dream-quest inverted, reflected

The nightmares were out in force last night. One, with an elfin face in which two giant eyes were black bottomless voids, a mouth shaped like an anteater's with a prehensile rasping radula, and a shock of pale spiky hair, sat next to me, gingerly holding my hand in the two hooked claws that jutted from her wrists and gnawed the flesh from my fingers. Another perched at my feet: a diminutive creature of unearthly beauty wearing a corset and blue furs, peeking at me from underneath half-closed eyelids beneath which nuclear fires raged and smiled demurely. Her lips parted; her teeth were thousands of shiny fat sowing needles. A third climbed up onto my chest; all sparkly edges and angles and an impossible multitude of sinuous limbs, grasping me, crushing me to her terrifyingly sharp surfaces while fluting some profoundly Lovecraftian gibberish into my ear. Yet another one loomed by the window: I couldn't make out the details of its face shrouded as it was in the shadows, but the madly swirling patterns of dull grey liquid that I could see hinted at the details I was better off not knowing. There was a sound like the flapping of giant rotting wings outside the window. The music playing on my computer sped up and slowed down, became softer and louder in tune with the brightening and fading auras around each object in the room. A roaring patch of bleeding darkness moved about the floor, throwing writhing pseudopods in all directions, and, as always, far in the distance those giant gods vaster than the universe and yet smaller than my hand moved about the mad landscape and watched me mutely with eyes the size of planets.

I woke up and opened a beer. It was quiet. The song--it was something by the 3rd and Mortal--ended and the creatures faded slowly into shadows. An insistent blue-jay imitating cries of the damned outside and the fizzing of bubbles in the beer-bottle were the only sounds. Then, suddenly, the walls of my room rushed away from me, shrieking like a flock of insane geese and I was suspended in a pattern of delicate trembling light, each strand a set of arcane equations running with fire along their infinite stretch, fluttering, a moth caught at the everpresent heart of this infinite cosmic web, impossibly convoluted and full of meaning. I wondered if the spider would come soon. I could see all the way to the edges of the infinite universe which are its center, where blind idiot gods churn out more mathematical monstrosities, where everything and nothing begins and ends and is and isn't, and for a second I could hear all the music ever written all at once. Everything expanded at the speed of light and disappeared into a void without stars.

I woke up and opened a beer. It was quiet.

I woke up and opened a beer.

I woke up.

I.