I had been trapped in an alien museum, touring it, but I kept making the aliens mad, and the museum workers told me to leave, with a warning. I had gotten too close to a dragon/lizard/venus flytrap plant hybrid and it hissed at me, and then I thought an alien bird was a stuffed animal and touched it, and it bit my finger, and I got yelled at by an employee while I apologized. At this point I was fully dreaming, and not necessarily aware of this fact. I had gone into the alien museum on purpose, but on the way out the entry was filled with people, most of them skinny and oblivious to how much I am physically struggling to exit the museum. The entrance was covered by, or perhaps accessed by, a gymnastics rope net that seemed to remind me of vacation bible school. It was supposed to be a fun playground entryway, but instead, because my body is so drained and I’m so exhausted, it was like a prison. A college kid helped to boost me up into the narrow entryway near the top in the rope net by holding his hands together and allowing me to step up on them, and I made it half-way out and then he left me on my own. A man supervising the college kids started praising the college kid because he had taken a picture of him while he was helping me up, and was telling the kid how this would positively impact his status professionally. Enthusiastically and encouragingly, he remarked “Your program is going to blow up, it’s going to blow. Up.” I dragged myself the rest of the way out of the entryway and started looking around for a bench to sit on, as I wanted to find somewhere to rest desperately.

Everything shifts, and things are very wrong.

I’m immediately aware that I’m fully awake, but still dreaming. Fully aware, but trapped. I feel what feels like the most fear and terror it feels possible for my brain to generate. The area of my mind where the great, horrible, evil to end all evils is contained opens. I see geometric patterns and flashing of fractals, of portions of objects and memories cut up and stitched together, glitching together. I hear this terrible ringing in my head and I know that it is sentient. I hear it audibly, and I know for a fact that I’m hearing it outside of me. But I know I’m inside myself, I’m just completely cut off from the sensory inputs currently, at least in the way that I have access to them in ordinary waking life. (This is the first instance I experience of the ringing.) I have a very clear sense of my spatial orientation inside of the impossible non-euclidean architecture, inside myself. I experience the sensation that something is very wrong. I shouldn’t be here. The I that I am, shouldn’t be where the “I” that I am is. I shouldn’t be awake in this place. I’m fully inside myself psychologically, and trapped. I experience a knowing that the evil ringing is hunting me, and it is an entity. It is open. The thing that contains the entity is open, but it is also the concept of opening itself, or perhaps it creates the concept of opening. It is familiar. I know this entity. It lives with me when I am awake; it lives inside my brain. I have a brief thought of utter despair, thinking “no, no, this was supposed to happen with someone else, not while I’m alone” (referring to the accessing of this content). I see the inside of my apartment cut into pieces and shifted together and glitched and incomprehensible, and I can’t understand why it is the way it is, and it’s so horrific, the word bad echoes over and over again, it has the sensation of “bad bad bad bad bad bad evil bad dying”, and the visuals are shifting through various types of illustration styles and semi-reality wrongness. It feels as though I can see the chaos static noise of individual atoms.

I’m in the basement in Akron, Ohio. The evil is contained in the basement, and it’s burrowing in the floor coming to get me. The evil is an entity that lives with me in my brain. It’s a virus, but I know that it’s not death or the grim reaper or anything personified, it has a personality, but it’s not a person, and it is pure evil, and it makes everything incredibly wrong, and imbued with the essence of wrongness. I can see so much, and it is wrong for me to be able to see so much. I know exactly how it all works, I know exactly how I work, and I can see it all. I know that I am inside of myself, I can’t feel the outside of my body, but I am the same as I am when I’m awake. I know again that I shouldn’t be here, that something has gone terribly wrong in my brain and I’m not supposed to be conscious right now. All of this happens at once. I can see all the textures, and it hurts so horrifically badly, television static, incomprehensibly.

I know that in order to survive, I need to get out. I am looking for an exit, but I send a probe of intention to trace the entity in the background, in order to see what I can learn about it later. The feeling is that of reality-endingness, not just death, but dread of the end of reality. At the same time, it feels as though I’m being hunted by reality, and that I can see patterns and static and chaos and spirals that are always present, but not acknowledged or seen when I am awake. I’m trying to figure out how to jerk myself out of sleep because I need to get out or it’ll hurt me permanently. I think about how to get out, and think “grounding”, “grounding exercises”, I look around and see various brain-breaking textures, I think “I need to find a texture, real life, grounding”, and then (physically, my non-dream body) I’m able to jerk my feet against each other and focus on the feeling of the texture of my skin against the blanket in the real world, outside of me. I follow the sensation through what feels like wire-tunnels out of my brain so that I can wake up, and I do. When I wake up, I’m not psychologically “waking up” as I was already awake, but I am physically waking up. I “shift” out of the physical trapped state, and the dreaming and horror and static overlaid on top of everything starts to fade. I feel sick, my head hurts very badly, and I feel as though I have been left with a map to where the evil lives. I try to calm myself and understand the experience. It feels like the entity exposed itself to come attack me, but in doing so it left an opening for me to trace it, letting me know where it lives. I know that it’s still there, and I know that the knowledge that it’s there will persist. It feels as though it wants power. It strikes me that I didn’t understand how non-humanoid of an entity it is, that I thought it was more of a person before. I am left feeling unsafe and with the sense that I need to remain still so that I won’t be seen, and have a thought that if I pretend that I do not exist and don’t move, then perhaps I won’t die. My head hurts very bad, and I feel extremely nauseous.