Bathe

Last night brought the most disgusting, horrifying dream I've ever had.  I think I've previously mentioned that I killed my fear response when I began practicing lucid dreaming--perhaps I should've felt fear during this one.  In any case, I kept my poise, perhaps absurdly, and that's the only detail that prevents me from labeling this a nightmare.

I normally wouldn't post a dream, but this one was so spectacular that I feel forced to adapt it for Pilgrims Dream.  I think I'll work it around for Agents Grossberger & Troutslop and their weird Orientation.

What follows is the dream, unadulterated.

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I enter a doctor's office that's like a Central Park penthouse.  There are no other patients or staff--just my doctor, a middle aged man in a dark suit.  We're familiar with each other; he'd operated on me before for the same problem that brings me here today.  He takes me into a small operating room.  There isn't any equipment--only a table in the middle of the room.  The walls are white and bare.  The floor is dark wood.  I lay down on an operating table.  I don't undress.

He begins operating on my brain.  I didn't notice, but he's removed the top of my skull.  Suddenly I come to, I realize what's happening, as if I'd been sleepwalking until this moment, and I want him to stop.  I'm under a heavy daze, but I manage to say, Stop.  He comes all the way around and sits on the right side of the table; he pushes over my legs to make room for himself.  He's no longer friendly, and he tries to make me say it's ok to continue.  I don't.  I sense that my consent is crucial to the operation.  He holds a needle before my eyes, filled with a brownish yellow liquid, and he injects it into my neck.  I remember that I'd had this operation before, and it didn't work, so I shouldn't go through it again.  I feel helpless, but I say stop again.  The operation is supposedly meant to treat a dream combination of epilepsy and sinus problems.  I'm too weak to move.  I feel consciousness leaving me, and there is nothing I can do.  An awful sensation floods me--these events are in complete opposition to my will, but I'm powerless to influence them in any way.  The room goes dim.

He relents, and I come to.  I intuit that without my consent, he truly can't continue, and he finally gave up.

I'm led to a room where an assistant is sitting at a desk.  She's prepared a sort of cantaloupe fruit salad/shake that also tastes like an orange creamsicle.  It's part of the operation--after the surgery, I should eat the cantaloupe/creamsicle concoction.  I remember this from the last time I had the operation.  It's even a bit of a treat, a sort of reward, and I remember how tasty and soothing it was.  I don't know why it's necessary for the operation.  In any case, I tell her I don't need it since I didn't have the operation.  She gets a puzzled look, and turns her eyes to the doctor who is standing behind me.

As if he's telling a joke, the doctor says, He vomited entire stomach-fulls of blood.

I remember that's a part of the operation, and I realize my mouth is caked with dry blood.  Apparently the cantaloupe/creamsicle is to help with this.  But I'd thought I'd averted the operation.

I go to a mirror.  My skull is shaved.  I can see it from all angles.  The back of my skull is twice it's normal size.  It looks a bit like Darth Vader's helmet.  From the front, I can see the back of my skull sagging down and out, almost to my shoulders.  I put my hands to the back of my head.  My skull is soft and pliant.  I push it back up, and it stays lifted for a moment.  It's still disgustingly huge.  I don't freak out though--I remind myself that the swelling will go down eventually.

I'm piecing together what must've happened while I was unconscious.  The doctor is a a butcher carrying out insane experiments.  He implanted something in my brain--that's why my skull is so much bigger.  It's some sort of device for mind-control.

I see the operating room, during the surgery.  I'm vomiting blood, and blood is flowing from my skull.  It quickly fills the room.  The doctor takes buckets of blood and splatters it on the walls like a madman. He dips his hands in my blood, which has already filled the room up to his waist, and makes handprints on the walls like a child with fingerpaints.

I see the operating room filled almost to the ceiling with my blood.  The doctor brings in very special clients--they come to bathe in blood.  This is the true purpose of the operation.  He performs it regularly, and I'm the first subject to realize what the doctor has actually done.  The clients come to this doctor as if to a health spa.  Bathing in blood heals them; it gives them power.  They swim through my blood as in a pool.  I'm under several feet of blood, and immobile--somehow I don't need to breathe.  The blood is transparent, so I can see a client swimming above me.

Broken visions:

I'm walking through the office again.  I see janitors scrubbing away at the floors and walls.  I also see detectives searching for evidence--I assume they are acting on my tip.  A detective uses some kind of wand, like a blacklight, and goes over the walls to search for any traces of blood, but the entire office has been thoroughly sanitized.

The doctor is long gone.

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Appended:

I believe this dream forms a pair with a dream that soon followed: Build.