Ask Lemmy

Since that dream I have felt the grinding knowledge of the pool in a number of other dreams. Often when I have a nightmare, the low rumble coming before I realize I'm dreaming and changing the dream world back to something familiar.

The second of these things came about 4 years ago. I found myself dreaming of a house I grew up in, a Victorian style house that had been divided into a triplex before my parents had attempted to buy it. As I wondered it in a nostalgic tour, the basalt pool warned me of something near. I understood that if I wanted to continue enjoying myself I should avoid the back hall. I wondered if this was a warning and it assured I was safe either way. I'd make a perfect horror movie protagonist, when warned by an eldritch entity beyond my comprehension I opted to immediately investigate.

As I stepped into the hall I found myself suspended hundreds of feet in the air over a flat unending expanse of sallow land as black ashes drifted by on a weak wind. Below me, across the entirety and coming from all directions, single file lines of people marched on to the singular landmark of this world.

At the center of these endless queues was an impossibly vast hole, not in the ground but in reality. Rising from it was the torso of a gaunt and boney humanoid being. Below me the people were ants and still this creatures towered over my vantage point. It's skin was the same sickly baige of the landscape and the sky. Its arms triple jointed and ending in hands that's were barely human. Its posture was that of someone desperately trying to hide their nakedness with only their arms as a shield. Its face terminated in a flat plane just below the tip of the nose so that it's nostrils were hinted by the barest of transition from the upper lip. Floating close but distinctly separate from where it's face ended was yet another hole like void, situated level to where the eyes would have been and evoking the image of a horrid halo. The ash fell freely from this second void and just barely, the glow of foreign stars could be seen within.

As I took in this sight I understood that the marching lines ended as each person jumped into the void below. Some would fall to the plateau of the entity's head to be consumed, the rest became the ash in the air. On occasions, the thing would pause in it's futile efforts to hide itself and reach miles into the lines around it to pluck a single person by their throat. When I asked the basalt why I was greated with a vision from its perspective. As the lengthy fingers pinched their target the victim fractured, echoes of their form expanding out in a starburst, each a representation of possibly. Every potential version of a being throughout all potential timelines, each seized by the throat and violently ripped from their anchor before being carelessly tossed to fizzle away in the wind. Through the pool I understood that this is both the principle of pain and ecstasy for the victim, an infinite moment of sensation as they sease to be in every possible way.

I ask aloud why I'm seeing this and instead of answer, the rumble grows from within me as the entity takes notice for the first time that we've intruded. Before it make a move I'm back above the pool, then back in my childhood house, as if I'd just entered the back hall. Ash lingers in the air but fades away to nothing before my eyes. I wake.