A dream - persistant evil

A nightmare. A really long, really bad one.

There was an evil thing, an essence of badness and ill will that pervaded everything. A vague, undefined presence of extreme malevolence. There was no help to resist it and no defense against it, and it was doing horrible things to people. This formless, persistent evil is a recurring theme in my dreams.

We were all afraid and coming together as a group to feel safer. It was myself, Matt, mom, Chey, grandma, Ed, dad, Glenna, Laine, and several friends and other familiar people. We were all walking single file up a stairway to an upper floor that had rows of seats, like the balcony of a court room. When we got up there, I sat next to grandma and sidled up really close to her. The girl in line behind me sat next to me. We were all squeezed in together on those benches as close as we could to each other for comfort. I put my arm around the girl next to me and held her tightly. I was a little uncomfortable holding this girl as closely as I did, but the general consensus seemed to be that it was alright, because we were all terrified.

It was gray and overcast outside. Empty cars lined the street of a small town business district and everything was still. I came upon one car with an occupant who was frantically trying to start it. He was having no luck, and was plainly terrified. He was a big man of about fifty, wearing a short sleeved business shirt that was tucked in over a substantial mid-section, with a pair of no nonsense black framed glasses perched on a sweaty, jowly face that jiggled as he struggled with the ignition. Then, without warning, he just came apart. His body separated into these little shiny, wet globules of semi-translucent fleshy matter. They all collapsed down into the seat and onto the floorboards, scattering and rolling every which way. The evil had done that to him.

Lots of other people suffered their own individually different and horrible transformations into insensate and purposeless forms of abominable insults to nature. They were crafted prisons of awful putrid chaos and suffering, pure manifestations of the will of pristine evil. Infinite hopelessness is what it felt like, to know that these things had happened to people. Back in the upstairs room we huddled together more closely in terror.

I could see downstairs that someone was vying for our attention. It was a woman with a harp and an accordion. She was a part of the evil, and she was going to play the evil for us on her instruments and she wanted our attention focused on her. People began to chatter nervously and a general panic ensured, but it was a still kind of panic as nobody moved. We all just waited for the evil to start flowing into our ears. I thought to myself, during this portion of existence comprised of palpable horror, what it would be like for someone who was deaf or blind or who otherwise lacked the physical means to sense the evil. I could only imagine that it would be even more horrible to have the evil seeping directly into their minds, skipping the nervous system outright, and just boring right through the skin and muscle and bone, right into the brain and heart. How horrifying that would be.

This segment passed, and a feeling of hope returned. People were out and about and gathering the broken and scattered pieces of cursed flesh, in all their torturous and unholy forms. There was hope that these people could be 'reconstituted', and brought back from their suffering. We piled all of the fleshy globules that we could find of that particular person back onto the front seat of the car, and he reformed in a reverse of the event which had torn him apart. He was whole, except that his flesh had an ashy, gray pallor, and it was missing from his head. The reformed dead man held a wadded up glob of skin and hair, which he pulled down over the bloody musculature of his head and face, and reverted to a look of dead normalcy. We asked if he was ok, and he assured us that he was, but he wasn't. He was dead.

I was in the back seat of that car, and we drove down the streets of that dead town. All of the other animated dead were there too, driving or walking or otherwise going about their business. An exuberant young girl in the front seat was turned around to face me, with her arms resting on the top of the seat back. She was joyfully explaining all of this to me and trying to communicate a sense of how wonderful it all was. "But this is horrible," I said, "that these people are animating their dead bodies from hell," to which the little girl replied, "No, this is the will of god. It's the miracle of resurrection." My mind quailed at this blatant lie, and I could only mutter to myself, no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no

I was back in the house again, and we were all downstairs, waiting for the evil to do whatever it was going to do to us. I watched but was only vaguely aware of something horrible happening to a friend of mine. We all accepted it as inevitable, and I stood with the girl I'd been sitting next to, and we held each other tightly.

At the end of it all, I managed to utter a prayer of desperation:

"Oh you wretched and perverse spirits, your presence has been felt and your power made known. Now I command you, in the name of the eternal Lord who made you and cast you from the heights of heaven, to cease from this disturbance!"

Then, with the intent of driving away the evil, I hauled a huge dry, rotting log over to a bonfire, and several others helped me to toss the heavy thing into the flames.

What happened?

Life got better once before.  Once, when I thought it was over and there wasn't anything more except for the wait, it surprised me and exploded and knocked the end way over the horizon, beyond view.  That was so weird.  And so unexpected.  But what the fuck is happening now?  I guess it's the same thing, or a similar thing, as what was happening before.  Right now, it seems like there isn't anything in the future, except for a slow decline into a continuous painful event, which gets deeper and deeper, until the pain becomes fatal.  I can't kill myself.  I just flat out can't do that.  What would that be like though?  Thinking about it makes my head hurt.  It's almost worse this time, because before, I had no idea that life was going to pick me up and turn me around.  Now that I have the memory of that happening, I can't just live inside of an ignorant despair.  Now I gotta keep thinking, all the time, what if it gets better again?  That's even worse than being completely hopeless.  It's a continuous 'what if what if what if what if', all the time.  It's like staying awake on Christmas Eve, and being so hopeful and anticipating something wonderful, except that there isn't any reason for being hopeful that anything wonderful will ever happen.  How can I sit here and say to myself, 'Ash, remember last time, how it was so hopeless, and you'd accepted it and didn't give a shit, but then life exploded in your face like a nuclear magnolia blossom?  Remember that?  Will that happen again? 
WTF was that all about the first time?  It's like... it's like it sucks.  That's what its like.  What happened?  I must have missed the part where everything went to hell in a handbasket.  I didn't wanna go there.  No wonder I missed it.