A Nightmare

Last night I had the worst nightmare I can remember ever having. I woke up terrified and shaking at 6:00am, and was still agitated at around 7:45am as I watched the dawn.

The nightmare took place in the third person; I was not part of events but rather just watched them happen. At times I saw events through the eyes of those involved, but I always felt as though it was other people this was happening to.

I grew up near a certain wood, Knott Wood, and as a young child I did not know what was on the far side of it. I had been told there was a river down there somewhere but had not seen it. In my dreams I filled in the landscape beyond the wood with creative recombinations of aspects of places I was familiar with. This fictional landscape is still available to me in my dreams and I visit it at least once every few months. It is a place of great comfort, a nostalgic expression of lost childhood, of idealised England, and of a perfect past before the hand of mankind interfered with nature. There is an almost autistic absence of other people.

In my dream, the men and company of the Dangerous Ideas wood were holding a summer celebration with a bonfire in Knott Wood. Three teenage boys were trying to organise to take a girl swimming in the river beyond the wood (this felt like William Morris' "beyond the world"). She was a real person I used to know. It got later and later and the swimming trip turned to a camping trip and the girl dropped out but the boys were determined to continue. Eventually they got permission from one of their fathers, but he was drunk and not from the area. Anyone else would have forbidden them from doing so.

So they went down to the river, and to their surprise they found an abandoned hamlet built along the river. I had never visited this location in my dreams before, being slightly upstream of where I had explored before this point. I have a vague recollection of not being able to explore in this direction perhaps fifteen or twenty years ago and of there being something vaguely sinister about it. The three boys were a little disturbed that the first abandoned house they came to had been broken into, but had not been looted or touched in any way despite containing valuable and useful items. Nonetheless, there was a pleasant grassy sward outside which was flatter than any other available spot, and they decided to lie there in their sleeping bags. I think this location was inspired by a house in the alps whose driveway I turned around in once.

As darkness fell, a dog appeared and one of the boys began to make a fuss over it. For the rest of the night the other two boys were unable to get him to do anything but play with the dog.

Then the narrative changed to one of the boys reading back what he had written in a book he had taken from the house. It was a two-page form printed in the front of a book, to be filled in to record the details of the location and registrar filling in the book. The boy had filled it in with a plain childish account of their camping expedition, ignoring the prompts on the form. Then he turned to the next page and each page contained a filled-in record of secret mass burials that had occured in the parish. Two of the dates were 1932 and March 1935. I felt that the present in the dream was the late 50s or early 60s.

This was the third boy who was occupied with the book, the first having the dog. The second boy was asleep but was being irritated by something in the dark. It was just irritating enough for him to wish it would stop but not irritating enough for him to get up and investigate. What was happening was that he was being gently poked in the feet with two sharp implements. I have shivers running all over my body writing this.

Then a second "dog" came to the third boy, who was by now also half-asleep. He was aware that this wasn't really a dog and that something was badly wrong. I feel utterly terrified recounting this; I am shivering and have to pause frequently. I do not want to go on; I will not proof-read this. The boy could not bring himself to recognise that it was not a dog, because it would be too terrible to acknowledge the truth. And so he played with it, half-asleep, as though it were a dog. Slowly he came round as far as he could allow himself to: he could not acknowledge the truth, it must remain a dog for the time being in order to preserve his sanity, but he could accept that something was wrong and that he had to get the three of them together to leave that place.

He looked at the first boy, and all of this was written over his face. He had been trapped for some time, not brave enough to bring himself as far as the point the third boy had reached. They looked at the second boy, but were unable to allow themselves to take in what they saw, so they just grabbed him and pulled him with them.

They walked together up the slope back to the main party of adults, but when they were almost there they realised that what they were dragging was not the second boy, but was something else they could not acknowledge. They had left him asleep and alone down there. With heavy hearts they turned and went back for him, knowing that they likely did not have enough willpower to succeed.

The narrative changed to the next day. A few parents were in a helicopter searching for the boys. The helicopter swept over the forest, and closed in on the river. One of the boys was in the river. At first he appeared to be a floating corpse, but then it became clear he was struggling. Underneath him were - two sheep? - two inflated sacks providing buoyancy. He was using the sacks to keep himself apart from something that was underneath the water, trying to drown whatever was there.

Then it surfaced, the face of a man, or something very similar, three times the size of a man and much flatter and more cartoony. The face was surrounded by thick dark-brown matted hair and the expression was one of manic friendship. The long tongue hung out like a dog's, and it seemed to be playing with the boy, making the boy think there was a chance of drowning the fiend, but all the time the monster was in complete control. The thing rolled around the bottom of the sacks and came up, showing himself to be hairy all over, looking like a wild brown version of Sulley from Monsters Inc. It had two horns like Desperate Dan had on his cow pie, which had been tickling the second boy the previous night. It sounds ridiculous but it was most real and terrifying and I am scared now writing.

The helicopter pilot recoiled and flew away as fast as he could. He would forever be a broken man, and the parents would not argue that this terror was too large to be faced, even at whatever the cost to their sons would be. There was a sense that the boys were far beyond help, and that the best anyone could do would be to get as far away as possible.

And then I woke up.