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(Lucid dream, September 2006)\n\nI am in a public library I used to frequent as a kid and the atmosphere is easygoing and pleasant. I browse around on one end and check out a few book aisles with French and Franco-Belgian comic books whose titles I don?t really understand and inexplicably enough, find some bags of fresh sliced bread just there for no reason. I pay no attention other than grabbing a piece of bread to chomp on while checking out books and shortly after I find myself going to the other end of the library where the subscription magazines are. I walk around the three people using the library computers still stuck on windows 98 and Pentium III processors at best. There is a tv (incongruous detail with the real library, but such are dreams.) on a metal stand with a VHS player on a rack and some random tapes on another, and in my non-lucid state I pay no attention to it, however I soon bump into it and instead of a loud crash or a harmless quiet *klong* against the television?s heavy CRT screen, the whole TV falls down harmlessly to the ground with barely any noise.\n\nI am confused. I walk to the television and ready myself to lift something heavy but at the first touch I realize that it's no heavier than an empty cardboard box. Something is amiss. I grab the tv effortlessly and put it back on its metal stand and I immediately find myself staring into my reflection and its own confused expression. There is something odd about my reflection, as if the screen was made of glass but reflected light from it like its surface was polished metal. Something that feels like an electric shock goes through me as my reflection goes wide-eyed, and with hurry I lift the tv up by the sides, and I begin to shout. \n\n\"I?M DREAMING! I?M DREAMING I?M DREAMING I?M DREAMING!!\" \n\nThere is nothing excited or joyful in these screams as I?m in my first half-lucid phase. I see my reflection again and focus on it as my stare grows stern and I look intensely into the strangely metallic reflection. Soon enough the strange haze I feel dissipates and I gain full control of my body. I am no longer a spectator watching through the first person eyes of a mental self-construct. For the first time in this world of dreams, I am me. \n\nI throw the tv away and watch it bounce against the corners of the walls and in my excitement I run back towards the computer area in the middle and peek over people?s shoulders and chit chat with them. I tell one \"I?m lucid!\" and another answers \"that?s great!\" and for a moment I give into the illusion that these are real people. Rookie mistake. I stand back upright and think about what I could do. I?m a young adult who?s a virgin so obviously I think about having some hot chick show up at first but then my heart skips as one person springs into my thoughts.\n\n\f\n\nMy little brother. It had been almost a year since he'd died and I'd grown a profound sense of guilt over how distant I'd been to him through his last months on this earth. I lived in a foster home and so was separated from both my separated parents (oh the irony) and I only got to see them once every weekend. At first, I spent every weekend at my mother's place to be with him to try and cheer him up both at the hospital and during the brief times when he was back home, and that did work. He looked up to me despite my best attempts at shooing him away whenever I visited my mom, and that was before his disease struck.\n\nThere was palpable sadness at the children's hospital, not from the children themselves as they proved to be tough fighters who never gave up, but from the hospital staff. Life expectancy in 2005 for many of these kids was pretty low and it weighed onto those poor doctors and nurses like they had the world's most painful secret on their shoulders. Behind the smiles and the cheers lied a gaping pit of sadness. For an already traumatized teen such as me, the mundane horrors I heard about and then saw by my own eyes broke me in a way that threw me into a depression that went undiagnosed for over a decade. Still, I tried to be stoic and I kept smiling for him but I was only a teen and an already fragile one with that. The mental load was too much and I soon stopped showing up every week, and then every few weeks, and then...\n\nDuring that summer he had his last birthday and I was photographed giving him a half-hearted hug. For all his progress he was still bald from chemotherapy and he looked like a shell of his former self. I could have sold my soul to the devil to be anywhere else. I came over for that weekend purely for his sake and regretted every moment of it. I was a high school dropout with no real future ahead, now with an undiagnosed mental illness and who was expected to be there for someone who was turning into a carcass before her own eyes and this was the last time I visited him. I felt selfish even at the time.\n\nLess than two months later he got a vital whole-body blood transfusion, a process that involved emptying him of all his blood while introducing donor blood free of the disease. His entire body from head to toe rejected the blood transplant. This trapped him into a coma from which he never woke up and his brain... liquefied; his body swelled up as his body began to rot while he was futilely artificially kept alive. I said my last goodbyes to what once was my little brother through a phone call. I didn't learn the details of his final condition until years later.\n\nFrom there grew an immense guilt that evolved into self-loathing. Then came the nightmares.\n\n\f\n\n[January 2006. I visit my mother at her new rented home for the weekend. The very first night, I have a nightmare where I notice my little brother, still bald and emaciated, walking around in the apartment. At first I pay it no mind and I greet him for the morning. Then I remember that he died, and that the bathroom in this place isn't facing me where I'm standing. I hurriedly walk to the stairs to their open bedroom while asking out for my mother and I only have a foot on the first step when I turn my head and see my little brother, giving me the stare. I had been having frequent nightmares since early childhood so nightmares were already a familiar thing by then and I'd learned to recognize this unsettling blank stare, the stare of something about to lunge at me.\n\nI'd grown a reflex where I would instinctively jolt myself awake before things got worse, but in my disbelief I lost complete control and began shouting at my mom while running up the stairs, my brother leaping towards me while turning into a centipede-like creature right out of John Carpenter's The Thing. One of its tentacles wraps itself around my leg and I fall just as my mother and her boyfriend sees the monster and begin to scream in horror while my little brother focuses on me, and only me, clawing its way as I'm now on my back trying to kick him away, each strike feeling like a red-hot iron tearing chunks of my body apart while I'm yelling helplessly for my damned mother to protect me like she's supposed to. I wake up on the couch in the living room in the middle of the night in sweat. \n\nNow awoken, I sit up and then become frozen in fear as memories of the nightmare and its ghastly end force themselves into my mind, sending shivers through my spine and keeping me awake for the rest of the night as I browsed satellite tv channels on mute to cope. From then on, I would have frequent nightmares about him attacking me either as his sick self or as a monster, or would die in increasingly more grotesque ways while I can't do anything about it. By now he would often grin at me even while grunting in pain, which somehow sounded like he was mocking me in death. I could do nothing but wallow in despair in front of repeatedly distorted replays of his passing.]\n\n\f\n\n \n\nI head back to the magazines part of the library and while staring at the ceiling for no real reason I shout ``I WANT TO SEE MY BROTHER!'', and almost as if waiting for the magic words I see my little brother materialize out of thin air without any smoke or flourishes. He's still bald and in hospital gown but he isn't emaciated anymore and he is smiling warmly at me. I run towards him and engulf him in a hug while I awkwardly kneel down, and after a few seconds of silent embrace I can only say ``I miss you so much.'' to which he replies ``I know.'' In a reassuring tone. I'd not heard his voice like this in an eternity.\n\n``I'm so sorry'' Is all that can come out of my lips next. He says ``It's ok.'' and he rocks me lightly from side to side. I'm only terse because even in the relative safety of lucidity I am still on the verge of tears, but I hold back. Eventually he lets go of the embrace and he calmly says ``I have to go now''. I nod with a smile and he walks around the corner of the book aisle. I try to follow him but he is gone. With no more purpose in this dream, I aimlessly wander the library until a few more moments later when I wake up.\n\nSo ends my personal Silent Hill. I had a few more nightmares related to him after that (such is the nature of trauma), but I did get to give my brother one last hug.\n\n","writing_bbcode_parsed":"One last hug. (Lucid dream, September 2006)

I am in a public library I used to frequent as a kid and the atmosphere is easygoing and pleasant. I browse around on one end and check out a few book aisles with French and Franco-Belgian comic books whose titles I don?t really understand and inexplicably enough, find some bags of fresh sliced bread just there for no reason. I pay no attention other than grabbing a piece of bread to chomp on while checking out books and shortly after I find myself going to the other end of the library where the subscription magazines are. I walk around the three people using the library computers still stuck on windows 98 and Pentium III processors at best. There is a tv (incongruous detail with the real library, but such are dreams.) on a metal stand with a VHS player on a rack and some random tapes on another, and in my non-lucid state I pay no attention to it, however I soon bump into it and instead of a loud crash or a harmless quiet *klong* against the television?s heavy CRT screen, the whole TV falls down harmlessly to the ground with barely any noise.

I am confused. I walk to the television and ready myself to lift something heavy but at the first touch I realize that it's no heavier than an empty cardboard box. Something is amiss. I grab the tv effortlessly and put it back on its metal stand and I immediately find myself staring into my reflection and its own confused expression. There is something odd about my reflection, as if the screen was made of glass but reflected light from it like its surface was polished metal. Something that feels like an electric shock goes through me as my reflection goes wide-eyed, and with hurry I lift the tv up by the sides, and I begin to shout.

"I?M DREAMING! I?M DREAMING I?M DREAMING I?M DREAMING!!"

There is nothing excited or joyful in these screams as I?m in my first half-lucid phase. I see my reflection again and focus on it as my stare grows stern and I look intensely into the strangely metallic reflection. Soon enough the strange haze I feel dissipates and I gain full control of my body. I am no longer a spectator watching through the first person eyes of a mental self-construct. For the first time in this world of dreams, I am me.

I throw the tv away and watch it bounce against the corners of the walls and in my excitement I run back towards the computer area in the middle and peek over people?s shoulders and chit chat with them. I tell one "I?m lucid!" and another answers "that?s great!" and for a moment I give into the illusion that these are real people. Rookie mistake. I stand back upright and think about what I could do. I?m a young adult who?s a virgin so obviously I think about having some hot chick show up at first but then my heart skips as one person springs into my thoughts.

\f

My little brother. It had been almost a year since he'd died and I'd grown a profound sense of guilt over how distant I'd been to him through his last months on this earth. I lived in a foster home and so was separated from both my separated parents (oh the irony) and I only got to see them once every weekend. At first, I spent every weekend at my mother's place to be with him to try and cheer him up both at the hospital and during the brief times when he was back home, and that did work. He looked up to me despite my best attempts at shooing him away whenever I visited my mom, and that was before his disease struck.

There was palpable sadness at the children's hospital, not from the children themselves as they proved to be tough fighters who never gave up, but from the hospital staff. Life expectancy in 2005 for many of these kids was pretty low and it weighed onto those poor doctors and nurses like they had the world's most painful secret on their shoulders. Behind the smiles and the cheers lied a gaping pit of sadness. For an already traumatized teen such as me, the mundane horrors I heard about and then saw by my own eyes broke me in a way that threw me into a depression that went undiagnosed for over a decade. Still, I tried to be stoic and I kept smiling for him but I was only a teen and an already fragile one with that. The mental load was too much and I soon stopped showing up every week, and then every few weeks, and then...

During that summer he had his last birthday and I was photographed giving him a half-hearted hug. For all his progress he was still bald from chemotherapy and he looked like a shell of his former self. I could have sold my soul to the devil to be anywhere else. I came over for that weekend purely for his sake and regretted every moment of it. I was a high school dropout with no real future ahead, now with an undiagnosed mental illness and who was expected to be there for someone who was turning into a carcass before her own eyes and this was the last time I visited him. I felt selfish even at the time.

Less than two months later he got a vital whole-body blood transfusion, a process that involved emptying him of all his blood while introducing donor blood free of the disease. His entire body from head to toe rejected the blood transplant. This trapped him into a coma from which he never woke up and his brain... liquefied; his body swelled up as his body began to rot while he was futilely artificially kept alive. I said my last goodbyes to what once was my little brother through a phone call. I didn't learn the details of his final condition until years later.

From there grew an immense guilt that evolved into self-loathing. Then came the nightmares.

\f

[January 2006. I visit my mother at her new rented home for the weekend. The very first night, I have a nightmare where I notice my little brother, still bald and emaciated, walking around in the apartment. At first I pay it no mind and I greet him for the morning. Then I remember that he died, and that the bathroom in this place isn't facing me where I'm standing. I hurriedly walk to the stairs to their open bedroom while asking out for my mother and I only have a foot on the first step when I turn my head and see my little brother, giving me the stare. I had been having frequent nightmares since early childhood so nightmares were already a familiar thing by then and I'd learned to recognize this unsettling blank stare, the stare of something about to lunge at me.

I'd grown a reflex where I would instinctively jolt myself awake before things got worse, but in my disbelief I lost complete control and began shouting at my mom while running up the stairs, my brother leaping towards me while turning into a centipede-like creature right out of John Carpenter's The Thing. One of its tentacles wraps itself around my leg and I fall just as my mother and her boyfriend sees the monster and begin to scream in horror while my little brother focuses on me, and only me, clawing its way as I'm now on my back trying to kick him away, each strike feeling like a red-hot iron tearing chunks of my body apart while I'm yelling helplessly for my damned mother to protect me like she's supposed to. I wake up on the couch in the living room in the middle of the night in sweat.

Now awoken, I sit up and then become frozen in fear as memories of the nightmare and its ghastly end force themselves into my mind, sending shivers through my spine and keeping me awake for the rest of the night as I browsed satellite tv channels on mute to cope. From then on, I would have frequent nightmares about him attacking me either as his sick self or as a monster, or would die in increasingly more grotesque ways while I can't do anything about it. By now he would often grin at me even while grunting in pain, which somehow sounded like he was mocking me in death. I could do nothing but wallow in despair in front of repeatedly distorted replays of his passing.]

\f

 

I head back to the magazines part of the library and while staring at the ceiling for no real reason I shout ``I WANT TO SEE MY BROTHER!'', and almost as if waiting for the magic words I see my little brother materialize out of thin air without any smoke or flourishes. He's still bald and in hospital gown but he isn't emaciated anymore and he is smiling warmly at me. I run towards him and engulf him in a hug while I awkwardly kneel down, and after a few seconds of silent embrace I can only say ``I miss you so much.'' to which he replies ``I know.'' In a reassuring tone. I'd not heard his voice like this in an eternity.

``I'm so sorry'' Is all that can come out of my lips next. He says ``It's ok.'' and he rocks me lightly from side to side. I'm only terse because even in the relative safety of lucidity I am still on the verge of tears, but I hold back. Eventually he lets go of the embrace and he calmly says ``I have to go now''. I nod with a smile and he walks around the corner of the book aisle. I try to follow him but he is gone. With no more purpose in this dream, I aimlessly wander the library until a few more moments later when I wake up.

So ends my personal Silent Hill. I had a few more nightmares related to him after that (such is the nature of trauma), but I did get to give my brother one last hug.

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