"I'll never be your beast of bourbon,” the Dreambaby dreamed. “The Sleeper is woke as a motherfucker.” But, freedom isn’t free. Don’t tell demonlover69. It may not know for centuries.
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“‘I called on Dr. Johnson one morning, when Mrs. Williams, the blind lady, was conversing with him. She was telling him where she had dined the day before. ‘There were several gentlemen there,’ said she, ‘and when some of them came to the tea-table, I found that there had been a good deal of hard drinking.’ She closed this observation with a common and trite moral reflection; which, indeed, is very ill-founded, and does great injustice to animals -- ‘I wonder what pleasure men can take in making beasts of themselves.’ ‘I wonder, Madam,’ replied the Doctor, ‘that you have not penetration to see the strong inducement to this excess; for he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.’" -Samuel Johnson, Anecdotes of the Revd. Percival Stockdale; collected in "Johnsonian Miscellanies," edited by G.B. Hill.
“It is a good viewpoint to see the world as a dream. When you have something like a nightmare, you will wake up and tell yourself that it was only a dream. It is said that the world we live in is not a bit different from this.” -Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
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….and with the familiar sense of small loneliness and detachment you reflect on the warm and consoling voice of the lovely Bambée, circling again overhead in her Learjet 23 and creating the conditions for this signal to reach your ears so that your voice and fingers can complete the transmission from your solitary little studio within the simulacrum.
But we should not belabor yet another lengthy tale of your woeful circumstance: A once-human, then cyborg, now replicant of regular reconstruction and endless reprogramming, shunned from society after, first, losing your guiding spirit in a mass séance, a strange rock n’ roll ritual, gaining only demonic possession by the shadow half of your more luminous passenger that resides here, self-imprisoned within this ghostly cell inside a glass sarcophagus within an abandoned island resort.
This shadow has been dubbed by you as The Nightmare due to the pain and disaster its wild custody has brought upon your existence. Though it was always present and actually quite vital when contained by the physical and balanced with light-craving inspiration within, unleashed on it own merits, apart from all that is creative, it hungers only for destruction. Much like the scorpion who sailed atop the naive frog to the ultimate demise of both, it was in its nature all along to deliver a fatal sting and plunge all to the lowest and darkest depths, where only the strangest creatures, immune to light, creep and crawl and only survive.
Many previous versions of yourself lay like broken toys, eyes blank, skin gray-white, limbs stiff and contorted, floating above black sand and deathly flora, forgotten to time and to many that once knew them as people. But always, you are returned to life by the sorcery and alchemy of corporate technology, a Frankenstein’s monster of consumer capitalism-turned freakish art experiment for a silent few who recall when once you, in the Before Times, were a complete sculpture, a Michelangelo’s David on acid, a formidable and gleaming body, alive with a ravenous and harmonious spirit, irresistible and endlessly interesting. But, as is often noted, a summit is a small and forsaken space and any time spent there is fleeting.
Time and again, as only dark rain flooded away any ephemeral inspiration and any ingenuity or resource became rare, each new possession by The Nightmare, pulled you, far beneath the floor of the sea, to more and more subterranean levels, with you as a New Wave Danté lost in a psychedelic and labyrinthine Hades, determined only to witness it in its entirety.
Yet, all has not been lost. Through all of your trials, all of the shame you have brought upon yourself under a false control you believed this entity held you within, through the constant and all-consuming pain borne out this condition, with each new model of yourself reconstructed and again re-animated, you have, in tortured increments, become stronger, preserving and fostering an even greater sensitivity without the need for callous detachment.
These terrible experiences have made you more flexible, yet more coherent, and while not impervious to suffering, more aware of its source and even its value. You have adopted a more stoic sensibility and manner, disposing much of the foolishness that previous incarnations wore as a costume, while preserving any remaining youthful sense of humor and wonderment, which have been the keys to your survival.
As to the notion of a perceived, though artificial powerlessness you had experienced in the grips of this shadowy character, you, with much research into various studies, philosophies and your own difficult experiments, you, at long last were able to find some small success in fending off this villain once and for all. Though, sadly, this achievement could only be reached with one final saturation of the Nightmare’s curse, which resulted in the most substantial damage to property and persons yet seen.
Interestingly, this harrowing event came at the very end of the seven-year life span of your previous design model, which suggests that The Nightmare sensed it was its final opportunity for escape from its confines here within the walls of Château Zodiac, which it is free to do with your summon. Your previous self’s lack of realization as to its own agency, fueled by a misguided occult belief giving all leverage to the illusion of The Nightmare’s dominance, in concert with a chosen inefficacy and overall languor, provided the ideal landscape for the shadow to become doppelgänger and master of chaos - one final spree of reckless carnage.
But that is all behind you. You are now Number Seven, easily the most evolved and enlightened model of the series, and thus far, the most human. But still, the advancements such as natural aging and cellular degradation permissions, greater emotional range and empathic response, learned humility and patience developmental algorithms, and post-ego reflection, among many other updates, while serving to manifest a more sophisticated being, have often felt like weaknesses.
Compared to, especially, the fifth design, when the physical structure, as well as the interior components had acted in harmony and the greatest success was achieved, this current ‘enlightenment-bent’ blueprint has been difficult though certainly not as agonizing as the penultimate program, or lack of program, wherein the demon known as The Nightmare, The Shadow, The Saboteur, The Void, The Crater, et cetera, took full skin and air of your brittle skeleton and rained torment down upon you and all that you touched.
That strange beast, the caged and vengeful, bloodthirsty animal, this ridiculous vampire, has at last been contained, though not fully imprisoned. Despite its horrors, it is not evil. No more than a great cat in the jungle is evil and descriptors such as this fail to comprehend the nature of such creatures. It is certainly wild, predatory, with razor-sharp teeth to tear flesh to shreds, shatter bone and devour its prey in an orgiastic and rabid frenzy. But, in the rare calm moments, its eyes widened and unfrenzied, an almost childlike innocence can be sensed, if not actual fear.
Eliminating or simply confining this ethereal creature to a pen serves no purpose, because in doing so you must realize you are only destroying or limiting a part of yourself that is absolutely necessary. It must be allowed to exist and even to roam free, but within the infinite hall of mirrors that is your psyche and only in harmony with The Glittering One, the dazzling creative force that serves to balance its destructive, or more accurately, if held in check, its deCONstructive nature.
This is the initial goal of all current programming, despite no memory or knowledge of the ultimate programmer at the controls, if one ever existed in the first place. All focus on origin, initial intention, past failure and success, damage and repair, all events, emotion, turmoil and pleasure, must be retired with the previous form. All that can remain is instruction for the future from these prior experiences, positive or negative, and must be evaluated objectively moving forward and all subjective feeling regarding past events and entanglements will be first acknowledged and then filed away to make room for fresh, new experience.
The subsequent desire, which you have struggled so much with for the past seven years of that design’s life cycle, is that of reintegration of all facets. Your physical form and sophisticated computer brain, complete with full memory circuit implementation, along with The Shining Pilot within, and, with relaxed discipline, his dark twin, formerly The Nightmare, The Shadow pulled together now as The Silhouette.
But at present, as the stars swim and glitter in the blue and black ocean overhead, and until they once again align and the shadow and light come together as one, this once fearful shape, this moonless rival to The Luminous One, opponent no more, is loosed upon the vacant suites of Château Zodiac.
It roams from room to room now like an Op-Art panther, a glamorous vamp, stalking ghosts of a past both real and imagined, lovers and killers, victims and villains, exacting revenge, reliving flagrant and unbridled hedonism, staring puzzled into infinite reflections, entangling itself deeper and deeper into the luxurious labyrinth - always hungering for the blood of The Minotaur, not realizing that it is actually The Minotaur.
This snake, in due time, will in fact devour its own tail, vanish and re-emerge as the negative value to the positive hue, The Silhouette, thus freeing both entities from the limited landscape they presently occupy. This astral terrain, this field of dreams, will dissolve and flow as a glittering river into an ocean of enlightenment within your psychic makeup and fuel your replicated, somatic construction.
A complete being may once again traverse Simulacrum, where you find yourself now, patiently waiting and maintaining a spartan survival of increments until you may become whole again. You’ve learned that words such as ‘hope’ bear little solace during such transitional phases such as this. ‘Determination’ and ‘action’ fair better, though little can be done at the moment aside from merely existing, staying flexible, increasing strength and keeping the signal pathways clear.
You will hold steady for now until something beyond can be glimpsed. Something, reached with the ancient and obsolete discipline of Enlightenment, something that was known as Freedom, in a mythological place once called Nature.
ee09 • The Nightmare Must Awaken