But there are more pressing things.

This cold or whatever it is will not go away. I've had it for two weeks. I just cough out dead white blood cells regularly. But there are odd things happening to my mind.

Lately I have been more open than usual. Not with people, ideas, anything conventional. My dreams are coming back, like they used to, the shackled chains and locks cracking red with rust under some force. I've already talked about one or two recent ones. I wake up at dawn nearly every morning, through the night sometimes. Feverish but without fever. The way I used to as a child. How the sheet beneath me was lightly damp with sweat in that tangible, so cold way.

Yet I have also been having visions. Vivid, vivid moments that I know are not dreams...but facilitated by them. It's as if this sickness has strangled my usual mental defenses, the vast Maginot Line that almost perfectly shuts out anything but the little glimmers. I am beginning to feel connections, ethereal networks slowly pulsing more quickly. Stronger.

My reality is beginning to fray again despite my best efforts.

This morning I was half-awake, dreaming. I was engaged in some training exercise near many men wearing robes. Some few were throwing small black stones at the mouth of this palatial beast. It stood upon two spindled, muscled legs, with aquamarine skin and a neck long like the Brontosaurus. The face was eerily human, though the jaw was far too big and the top of the head like a snake. It had a small mane of brown hair on top. It moved so quickly I couldn't see why or how these highwayman looking fellows could do it.

My training was macabre.

I remember one scene with absolute clarity. I was at the mouth of a cave, with a device that had a row of saws. Secured to it were rows up rows of CD's, about 10 deep and 8 wide. A mouse or something that size was forcibly strapped to the middle. And with silent determination I turned on the saw and began to cut through the CD's. Blood surged in all directions. I put my left hand to my face to keep it away, still in the process. I seemed to half realize what I was doing right then, but somehow it seemed necessary. I was wearing the same kind of dark robe, nearly dripping with the bright red blood of arteries.

Something had caught my attention. Something was terribly wrong. The creature had somehow unsecured its moorings. It was devouring with a bloodlust, a hatred that only a sentient creature could know. I was outraged this thing was doing this, and I began throwing rocks at it. In amidst dispatching the others, it turned its attention to my rage.

And at that point it was as if my dream stopped. Like it were on pause, the scene still and in black and white. I knew I was very likely going to die. But I decided to continue. Everyone was dead, or scattered. I focused on the sheer impertinence and gaul of the beast. I felt power surge around me as giant chains literally burst from the ground and whip around the creature. It was eerily like Hellraiser, and that control immensely pleased me. I screamed at the sky with the harsh invectives you expect of high priests. I whipped and bound the creature down, hard and with no mercy. I climbed atop its stomach and, sensing it being clever, drove a chain in its mouth to bind its tongue. Then both jaws, nearly far enough back to snap them.

It was at this point it wanted to negotiate, saying that the violence wasn't necessary.

I would have none of it. I would make the pain of enslavement hot and screaming for it, and absolute domination was to be had. It was the only way. At one point I thought it would be amusing to drive a speared hook through its back and into its stomach. It was then it somehow asked me for mercy. And at that point some other part of me saw the usefulness of that, that it was reasonable. And so I nodded to the creature and said, "for mercy's sake, then."

After that I gradually unbound the chains. I think perhaps, in trying to reason it over, that I had already completely dominated it.

And that was immensely pleasurable. The thought that I could shackle, bind, and put something so fierce in its place. It made me wonder--then and now--the worth of taking the whip to the side and back and face of those who lacked civility, and wished to communicate in the way monsters do. I think I understand that language now.

My throat was completely dry. I was back in this world. Only I had a direct connection to another one. I was awake here--I know because I fumbled for water underneath my mask.

Somehow I was in a dimension the equivalent of one block over. It had a bizarre name. Iz'kr'k or something, though it sounded melodic. I wandered through faires and pubs, saw sigils and designs I'd never read about or seen. It was something of a combination between the Star Wars cantina mixed with sentient lizards. I was too out of focus to talk at most points, but I do remember asking about news, gossip. This was all very bizarre because I WAS awake, with the pain of a cold in my throat.

After awhile I decided I had to get back to sleep or my day would be screwed. I wanted to wander around more and see if these lizard folk and others at the pub were it, or if something more alien or mammalian was around. Even now I feel a faint brushing on my mind, like ultra-fine drapes for a canopy bed, nearly translucent. And I'm there wandering again, but the clarity is terrible and it doesn't have that same ring of truth when I was awake this morning.

It's things like this and some other phenomena that make me wonder.

My emotions in some regards have also been unbound somewhat. I feel a dull, sad ache about something I don't want to talk about. It's been coming to me regularly. Normally it never surfaces, but it has been insistent.

Aside from that is the whirling madness feeling. Where my mind feels like it's pulling itself, and I begin to get jittery and the staccato rhyming in my head gets more and more intense. Speeding up. But like waves elsewhere I fall back and can't reach for anything, and I'm left with this faded, tired feeling like I have cancer or I'm slowly going mad.

Neither of which is the case. But there are many reasons that the blind ones make locks of hearing for deaf fingers, riddles of thick metal bars and chains, long closed doorways riddled with dust. There are many reasons I have converged on the reality, self, and talents I have.

I made myself whole from what would otherwise be broken parts. But several sections want to grow out; and several sections wish to explode and take me back.

It's all very confusing, a matter best left to time and solutions that occur beneath the surface.

I want to be in my 50's, huge salt-and-pepper moustache, gaunt cheeked and emaciated with a lonely cowboy's face, sitting on a mahogany rocking chair somewhere in New Mexico, on a porch in the desert. There'd be a bottle of liquor in my hand. And I would stare out to the rocky shelves and sandstone towers. A song would play off just in the distance...somber, quiet, haunting. 'Goodbye..old Poe...goodbye Texas Jones...' And I would sit and drink while the day and my thoughts faded, until twinkling salt spilled onto the night sky, and all I could remember was that I had no memory.

I need to sleep to do proliferations tomorrow, after I read some more of this 'Mutations' story...

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