My Trips to Carcosa (Recurring Dream Photobashes)

I recall more dreams in my childhood than I do real events.

...And that's something I used to regret.

Alot of people would like to flagellate themselves over not being in the moment enough when they were younger and when the world was still new and huge to them, and I used to be the same way. Things always seemed better looking back, that's why they call it 'nostalgia.' But maturing, for me, was realizing those weren't times, but feelings. Feelings I can recreate in larger, more grand ways just like younger me would've hoped.

I realized this because of something I'd neglected to investigate for my whole life. My dreams never changed. Sure, situations evolved, characters swapped, the plots lengthened, but they somehow kept that same 'engine' feel. Like it's the same place I'm coming back to. Or rather, the same place I keep rendering. And the ones that recur, or themes that'd repeat, continue to follow me unchanged.

The Dark Beach

The Dark Beach is a place of tranquil malaise. The water is ice cold, the sand is warm, and the lukewarm wind always blows at your back. Light of a full moon bounces off the waves, but the sky is completely featureless. No stars, no moon. Nothing.

As far as I knew, the water went infinitely deep. Something under it would rumble. Not in the sense of a hidden sea monster, more like there being such an immense volume of shifting matter that the quakes are felt in your bones.

I have a pretty good guess what made this one repeat. When I was 7 or 8 I had a PS2 in my room, and I'd either leave it on with a movie or fall asleep playing something. When in the bios menu, an ambient space-ocean like ambience would loop. The calm rumbles, the dark shapes and voided background, calm nights, if I had to give an image to the sounds that ambience would belong to it would be the Dark Beach.

The Squares

I... Don't know about this one.

This one had no inherent vista or situation, if it does it's buried deep in my subconscious. Closest 'dream lore' I have for these is in one dream they were part of some extradimensional occupation, like these are some sort of unknowable or impossible entities that survey us in captivity. Weirdest thing was life was completely normal, all the dream had aside from those was me riding my bike in the neighborhood and talking to people as we gave worried glances to the voided squares. No other dream brought attention to them.
Portals? Ships? Faces? Analogue horror 10 years before the fact?

No idea. They never did anything.

The End of The World

Two things about me.

1. I grew up a conspiracy/doomsdayer nut.

2. I live under constant watch of tornados.

Naturally, with these two things seeding a unique sort of paranoia, I dreamed alot about weather related disasters. Not wrecked houses or flying debris, just the storms themselves. Where I live, you can tell a really bad storm is gonna come around if the sky is a sickly yellow or green. In my dreams, it sometimes came out kinda gold.

The storms would usually have no rain, maybe some misty drizzle. But your senses would always be overwhelmed by the wind more than anything. The wind would shriek like a banshee, deafeningly so. The massive lightning maelstrom with the rapid cloud movement made the sky feel like Earth's fluorescent light flickering out before dying. Like it was the end of the world.

The Cosmos

I was always a space kid. Everything about it fascinated me.

Very often my most calming dreams would be the ones with multiple moons, or visible planetary bodies. Sorta like one of those old pulp sci-fi book covers. In some of these meteors would sometimes fly over me at low altitude— Yes, meteors, I never saw or heard them land.

Each space dream would have its own logic behind it.

- A moon that changes size and place every time you look away.

- A sky that changes composition every time you blink.

- Duplicate of Earth.

- A moon that would turn into a duplicate of Earth.

- Artefacting, like a broken planetarium.

- And eye-visible vessels with blinking lights. (UFOs? Satellites? Drones?)

Given my open passion for space, this is probably the least surprising recurring element in my hypnogogic travels, despite this entry having arguably the most terrifying implications.

I kinda wanna make more, this started as a writing exercise that turned into something more introspective.