American McGee's Alice In Wonderland
We often ask of ourselves: Do humans dream in colour?
I dream in cinemascope, a rich, multi-layered phastasmagoria filled with imagery that provokes every sense, every sight and smell reverberating as if I were on LSD.
Sometimes this is pleasant enough, as if I were spending a normal day in the life of a normal girl. But often, and often enough that it has become a menace, what starts out as a seemingly innocuous dream quickly morphs into a sinister nightmare that is as real as my hand before my face. Every dark, strangled detail twists itself before my eyes like American McGee’s Alice In Wonderland, and worse still, when I wake up, I can remember every single thing.
Those who don’t dream as vividly can never understand what it is to shoot upright in the dark, wet with a cold, clammy fear of unspeakable horrors. They can’t know what it is to wake up more tired than when you went to sleep, feeling more pain from the R.E.M world than the real one.
My dreams are not realistic tales of being chased downstairs by robbers or attacked and killed by lecherous men; they are darker and more seperentine, a neverwaking, neverending fantasy.
And because they are terrors which only I can concoct and which only the labyrinth of my mind can justify, they chill me to the bone.
Recently, they have become more frequent in occurrence and I notice that they have started to affect my waking life as well.
I walk around, dull as a spectre, exhausted from struggles with my personal minotaurs.
Worse, I have always had dreams that seem to speak to me of a deeper issue in myself, something which needs to be resolved and which has always been masked by the blank, smiling veneer of everyday life.
Once, it was a scientist who endeavoured to degenerate all the people in my town into single celled organisms by preaching salvation to them. Another time, it was an aged wizard, cunning as a vulture, who kidnapped me as a twelve-year-old and hid me in his castle with every intention of practising paedophilia on me.
Last night, my demons took the form of toys.
I was standing in a giant toy box, large as a garden, chequered in shades of pink and plum like a disney chessboard.
A line drawn jaggedly along the middle of the box indicated a vague no-man’s land in which danger lay and no toy dared to step. On the “safe” side, two-dimensional trees gnarled upwards from the garish ground, phony as pop-up cardboard.
The toys sat there, scattered all round the flat trunks, floppy and still in a silent picnic.
I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there. I was merely plagued by a nagging sense of unease and an immediate distrust of my surroundings. Pressing close to my side was the only other living thing in the whole box, an enormous rottweiler who growled in a low, steady throb under his breath.
His hot flank steadied me and I assumed he was my dog, there to protect me. The toys were macabre in their tableux, almost completely innocent-looking, except for little quirks that rendered them hideously frightening, though I could not conceive why.
A pink terry-cloth rabbit peeked inquisitively out of one cute button eye. The other eye, however, was missing and had been replaced by thick patchwork, a black slash crossed with shorter perpendicular stitches, ragged as if some clumsy, evil hand had ripped its way through the stuffing. The eye slanted downward towards the nose, impossibly devious and sinister when juxtaposed with the innocent rose-coloured skin.
They were all malformed, I thought, shuddering.
And then they moved. Not quickly but as one, in slow, tiny jerks as if a puppet master above was awakening. And in those ragged, mummy-like movements, they flopped towards me.
Immediately the dog beside me began to growl more loudly, his fear and rage evident in the little muscles that jumped beneath his flesh. I started to step backward in horror when they spoke, without their sewn on mouths moving, but in a chorus of sing-song, high caterwauling that made my hair stand on end.
“Play with me. Play with me,” they wailed and screeched, twitching closer and closer to us.
“Oh god… oh my god…” I was trembling so hard I couldn’t think. I turned to run but an army was encircling us from behind too. A doll with vacant, blood red eyes stumbled at us while a jack-in-the-box with glittering, serrated teeth sprang out of his home with every fumbling step.
“Play with me. PLAY WITH ME.” The childish screeches were almost deafening, now more threats than anything. They lolled and jerked towards us with a slowness that was infinitely more menacing than a run; we had nowhere to go.
“Do something, please,” I begged the massive dog, almost in tears.
He responded by stiffening his hulking mass and growling so loudly that every muscle in his body vibrated. A rag doll with a cold, toothless smile was almost at my feet, and the pink rabbit was flopping violently up and down, as if in its eagerness to climb over the doll and get at me.
My legs were completely cold and numb now, and as a toy monkey with clashing cymbals that could almost certainly slice off a human finger between them emitted a shrieking laugh and leapt through the air at me, I cried out in abject horror and threw my hands up to cover my face.
Then, the rottweiler leapt.
He crashed through them, skittering them like hollow bowling pins, his big black-brown bulk swinging in an ungainly arc. They howled as they were flung, ululating with a witchlike intensity that I could hardly bear.
Those who were thrown a short distance righted themselves, only to jerk themselves towards us again, like marionettes with no purpose other than obeying an invisible master. The dog fought valiantly, making a circle around me and savagely mauling any toy that came within one foot of me, but there were too many to fight off and the monkey with the cymbals leapt at my shin, gashing them badly.
“No!” I cried and in desperation, flung myself across the demarcation, throwing my body from the “safe” side into no-man’s land.
As suddenly as they had started, the toys were completely silent. The air was cold here, and deathly still. And on this side of the line, I was starting to feel a palpable fear, but one that was no longer hallucenogenic and childish but a dark, cold chill that stroked its finger along my spine.
I was afraid to look up, back across the line to the safe side, but I did.
And when I saw it, I scrambled backwards across the floor on my hands and heels in horror.
They were not toys anymore.
They were people. Standing there, with dangling arms and heads drooping from their necks like zombies, like hollow shells of people with a fiery hate burning in their eyes. The trees were no longer trees but crooked, crumbling towers of black brick.
And my rottweiler, my beautiful brave giant, was lying dead at the feet of a woman in a stark labcoat, his throat slit by a knife in her hand.
As I stared, she brushed a hand over her spotless lapel, straightened up and walked slowly towards me, her heels clicking on the ground, now chequered black and white. She was the only straight, proud, animate thing in that field of still, slightly swaying zombies and her eyes were intelligent, cold and more evil than anything I’d ever seen in my life.
As the corners of her mouth quirked upwards in a malevolent sneer, realisation dawned. In crossing the line, I had moved from the world of appearance into a world where I could see everything for what it was, and the woman, this lady evil, was on top of it all, she was the one pulling the strings.
She strode, every step deliberate and purposeful and crossed the line without pause. Then, she reached down and in one swift gesture, committed without any feeling, yanked me upwards by my hair.
“That was easier than I thought,” she whispered in my ear. Her voice was smooth and crisp with metallic undertones.
“Please.” I said in hushed monotone, tears starting to drip noiselessly from my eyes. I could not find any gesture big enough to display my racing fear and sorrow.
“All my people needed to do was keep you on that side of the line for long enough. And they did, of course.” Her breath was blistering cold on my ear.
“Keep me long enough for what?” A whimper was creeping into my voice and my eyes were blur with falling tears.
“To prick you with these.” She dropped me on the ground and held up a hand in front of my nose for me to see what she held delicately pinched between thumb and forefinger: an impossibly thin sliver of a needle, only one inch long.
“What?” I breathed, reaching up to touch the back of my head. And with mounting horror I felt the heads of two dozen tiny pins, impaled along my softening scalp. Now that I knew they were there, my skin registered the sharp, smarting prick of each one. “But – but, what are they?” My head was beginning to swim.
“Poison,” she stated with the throwaway gesture of a shrug. “Each needle containing just enough to make you a little more helpless. And here, the last one. All I need now to make you one of them.”
I looked through hazy eyes at her, feeling a tired weight nudge its way through my body now. “Please,” the tears were running messily with snot now. “You don’t have to.” But the words were slurred.
“Sorry,” she said, without a trace of remorse. Then, she snatched up my hand in her cool one, and with a darting precision, slid the last needle into the epidermis of my fingertip. Pain raced from the tip of my finger into my limp hand and I felt my heart begin to seize up.
Fighting dizziness and nausea, I started breathing through my teeth, the breath hissing loudly in and out as I took long, deep breaths in an effort to stay conscious. As the breaths I drew grew louder and louder in my attempt to keep on even keel, my vision blurred until all I could see was a sea of grey, and my breathing sounded like the rasp of a saw, thunder to my ears.
And then, most frightening of all: I woke up.
I opened my eyes and realised the rasping I was hearing was not only in my head, but coming from my chest in raw, dry sobs so loud that Chip was staring at me in wonder in the darkness, awakened by my heaves.
As the dizziness from my dream slowly cleared and my breathing regulated itself, I became aware of a throbbing pain in my middle finger on my right hand. In disbelief, I flicked my bedside lamp on, and in the ghastly greenish glow, I found that I was digging the corner of my thumbnail into the fingertip, so hard that a red puncture wound had formed and the skin was almost broken. It was the spot the needle had pierced in my dream.
I lay on the floor with Chip for long moments after that, too tired to move, to scared to go back to sleep.
It feels increasingly like world in my head is oozing, creeping into the one outside it. I don’t understand it. What am I chasing?
My feverish imagination never used to bring such fear.
Now, it seems I’m Alice and the looking glass holds no more wonder for me.
