The following is a dream that recurred several times throughout 2013. I have many records of it, so I can piece the forgotten parts together. Lain is quite out of character in this dream, but I feel the need to commit it to words.

I was walking through a street in Japan with some friends. I don’t remember anything about the friends, apart from that I felt nervous with them. We came to the brow of a hill, and people started to disappear. I looked around, and the dream cut away to the inside of a little suburban house. It was filled with acrid smoke, like plastic or rubber burning.

In the house, people with little pink hollows where they should have had eyes roamed the corridors, stumbling, flailing. Lights flashed. I walked through a sort of rubber corridor and met a beautiful girl.

The girl was in her early teens. She wore nothing but a white nightdress, and the cross-shaped hair clip in her curious length of hair that escaped her hacky, DIY haircut. I knew immediately that the girl had been carrying out experimentation on those unfortunate enough to wander into the woods (I have forgotten how I knew in the dream, sorry). Nonetheless, she was beautiful.

The girl confided in me. She told me that she was working to build herself a father. She had turned away from the world before, but she always watched from the bridge over the underpass by the school, watching all the people who don’t know her name.

I felt calm. Wonderfully, suffocatingly calm. The girl laid me down on a cold metal bed and asked me to remove my clothes. She explained to me the human need for permeation, saturation, penetration. She then drew a neat line from the top of my forehead to my clitoris with a knife. It didn’t hurt; my only thought was that I would be in trouble with my mother if a scar carried across to the real world. I was aware that I was dreaming, but not quite aware that what was happening was not quite real.

The girl opened me up and slipped inside. I lay, happy in the thought that I was filled with her, that my blood and organs and pallid brain were keeping her warm and safe. I knew now that it was certainly a dream, and I thought back to my days of paranoid delusions, when I would be caught by mother babbling about the CIA in my sleep. I worried that perhaps I was making sounds in my sleep. But the dream didn’t end.

The girl spoke to me, resting her brain against mine with a tingling warmth. I can’t remember words, but they were like sweet nepenthe to me. The girl had made so many people suffer what looked like unimaginable pain, but she made me l special. Perhaps she had given them what they truly needed, too, and it simply looked painful.

I woke up, but rolled over, fell back to sleep, and immediately re-entered the dream. We stood up walked around the room, the girl all the while speaking to me. I woke for the last time, got up, dressed, and went to school.