CURSED.
NAP.

for the past six months.

Sometimes I even dream this stupid maze multiple times a night. Lately, I trip the trigger or open the gate or do the wrong thing or push the wrong button or say the wrong word, only to have the bottom drop out—

Dammit! My arms cross as I fall. I glare through slitted eyes into the Black. Seriously? Again? What in twelve hells did I do wrong this time?

Silence.

They just reboot the game. Start me at the beginning. Let me flounder and fuck it up, over and over and over and once more and again and one more time for good measure.

Oh.

And one more time for good measure.

It feels like Kobyashi Maru.¹

Maybe I’ve been here enough times or gotten far enough that I’ve earned some sort of cookie or shiny upgrade object. (I’m not a gamer so I only know these things by premise from watching my gamer friends and gamer exes. This grid-maze is not one of my primary dreamscapes. It’s just the latest one that has decided to plague me.)

(Go figure. We’re at the height of a pandemic.)

(Oops. Did I not tell you the date? August 22, 2020.)

Not like that matters in here. And yet, this place is apparently all about Time because tonight, for the first time ever, my dying maze-self is awarded a clue. It isn’t delivered in words, exactly. There is no face, but yet I sense innumerable eyes on me, watching and assessing. They speak to me in a myriad voices that have no mouths, and they tell me something that bolts me straight up out of bed without a hint of the usual post-nightmare haze.

You don’t have as much time as you think you do. So if there’s anything you really need to accomplish,
to say,
to finish,
you need to get on that.
NOW.

The Result

In total, these daily death dreams hammered me for a full nine months, always bearing the same warnings, so I started making lists:

• Anything left unsaid to anybody. (Even as a kid, I’ve always lived under the awareness that any moment could be the last chance I had to tell someone something important, so I’ve never done a lot of hesitating. Maybe because I almost drowned when I was four. I dunno. Almost dying in a tornado when I was twenty-four doubled down on it. Then my big car wreck in 2000 exploded it to mass proportion, so there were none of these.)

• Any burning questions that needed answering. (There was only one.)

• THE places I needed to visit before I died. (At the height of a pandemic, my aversion to getting on a plane or dealing with Covid and humanity’s reactions to it squished this once-important bucket into: “Meh, I’ve checked off my original list-toppers, and I’ve got travel documentaries in the comfort of my jammies with no jet lag, plague, or seizures. I’m good.”)

• THE things I’ve never tried or wanted to learn, and would be really bummed if I never got to. (I’ve never really hesitated about that either so there were also none of those. Curiosity? Always. Regrets? No.)

That left the things I most deeply burned to create. All I could think of was that speech by Les Brown as inspired by Myles Monroe about the graveyard being the richest place on earth:²

Imagine if you will, being on your deathbed, and standing around your bed the ghosts of the dreams, the ideas, the abilities, the talents given to you by Life - for whatever reason, you never pursued those dreams. You never acted on those ideas. You never used those gifts, and there they are standing around your bed, looking at you with large, angry eyes.

“We came to YOU. And only you could have given us life, and now we must die with you forever.”

And the question is: If you die today, what dreams, what ideas, what leadership, what books, what gifts will die with you?

I had too many of those ghosts lurking around my bed when I awoke on those sweat-soaked nights. My fictional characters, my dances, my unused costumes, my younger selves whose stories clogged my computer and had never been read, and yes, they were all hurling accusatory, expectant looks at me, so I made another list:

• THE most crucial fiction scenes that I at least needed to make notes about, even if I wasn’t ready to pump out the chapters yet. Once I opened the floodgates, the snippets started machine-gunning me too fast and too hard to detail full chapters anyway.

• THE most crucial experiences and lessons of my life that I needed to get out of my head and onto the page.

• THE dances that would break my heart if I never got to create them.³

I wasn’t ready to do a lot of those dances. My torn meniscus wasn’t remotely close to being healed. I was still battling the hip injury that had put so much stress on my knee. My spine and especially my neck were still a mess. I still hadn’t regained the ability to make choreographies, much less memorize them after I’d re-lost those abilities during the Year of Seizures.

I started filming anyway.

I didn’t worry about editing. When lockdown hit, I was thrust into a frenzy of creating an online dance course to make up for what my students had already paid for, and to keep any shred of an income. That failed experiment had taught me that video editing is something I can only do in small spurts. The ridiculous hours it chews up, plus all that micro-mousing, takes too much of a toll on my body compared to the minuscule end product.

I didn’t care.

I just filmed and filmed and put on costumes and filmed, knowing that the dances themselves are the one thing that only I can create. Editing? Bah. If I croak tomorrow, somebody else could do something with the footage. Editing is also something I can do in my oldy-moldy dotage.

I’m already fifty. Considering the amount of injuries my body already has, I only have a limited time to do all this stuff.

So I shot footage in the aftermath of a freak blizzard in spring. I pranced in the flowers, grooved in my faerie lights, and played on my deck. I pulled out all my old SCA costumes that have never been captured on video, as well as new ones I had never gotten to use before my re-injuries. I recorded a boatload of dances in front of the fall foliage in my rat-ass parking lot. I shot even more in front of my rinky-dink wafty backdrops on my rat-ass, stained carpet that I covered up with an area rug that will never stay put.

We’ll see how far I get with my equally rinky-dink green screen backdrop and foam puzzle-mat floor as I create the magnum project that has taken over my sewing studio, the costume room, a costume rack in the bedroom, a dresser, and one of my altars: the dances inspired by my favorite fantasy series.⁴

Since we’re mostly a one-woman show around here with almost zero budget, and I am not a videographer, all of this stuff is rinky-dink, and I just cannot be bothered to give a rat’s ass about production value. I can’t wait around anymore to find the right videographer, the right location, the right camera, the right moment.

Fuck it.

That was actually my mantra on New Year’s Eve 2020. Then “coincidentally” (hahahah), just to confirm that I was on the right path—or…that I was hacking and slashing out my own path in the right direction—Synchronicity tossed a movie into my lap. It was called The F##k It List.⁵ As such, my Roaring 20s mantra blew up to mass proportion as I said, “Fuck it!” to thing after thing that used to gnaw me to shreds.

At the same time, something similar happened to my writing, as inspired by those chronic death dreams.

You need to stop waiting:
to find a publisher,
to figure out who your audience is,
to find them where they lurk,
to get off disability and
to get an income back so you can afford
to get this stuff professionally edited,
to feel like it’s “ready,”
to feel like it’s “done.”

FUCK IT.

If you ever want anybody to read your words
you need to shove it out into the world
AS IS.

RIGHT NOW.

So I did.

I puked out episodes about my life experiences and what they’d taught me all across my old blog⁶

I started uploading my steamy, kinky Persephone & Haides tales serialized on the Speakeasy.⁷

I started sharing all my art & nature photo shoots and I made videos about the things that inspire me the most.⁸

I blathered about my creative process, my obsessions, my passions, my struggles, my triumphs, my abysmal failures, and I got banned from Instagram the second I started sharing the full gamut instead of just pretty-pretty dance and nature. No surprise there. I’d been taking flack and watching people flee overboard since my first posts about Dain Bramage, disability, and injury recovery, so I could only imagine what would happen when I hit Damsel To Dangerous.

When I started posting those tales out where people could…gulp…you know…actually read them, other nightmares started pockmarking the grid-maze dreams. Being hunted. Losing all my friends. Losing irreplaceable belongings. Costumes breaking. Walking out on shows. Being surrounded and attacked. Home invasion.

But then my cousin visited my dreamsphere. Three years older than me, she was the sweetest, the kindest, the gentlest of my generation. She was everybody’s favorite.

She died from cancer when she was only forty-seven.

In that dream, she told me that the lymph node we’ve been watching in my right breast since 2010, and that had suddenly started giving me sharp pains all fall, would be fine—that I would be fine as long as I kept doing what I was doing. To get it all out, no matter what my detractors said, no matter how little encouragement I received, no matter what.

So I kept writing. I kept snapping photos. I kept filming. Sometimes I couldn’t keep up with posting because I was too busy creating. Sometimes it came out in a mass regurgitation of back-to-back serial posts. Other times the pipes got backed up because something required too much research. Then randomly, I would be steady-eddy for months. I was the opposite of the consistent content creator who makes algorithms and consumers happy.

Fuck it.

I kept writing. I kept snapping photos. I kept filming. And I kept posting, even though it was nothing close to perfect and not remotely professional.

Know what happened?

I stopped having those death dreams. The other night terrors dried up. And that pain in my right breast?

GONE.

© 2023 Hartebeast

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RELATED POSTS:

Another of those 2020 night terrors - I spill my sensitive secrets online so the Nazi officer of my psyche moves to take me out

Yeah, you got it, folks. It’s me again with a little A-TTI-TUDE. I watch this movie at least once a year. Why it matters today:

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1. Kobyashi Maru

2. The whole “graveyard is the richest place in the world” speech by Les Brown

3. My YouTube channel where you can find all those dances and the ones I gradually get to editing and uploading.

My post-shoot talk about this experiment of creating dances for video instead of stage in the wake of Traumatic Brain Injury.

The work-in-progress photo gallery of all the other dances I’ve shot but alas, I don’t have a clone specifically for video editing. YET.

4. The Kingkiller Cosplay Dances - my ginormous dance project I’m currently working on, inspired by my favorite fantasy series

The photo gallery of my costume trials and all the work--in-progress shenanigans.

5. The F##k It List - a gem from the movie. Spoilers ahoy!

6. The Section of this publication where I’ll be migrating all those old memoir tales.

7. I’m also migrating the NSFW Persephone & Haides tales to Substack:

8. I’m migrating the art & nature, creative process stuff over here too: