When you’re a socially awkward adult orphan who inherited your parents’ money and the house you grew up in, with a disposable income from a career that requires technical skill while you lack a creative one, your mind may tend to wander and grow desperate for new experiences you aren’t imaginative enough to think up on your own. I’m critical of movies and TV shows, and rarely find one that I can enjoy, so over my years of lonely nights spent in this big, empty house where I grew up, I’ve had to really experiment in my efforts to find new forms of entertainment.

Now, I certainly don’t recommend this hobby to anyone nor am I at all advocating for it. I’m just posting here to talk about my experience, and it needs some context. While I’m half-tempted to share the cocktail recipe here or give you all hints on where to find it… Yeah, you should really avoid its use.

I’m in this forum, so it must be obvious that like most of you, I consider myself a bit of a psychonaut. I don’t experiment with both natural and synthetic chemicals to get a buzz or a high, or to escape pain or go on a spiritual journey, or to fundamentally change my personality or view of the world. I don’t believe I have an addiction problem, either. Most of the stuff I take, I genuinely have no desire to go a second round with. Even when I do enjoy something, I tend to get off of it after a little more experimentation. For me, the rush comes from brand-new experiences, and the thrill of the unknown. Maybe I’m addicted to all that, but no substance in particular.

I am very careful with my hobby. Unless impossible, I procure all my base chemicals from reputable sources and make the products myself in my garage laboratory, clean and pure enough to make Walter White proud. If I have to turn to a substance someone else made, you know I’m going to analyze its structure and makeup first, and start with taste tests before the big night. I’m exact with my dosages, I balance my pre-trip nutrition, stay hydrated, and begin every journey in the middle of my California King mattress. I even wear a smart watch that can dial 911 with a voice command in case I wake up and can’t move. The vital monitoring is just a bonus. I have no family left, and my friends all moved away. No one really cares about me, but I’ll be damned if a burglar finds my decomposing corpse three months after a journey ended poorly.

I’ve yet to call for medical services, however. Like I said, I’m careful.

But nothing prepared me for the trip I took a month ago. I can’t promise this will last forever, but I’ve stayed sober since then. I’ve had too much to think about and write down, anyway, and I’ve wanted to stay clearheaded. Of course, I know a few good recipes that’ll probably open up my mind and memories and help me recall things I’ve forgotten, but… I’m not sure I want to risk reliving any part of what I went through that night.

Dreams have always been an escape for me. They were my first one, long before I lost my parents. I’ve always dreamt vividly, and began keeping a journal when I was just seven. At ten, I was lucid dreaming on occasion without realizing what that was. By twelve, I had about mastered the ability and slept lucidly most nights. The thing is, though, you don’t want to do it every night, in my opinion, even if you can. Without the random nonsensical chaos your mind comes up with as it manages memories during REM sleep, being in control of your actions, story lines, and environments every night becomes dull and repetitive. It’s good to let your subconscious steer the ship now and then, as it’ll inspire you with its fiction much more than your directed version of it.

I’ve dreamt of it all. Everything that’s talked about in books and online forums about dream tropes—I’ve seen them, plus many others no one seems to bring up. I’ve been in more disgusting public bathrooms than I can count, where the toilets are filthy or nonfunctional. I’ve had to go back and attend each one of my schools, and skipped to the end of the semester having never written that paper, or realizing there was a class I forgot to go to.

I’ve been trapped in giant liminal spaces, and barely outran something monstrous that chased me or I hid from in distant, strange rooms. I’ve seen the empty, forgotten swimming pool buried under my house, gotten lost on an unending highway, and driven in an unfamiliar neighborhood after dark in a car with non-functioning brakes. I’ve gone off bridges and drowned in said useless car. I’ve flown, I’ve hovered, I’ve walked through town with no clothes. I’ve lived out dozens of end-of-the-world scenarios where everyone is sad and afraid, and yet the end never arrives.

And those were just the drug-free dreams. Put something in your blood that nature didn’t intend to be there, and that’s when you get into the really weird, terrifying, or exciting crap, like remixes of the usual stories, or the most insane new ones you can’t believe your own addled mind came up with. I don’t sleep with everything I try in my system; I usually do my best to stay awake. But some things do come with a recommendation of sleep, in order to experience the full effects. And then there are a few rare concoctions, like the one I’ll call “Dream Brew,” that really only do anything at all if you sleep after taking it.

I don’t even remember for sure how I stumbled upon it. I was up late one night browsing casually on my phone, bored out of my mind and coming off a three-day detox after my last trip, which was not a fun one. Professional that I am, I naturally only use proxies and private browsing when I’m in one of my research phases. I was clean, but half-asleep in bed fighting insomnia at the time, so I lack clear recollection on how I found the page. I want to say it was a random link on a subreddit, that led to an obscure forum, to a user with a name of numbers posting about their latest journey, and then clicking on their profile which led a personal blog entry, which had a link leading to another blog, and I’m not even sure how many additional layers there were after that. I was fading.

Dream Brew was supposedly the masterpiece created by a professional chemist obsessed with dreaming, purely for personal use at first. But after perfecting it, he decided to share its ingredients and cooking instructions. Even if I could remember everything about it, I wouldn’t post it here, at least not as a part of my story. I mean, when properly created, it seems perfectly safe—I did live to relay my usage experience. But I also recall there being a couple of components that can cause harm if not prepared to perfection.

Delivered in the form of a tincture that needs to be chilled for thirty-six hours in advance of consumption, the mixture uses twelve different active ingredients, some of which have to be distilled or separated from other things in over-the-counter medicines. Two of the elements come from uncommon psychotropic prescription medicine that will have to be procured in other ways. Even with all the people I know, it was a pain in the ass to acquire both, but I managed to do so within a week of learning about Dream Brew.

Body mass index, mental health issues, and even blood type all need to be considered, with ingredient dosages adjusted to compensate for specific measurements. This suggests that the mysterious creator with numbers for a name may have experimented with other people. It would all be pretty shady, of course, and I’d never be the first to try out the mixture. Yet there were several dozen replies to the original poster that began with skepticism, and then turned into responses about how amazing their trip had been, some encouraging others to try it for themselves. A few even called the OP a drug-engineering genius.

If there was any cause for alarm or at least hesitation, it was in the fact that the creator never replied to a single remark or question. In fact, I later found out that the Dream Brew instructions was the last post he ever made on the forum, even as praise and curiosity were heaped upon him. A little ominous, but people were obviously surviving and sharing similar experiences.

Dream Brew rewires the brain somehow and allows the user to “unlock the full potential” of the mind during sleep. Purity and effectiveness varied greatly among the product testers, though it’s difficult to say how many made it to spec, and how many cooked something suboptimal. Usage discussion seemed limited to the creator’s thread, and I can’t recall finding it brought up elsewhere.

The breakdown of experience positive responses is more or less this: 96% of users reported more vivid, sharper dreams, with higher retention rates when it came to remembering them, even after multiple REM cycles. 80% said that they believed they dreamt twice as many times or as long through the night, making for some epic stories, though they remained as nonsensical as usual. A slightly smaller ratio of users, around 75%, claimed that they were able to be fully and easily lucid for at least the majority of all these dreams. And just under half of users, whether they got the brew perfect or simply had the optimal biology for uptake, shared stories of unlocking the ultimate ability, and the thing that is normally unobtainable perhaps to everyone who isn’t some enlightened monk.

Going out of bounds.

That’s what my generation and the next one would call it, since video games have “broken our brains” and made us compare all media to their logic, some might say. But how does someone “go out of bounds” in a dream? What’s keeping anyone from doing that on their own, especially if they’re experts at lucid dreaming in the first place? It’s not the easiest thing to defy what little logic dreams do have and go right through walls, but I’ve pulled it off before.

Rather, what “out of bounds” means in this case… is leaving the normal boundaries of the entire dream world itself. To accept this concept, you need to first understand that when we have our fun or terrifying nighttime adventures, they’re set in a finite space; in essence a “game world” projected by our brains. It can morph as we grow, and our memories in which dreams are based shift in importance or disappear, to be replaced by newer, more vivid recollections. For some, like me, they’re more stable over the years. I even used to map out my dreamland, which helped me remember locations and how to “get to them.”

Rules can be bent on every visit, and we really are gods of our internal domains, but if you zoom out far enough, you realize that there is an underlying order to the places both fictional and recreated that you journey to each night.

Dream Brew upsets that order and allows you to leave the standard, usually safe dream world. You can go far higher, or deeper, or much further out than you normally would. Each direction yields different results, and I tried them all across the three nights I went through my small supply of the stuff.

Going past the horizon is inherently seen as the least “dangerous” option, so it’s what I tried first, just to make sure the mix had been properly made and to test its effects. I took a full dose, settled into the middle of my huge bed, and drifted off to sleep within minutes in a dark room as white noise played.

If the whole thing was a bust, so be it, I thought. If I happened to be unlucky enough that the brew didn’t affect me, or that all my other experiences had burnt out my potential to uptake, then I’d move on. If nothing else, I was just hoping that it’d give me a good night’s rest.

See, I had this stupid new asshole neighbor, and every morning he had a team come out and work on his seemingly eternal patio project. There’s sledge and jackhammering, and repeated use of a portable cement mixer. It was really starting to drive me nuts, so what better time to play with a dream drug?

Night One

When I first started dreaming lucidly that night, I had “spawned” in at one of the old tennis courts at my high school of all places. The courts extended off into one direction; there were dozens lined up, each being played on. I stood alone on mine as my teenage classmates, a sea of generic faces, laughed at me or booed. Who knows why, or what it was trying to convey. I never played tennis more than I had to, and always hated PE. So, as the ringing in my ears that often came with the start of a lucid trip faded, I went ahead and took flight to get away from whatever my mind had been inventing for me on its own.

Dream Brew also alters the normal limitations we find in dreams and the mental constructs in which they exist, allowing you to do things that the brain doesn’t normally allow while sleeping. Gone is the haziness and lack of control. You no longer run like you’re stuck in tar, or throw heavy punches that never land. You can tell time if you want, and clearly read text messages, though they can still be illogical. It’s as if your mind is still generating new lands or “decompressing” old ones from memory, but it can no longer anchor you to them. Normally, flying in dreams, at least for me, is slow and boring. I never get to go too high or fast. Typically, at most, I only make it to the top of a tall tree.

But now, I was able to soar like a fighter jet, with all the maneuverability. I blasted over cityscapes so fast that my mind didn’t have time to decide who, or what to fill them with, leaving them devoid of dream denizens. I blew past all the movie theaters that played made-up films, or the few real ones I was looking forward to seeing, only to disappoint me by making them terrible and aimless. The office where my dad used to work, which in this world I’d go to if I wanted to find myself trapped in an endless, dark liminal space, failed to “render” its windows, leaving it as an even more ominous brutalist monolith. The ridiculously obscene and huge ten-story mall I also got lost inside of more than once didn’t look so threatening when it was the size of a dollhouse under my wings.

This advanced flight was coming to me as easily as the thread posters said it would. My first time taking the stuff, and I was able to figure it out simply because multiple people said it was possible, and one of the best parts about the experience. Before long, I had left the city, and the endless suburban sprawl beyond. I flew over the twisting heap of spaghetti knots that were the highways without exits I’d been stuck on countless times, and then went past all those mountains I typically only saw on the horizon—yet had still gone to a few dreams a year. There were lonely cabins and ski resorts up there, despite me never having skied once in my life. From where does my mind pull these places?

Past them, at the end of a valley and beyond the train tracks that loop around my realm, is the ocean. Where it meets land are both various beaches and sheer cliffs. There is a bridge that spans the equivalent of twenty miles at least, which I’d never been able to cross. Every time I’ve tried, I always end up driving off and into the water. It doesn’t help that it lacks any railings.

But tonight, I’d finally see what was on the other side of the bridge. I’d find out what it really meant to go “out of bounds.” Past the horizon, I see land. I think it’s an island at first, but it’s much bigger. It’s like a whole new continent, that’s always been somewhere in my subconscious, yet inaccessible.

And… it’s a disappointing place. I expected this, however, after reading about so many other experiences. It isn’t low-fidelity in a video game sense, like it has a minimum level of detail and fewer polygons. Instead, it’s just plain. Even barren. There’s landscape, but it’s uninspired and dull. Soft rolling hills, a sudden transition to a desert, a big lake. There are no towns to see out here, and the trees are copy and pasted. No one is sure yet if these distant areas actually have always existed, or if they’re made when we see them for the first time, but there are some theories that if you stay in them long enough, they’ll begin to take on more refined shapes and even populate with people, or as most of us explorers call them, projections. Yeah, like they do in Inception.

I have no motivation to explore it, as I don’t have unlimited time. I hadn’t mentioned it yet, but a side effect of Dream Brew is that its temporal dilation gets worse as you further violate the natural order. You might think that the drug causes the brain to speed up, as if it’s “overclocking,” but it’s actually the opposite. Mental processes slow down as you go further out, although we don’t perceive this. In other words, as you travel more and more away from the normal “player area,” time stretches. Sometimes, just five minutes inside the head can equate to an hour in the real world. It seems paradoxical, since the dream realm gets simpler and murkier the more outside you go—like it should be easier for the mind to process—but there it is. The brain is so mysterious.

Everything I’ve described so far was enough to get some users to bail after a single go at it, or never attempt the trip at all. There’s too much “wrong” about the journey if it slows down or gunks up the mind like that, they’ll say, even if bad experiences have been almost unheard of. And, yeah, I’ll agree there’s something unsettling about the mind struggling like that, but it’s just the fear of the unknown. Our minds are always enigmatic, but most of us don’t go around on the daily having an existential crisis thinking about the fact.

I’m rambling, but there isn’t much left to say about the lateral journey. If you keep going, the world just gets even simpler, continually lowering in its definition. Landscapes become blurry, amorphous shapes, like geological clouds. Even the trees eventually disappear, and hills go from occasional bumps in the landscape to not appearing at all. The world turns flat, and loses its colors. Eventually, you have a gray sky above, and a slightly lighter gray ground below. Was it even ground anymore? I flew in close to investigate, and it was as hard and cold as concrete, but without the texture, and it wasn’t malleable at all.

The world persisted as a giant void for hundreds of miles or so, but I kept flying because I wanted to see for myself the phenomenon most other users had mentioned. A bit after I had lost track of time, landscape began to reform. The hills returned, and then the trees, and then I saw a solitary unused dirt road that transitioned to asphalt and then another long bridge. And on its other side, was my continent again, and more familiar places. I’d actually gone around my small world of dreams, in a circumnavigation that most were not likely to even consider, much less find a way to do unaided.

My first night’s journey had ended, and worried about real world time, even though it was the weekend, I forced myself to wake up. I’d drooled all over my pillow, had a full bladder, and I’d been asleep for twelve hours and made it to one in the afternoon, but at least I was alive. And my neighbor’s construction work was already over for the day.

I spent many of the hours that followed recollecting and gathering my thoughts about my trip, and writing down notes. It was recommended to wait a week before using Dream Brew again to let the mind reset, and I wasn’t going to argue against doctor’s orders.

Night Two

Five boring yet hellish weekdays of work later, I dove in for Round 2. This time, I went straight down after I began my dreams in an abandoned amusement park that never existed, but that I’d visited many times anyway. Reports from other explorers have stated that this was a good second thing to try, even if it could be an unsettling or terrifying journey. As a lover of horror movies and scary stories, I’d been looking forward to it.

There aren’t monsters down there. There aren’t really any projections at all, other than the occasional shadow of… something that once was, or could be. A “remnant,” some dreamers called them. The underworlds of our imaginations aren’t sewers, or caverns, or some kind of inner hell. It’s actually an abyss of the forgotten lands. It happens slowly, and we don’t notice, but our dream worlds gradually sink into darkness and are replaced with newer versions that better reflect who we’ve become as we get older.

The “crust” is also thinner than you might expect. Ten, maybe twenty feet of some kind of ethereal rock separates the surface from the first under layer, where the most recent previous version of every place and building lies dormant and buried. It’s very similar to the current iterations of everything, but, like the lands past the horizon, it’s all simpler; details are lost, and structures become rudimentary. Being down there, with only frozen or at most flickering shadows of empty shell NPCs makes for a liminal space wonderland for lovers of the concept. The vast empty spaces are mostly free of objects, but still mostly well-lit. It’s a corpse of a world with its own low-hanging sky, and if you explore it enough, you’ll find treasure.

It has endless suburbia of copy-pasted homes, and forgotten playgrounds in the depths. Locales you visited just once, or repeatedly used to as a child, eventually discarded by our minds, either because we got bored of them, or some part of our subconscious treated them as rejected venues. As I explored the tomb, I could recall locked-away memories of ancient dreams in some places. But most of what I saw, was gone from everywhere else in my mind, except for the small corners in which I studied skeletons of buildings with purposes lost to time. And yet, a story was once told in those corners.

As you go further down, the world becomes darker, and loses color again. Vast emptiness separates the structures, and what ones still exist—these little fragments of the brain’s past—often lack roofs or floors. Sometimes all that remains is a single wall. I saw a rocking chair on a flat, vacant lot, with nothing else nearby it for miles around. There was a billboard that was only filled with a solid, desaturated red. An entire fantastical castle made of stone, but as empty as a movie set. I used to dream of castles often, but not since I was eight.

There was a small river that began and ended with sudden, cut-off edges. A graveyard of crashed airplanes, since that’s all they do when I fly in dreams. That, or get lost at an airport—there were a few of those around, too. Old ones, replaced by even bigger and more labyrinthian terminals.

Keep going, and inevitably everything decays and breaks down. The layers become dimmer and fade into darkness, and the buildings also become nothing but shadows. You know when you’ve hit the bottommost level, as there is only solid blackness in all directions. If there’s something even further down into the abyss, or below it—one’s soul, perhaps—no one’s found it yet, and I’m no pioneer. I’d already spent long enough in the depths.

Fourteen hours I’d been asleep this time. These nights were getting ridiculous. My mind had been opened to the scale of the inner universe, but this wasn’t for me. It was too much, and looking behind the curtain was actually sort of ruining dreaming for me. I felt about ready to go back “in bounds” and take a break from lucid dreams, as well.

But I had one last dose in the refrigerator, and I didn’t hate the trips enough to just throw it out. There was one more direction to go, and I gave myself two weeks to recover and really consider if it would be worth going up.

During my rest period, I spent my time reading and rereading every experience when it came to skyward travel. For many, it was a disappointment, even if it was still briefly “interesting” to see the entire dream continent from the air. Keep going, and the sky transitions into some version of low orbit and space, which isn’t even considered truly out of bounds, at least for anyone that has visited a space station or walked the corridors of a sci-fi ship up there. The look of the cosmos is different for every user. For some, it’s pure darkness. Others see stars, or vast swirling patterns of light. I was curious what I had.

I was finally starting to sleep better, which lightened my mood a bit. My annoying neighbor’s patio project was also over with, giving me back my quiet mornings. Dream Brew could only stay potent while chilled for so long, so with my constant enemy of boredom nipping at my ankles, I made the choice to go ahead and sleep with it in my system for a final time.

Night Three

That night, I became lucid inside another one of my typical haunts: my old childhood mall, which had been torn down some years back. Sometimes it was busy and healthy. Usually, it isn’t. This time, all the stores are closed and sunlight pours in through the skylights. More liminal spaces in all directions. This trend feels unstoppable. I guess that a couple younger generations are just terrified of empty rooms.

I fly upward, clipping right through the roof, and I keep going. It’s a bright, clear day in my dreams, perfect for seeing the world that only truly exists when I sleep. I go further and further, until my mind decides it’s time to start darkening the blues of the sky. I stop for a moment and look down to see the shape of the continent, surrounded by an ocean. The coast lines wriggle slowly, like they’re changing shape, morphing into new boundaries. It’s either a common side effect of the drug, or from just seeing the world so high up; users aren’t sure.

Continuing my journey, I make it to low orbit. The gravity feels the same, I suppose since the mind doesn’t really perceive gravity while asleep. Unless your bed is on the space station, perhaps. I was never big on science fiction, and I don’t recall if I’d ever dreamt up in the void of space before.

I can’t speak for everyone, but my dream world has no sun. There is a field of stars up there, and something that looks like an arm of the Milky Way, but other than a few stars that have a noticeable shape and must be “closer,” there’s no larger, blinding one to speak of. Beneath me is a lush green, blue, and cloudy world that’s brighter than it ever could be given the lack of a nearby sun.

And, I mean, I guess I have fairly bog-standard dreams birthed from a well-adjusted mind, because it looks… normal? Boring? I have said I’m not the most imaginative person, and I don’t really go for nonsensical stories. One of the reasons I trained myself to dream lucidly was just from being tired of the random absurdity my brain subjects me to. Other users have described their worlds as looking alien, or dark and scary, or far more beautiful or exotic when seen from so high up. Me? I just see Earth, but with different continents.

Well, I think, this was a waste of time. I’d probably wake up being one of the disappointed explorers of the “above realm.” I look around space, searching for any spacecraft to board or maybe a moon to try and land on, but apparently my head can’t bother to manifest anything. I’m about to go back down and live out another lucid, typical story… when I see it, in the vastness of space.

There’s another world out there, either smaller or more distant than my psyche’s version of a moon. It glows a bright red, like a ruby in the darkness. It seems to pulsate, or breathe somehow. And I’m compelled to fly towards it. Just to see something new and strange before I wake up.

Finding these “other worlds” isn’t unprecedented for the explorers. If they had never been mentioned before on the forum, I wouldn’t have risked being the first to explore one. They’re rarely seen, but a few people had traveled to them already. Described as and theorized to be strange, alternate versions of our dream realms, the worlds have a familiarity to them, yet are also seen as “remixes” of the mental landscapes we know and visit at night.

If lateral movement brings us to the places that exist only in low detail, and going below sends us through time and older versions, then going up and out may take us to mirror, alternate dreamlands. Normally, they’re inaccessible, but we may find ourselves in such places when we’re sick or under the influence of something and don’t even realize it—as if our brains gave us a completely wrong “spawn point” while we have a chemical imbalance.

Only three or four users had traveled to these other worlds by the time I made my brew, but so far, they’d all enjoyed both the journey and the destination, because they were functional places that offered brand-new experiences quite different from what we’d grown used to.

Knowing my time is limited, and with no plans to make another dose, I go to the red world, determined to see anything at all that I’ve never seen before. I take aim and glide there, going far faster than expected. I know I’m not truly going through outer space, but it certainly feels like I’m traveling quickly in a vacuum. The world grows, and the one I came from shrinks behind me.

At some point, maybe halfway there, I realize that it seems to be pulling me in. That, or I’m simply going too fast. Upon feeling like I’m out of control and in for the sort of landing a meteor is used to, I try to slow myself down. But I can’t figure out how, if it’s even possible. The red world glows like a dull star, and its upper atmosphere has no distinguishing features, not even cloud layers or wisps. It’s simply a blood-red planet as big as my own.

I hit the air, but I have no body that can compress it or burn up. Instead, I pass through it incredibly fast, blasting across miles’ worth of dense crimson fog. Before I slam into another island continent, I get a glimpse of this world from above for just a second or two. Its oceans are a dark red, like oxygen-heavy blood, and it appears covered in ruined architecture or broken, twisted cities. In some areas are pillars of flame, as tall as skyscrapers. The buildings are as white as bone, and forests of black, dead trees cover rocky hills.

I only had two real thoughts before I hit the ground: I regretted coming here already, and I might’ve found the depths of hell. It must have existed as a place away from or beneath the physical, waking realm.

Once I had recovered and gotten to my floaty feet in the small crater I’d left from my impact, I took in the nightmarish sights all around me. This land, or at least the area where I’d fallen, was like an anti-liminal space. It was so dense and detailed with eccentric, bespoke artifacts that every spot felt like an end location; there were no empty, transitory spaces. It was an outdoor art museum from Dante’s Inferno. Roman and Greco pillars, many towering up into the sky, surrounded me, as did mostly armless or headless statues of all sizes.

Gnarled bloody roots ensnared the alabaster marble, wrapping around in impossible shapes and pulsating, yet instead of feeding trees, they culminated into skeletal torch stands that held flames seemingly burning without fuel. The bones were like those found in human arms and legs, yet they were too big and would have belonged to giants. On the ground, instead of marble, were endless red bricks, nearly all of them badly cracked and home to dark brown or black weeds. I came to realize that the hills were made of bones, too, but for them it was in the form of crimson seashells; the remnants of shellfish, in colors I don’t believe are found on Earth. And above, there was nothing but swirling red storm clouds that blocked out the stars. It truly was an infernal realm, but a unique vision of it, and one fabricated from a human mind. Some part of my mind.

The area appeared to be empty of anything living or projected, and I had no idea if they’d attack me like antibodies went after an intruder, despite them existing somewhere within my head. I had time to ponder for the immediate moment, so I scoured the possibilities of where I had sent myself.

My first thoughts orbited around the idea of multiple personalities, or different behaviors. What if this world was one that had always been a part of me, only it had been repressed, and never visited? Or maybe if my personality underwent a drastic, sudden change, I’d begin spending my nights in this hellscape instead? What if everyone had a world like this inside them, and those that had seen it were the ones who first conjured up descriptions of mythical underworlds throughout the ages?

Or instead, building on the idea of this place always being a part of me, what if it developed alongside my “normal” dreamland, and was simply, under usual circumstances, inaccessible to my consciousness? Or something vestigial that I had no need to see? Or, on that note… something still gestating, that could eventually replace the inner world I knew? Could it be a proto-dream world, or one made incorrectly and tossed aside, or a corrupted one that came out all wrong and was quarantined? I prided myself in holding onto logic and using it to explain my experiences, even during heavy trips, but this was something beyond, that defied easy explanation. I had just gone far past my comfort zone and done what I had no desire to do: I’d become a pioneer.

I had no body to break, but I was still too disoriented at first to fly. I stumbled around for a bit in the acid-trip nightmare landscape, full of bizarre and pointlessly morbid objects and obstacles of needlessly large proportions. Before long, the pathway of bricks ended near a hill of razor-sharp red shells. I fell as I climbed up them, slicing up my arms and hands. Even the boots I had projected onto myself were cut up. Years of experience told me that the injuries would heal and tears would mend, as long as I kept my eyes off them for a time and didn’t think or worry about the damage too much.

When I got to the top of the hill, I could see the macabre city in the valley below. Evolving past the classical imagery and motifs of my landing spot, it appeared to be a demented dream of a Victorian slum, full of tall houses and shops made of rotting dark wood. Endless smokestacks covered the roofs, puffing out red smog that might’ve contributed to the dense crimson clouds above, if the world even took climate into account.

The only reasons I went down into that city of decay were that it seemed just as empty as the prior location, and thus relatively safe, and my curiosity of what it might contain barely won out over my urge to flee this world, at least right away. I still couldn’t fly yet, but I could leap great distances with floaty jumps, so I made the journey in a few bounds.

Based off what I’d seen so far, I half-expected to find bizarre esoteric storefronts selling human skulls or vials of blood, or maybe books bound with human skin, but perhaps all of that would’ve been too on the nose. What I found instead were empty streets and abandoned shops. There was a pervasive sound of creaking and splintering wood, and the sight of nails and metal so rusted that the simulated breeze blew iron dust off their surfaces. There was an acrid smell of something acidic, and the feeling of aridness was so strong that it was like I could feel my mouth becoming dry.

I’d seen places with this kind of vibe many times in my dreams before. Not nearly as sick and depraved, no, but a core theme had carried over to this town: it had been forgotten and left behind. Long ago, it and variations of it may have hosted stories. Now it was falling into neglect and slowly turning into a husk, destined to be buried and dragged into the underlayers of this world. If those existed, I certainly had zero desire to see them.

But wasn’t this entire world abandoned, or never had a purpose in the first place? Why would one town be any different than anything else here?

As I thought about these things in the town square, near a rusted guillotine, I encountered my first sign of life. A faint scratching sound got me to look over towards a massive pyramidal stack of barrels. Sitting atop one of the bottom ones… was what appeared to be a hairless, blind cat with torn ears. Was it… looking at me, with those milky blank eyes?

And on closer inspection, this cat wasn’t just hairless—it was skinless, with its muscles fully exposed. As far as I could remember, I’d never dreamed of such a horrible looking creature. And I didn’t enjoy the realization that this world was actually not empty of projections. The cat “stared,” either sizing me up, or about to do something worse. When it let out a raspy, sickly hiss yet didn’t attack, I realized it was worse. It had likely just alerted every projection in the area, or even this entire cursed planet, to the presence of an intruder.

And the antibodies were closer than I expected. In seconds, these horrid… things began to emerge from the buildings, or broke through the windows. Some had even been clinging to the sides of structures in a dormant manner that made it impossible for me to notice them.

Nightmarish abominations, every one—and no two were alike. Not a single creature was recognizable from the horror meta. The monsters of video games and movies, I might know how to fight, or at least which side to run away from. These creatures lacked context, or a solid reference base that could have dampened my shock and disgust.

Some kind of slithering, bulbous mass of jelly slithered out from the door of a tavern, its body solid black and like a mix between a bloated leech and a jellyfish. One of the gaslight lampposts revealed itself to be a massive predator in disguise, the “pole” breaking up into spindly metal limbs while the lamp itself flipped around to reveal a face that was nothing but serrated teeth. The worst of the horde of a dozen or so difficult-to-describe monsters was a large creature that crawled down the side of an angled roof. It was a three-pronged beast that had six human legs attached to naked lower torsos, all stitched onto a single giant eyeball in the middle with an unwavering gaze always pointed right at me.

What kind of sick mind could conceive of such horrors? What part of me would ever manifest such impossible atrocities? I didn’t know, I didn’t want to know, and some core of my being was feeling true fear, as if realizing they could cause physical harm to me, even in a dream. Even if not, they’d certainly leave me psychologically scarred if I remained in this hellhole for a few minutes longer.

Just before I could be grabbed by a headless grizzly bear that had arms covered in canine teeth like they were spines, I managed to get myself up into the air. It was only a jump at first, but I kicked, swam, and wriggled on my slow descent—anything at all to tell my mind to “fly, damn it!” For a few seconds, I hovered in the air, frozen in place. And then, finally, I rocketed upwards, away from a place I’d never want to see again.

But… of course my problems wouldn’t just end there. I was unable to wake myself up, no matter how much I tried. My assumption was that I had to be back on my normal, sane world to do that—or in “space,” at the very least. And the nature of this world made it problematic even just to leave.

I hadn’t really noticed before since I had blazed through the atmosphere like a comet, but hurricane-force winds filled the dense red cloud layer, and as I couldn’t see in that fog of red more than a foot or so in front of my face, I got myself disoriented almost immediately. Being buffeted and tossed around by the winds didn’t help matters, and I must’ve spent most of my time flying around on a horizontal plane and getting nowhere. I’d repeatedly think I had escaped the sky, only to find ground below me again instead of stars.

This world was keeping me trapped. It felt like I’d been ensnared by a massive and hungry eldritch predator. And now it was coming to life or waking up, alerted by my presence. For all I knew, creatures and monsters from all over the world were honing in on my position. And some of them could fly.

I saw them above the red horizon, shaped like dragons or giant crows, or some chimera of the two—they were too far away for me to tell, and I wasn’t interested in finding out. I figured that my best chance at getting off this world was in finding an area with a clear or at least better view of the sky. I could still soar over the landscape pretty damn quickly, which was my best, only defense.

In my search, I blew past and over deserts of bone-white cacti. I saw a waterfall made up of blood, draining into in an industrial vat of sludge. There was an entire city made solely of huge factories spewing solid red smoke from stacks that jutted out at odd diagonal angles. There was an enormous temple built out of black and white marble that used non-Euclidian geometry yet had no discernible center point or shrine, like it was venerating nothing. It was covered in disturbed oil paintings, many hung upside down, each depicting scenes I won’t bother to describe. I’ll just say… I’d never seen so many depictions of entrails and severed limbs in one gallery.

More and more, I learned that this world didn’t have one single element to it I could call “normal.”

My world had produced many wacky, random stories, yet it was mostly made of everyday suburbs and cities. This place was a horror show of almost comedic or satirical proportions, like a gonzo movie director with a wild vision and a blank check who made endless sets for the most demented story ever.

It felt… too much. Fake, yet no less terrifying, because someone still had to dream all this up. And it was modest old me, apparently. The world was so far removed from my regular mindset that I was seen as a foreign invader.

I became lost in my thoughts, and my eyes spent too much time skyward, searching for a hole in the clouds. I never saw it coming. I was flying over some kind of marsh, filled with bubbling tar. Suddenly, the entire swamp rose into the air, taking the form of a gigantic octopus tentacle. I didn’t see it in time, and it wrapped itself around me, bringing me to a stop in an instant.

I struggled to break free as it pulled me down into the mire, and no amount of trying to summon a weapon of any kind helped, as I seemed to be powerless to alter or create anything in the hell world. Even so, I somehow managed to kick and tear myself free just by thrashing hard enough, and came crashing down into the gravel encircling the bog.

Being covered in tar made be unable to fly, though I could still run fast enough to get away from the gooey appendage before it had a chance to reach down and grab me a second time. But, again, this world was so thick and dense with the wildest shit no regular person imagines, that I barely got anywhere before I tripped on something and fell right into a gore pile of indeterminate viscera. Revolting as that was—and, yes, I could smell it—what was worse was getting back up and seeing the thing that had tripped me.

It looked like an infinitely long winding root, snaking all across the ground for miles and doubling back on itself. I couldn’t even see the tree it belonged to, if there was one, but it did have the appearance of a gnarled root. One that slithered, and broke into multiple segments, each of which sprouted large insect legs that looked razor-sharp. The countless limbs lifted the ends of the root creatures upwards, and upon turning to me, they all sprouted lamprey-like mouths of circling jagged teeth. They hissed like the skinless cat, and began striking at me like snakes. This place and its monsters were never-ending.

Each of their bites that hit sent a wave of pain through my body. I’d felt pain in dreams before, but just as an interpretation of it, like your mind telling you “this is supposed to hurt.” But this was different. I felt those bites like they were physical blows, tearing into me. It shouldn’t have been possible, and I was only lucky that they were fairly small monstrosities. If something larger attacked me here… I was already dreading just thinking about it.         

I scrambled away, got up onto a hill made of more gore and guts from hundreds of indistinguishable beasts, and willed myself to leap across an empty valley. The pain didn’t linger, the tar left my body as it slowly refreshed itself or “forgot” about the injuries, and I soon took to the air again. From now on, I told myself, I’d pay better attention to the ground.

The flying projections had caught up substantially, and their numbers had grown. There was a cloud of buzzing locusts accompanying them, visible against the blood-red sky. God knows what they looked like close up, or if they had the power to tear me to pieces within seconds. Dying here felt like a truly terrifying concept, and not something I would test if I could help it.

It looked like I was heading somewhere. I was above a twisted network of train tracks, overlapping and crisscrossing each other. There were highways of solid black asphalt, dark as the tar that had grabbed me. These meaningless transportation routes were coalescing around a growing city on the horizon. It attracted my gaze so much that I couldn’t help but focus solely on its study.

It was almost endlessly wide, bigger than a typical metropolis in the real world. Yet it was also dead from what I could see. There were no lights; just darkened, dead tombs the size of office towers and made of stone carved into intricate shapes that had no parallel to Earth’s civilizations, lost or otherwise. Like a city where old gods once dwelled, it’s too difficult to describe with clarity, but I can say that the structures gradually contorted, and many leaned heavily, only being propped up by unseen supports or forces.

I know nothing needs to make sense in dreams, but everything in this place was just so perverse and unnatural. I can’t stress that enough. I’m actually only describing about half the things I remember seeing, because it’s so hard to explain the other half with words alone. Despite the fact that a great many of the creatures, objects, “artwork,” and structures are seared into my brain like a mental scar. I think that world internally damaged me. It’s been a month since I stupidly went to it, and I feel like I’m just now starting to recover. It’s not like I can talk to anyone about it, outside of sharing my journey with online strangers.

At first figuring it’d be best to avoid the dead city entirely, I adjusted my flight heading to give it a wide berth. But then I saw it: my possible exit.

Above the center of the city was a break in the crimson clouds. I didn’t notice at first, because I couldn’t see the sky from my location, but it definitely looked like there was a “stadium effect” eye of a hurricane out there. High winds swirled around the eye, but the inside seemed peaceful. If it went all the way to the upper atmosphere, or just most of the way and ended at a cloud layer thin enough to break through, I figured I’d be able to escape the nightmare from hell.

Bracing for the worst but having no idea what that could entail, I changed course and headed into the airspace over the sprawling graveyard. As I flew above the derelict buildings, I worked up the courage to look down, and saw no signs of movement. Maybe the projections avoided the place? Or there could be millions of them inside the towers, waiting in the shadows.

I noticed that there appeared to be a large, circular gap in the stone edifices dead ahead of me, but I didn’t pay it much mind. This turned out to be a huge mistake, as shortly after I began to angle myself upward to enter the eye, I passed over the reason for the architectural void in the middle of the city, and paid a price for flying above it.

The instant I crossed some invisible threshold, I lost my forward momentum. I couldn’t tell if something was pulling me down, or if I had flown over a place where the gravity that shouldn’t exist was heavier. There was no wind against my face, not even moving air as I plummeted like a rock.

Directly below me was the why behind the hole in the city: there was a hole in the ground, too. A gigantic one, too clean to be a sinkhole, at least a mile in diameter. It had circular walls of smooth stone, and was surrounded by more of that cracked red brick road that weaved across the world.

The pit was like a black hole. Without so much as feeling air resistance, I dropped straight down into it. I dipped beneath the surface in seconds, and kept going. It was like descending into an abyssal trench. The world became bathed in a faintly foggy, monochrome red, losing all its other color. In the dim light near the bottom, which could’ve been three or more miles deep for all I knew, I began to see landscape.

Seeing as how I thought at first that this surely must’ve been a tunnel into the core of this world, or maybe the source of all nightmares, a gateway to the evil within my soul, or something else too poetic for a simpleton like me to describe, what I saw take shape in the darkness surprised me. I only had a few seconds to see it before I crashed into soft earth, but from the glimpse I got, the area seemed surprisingly… ordinary.

I stood up in an overgrown field, filled with sepia-toned tall grass. I had landed on a derelict farm, with nothing past the wooden fences but more tall grass. There was a barn in the distance, burnt and falling apart. A windmill stood between it and the farmhouse, its blades not moving in the slightest as no wind existed down here. High up above was a splotch of night sky, surrounded by a ring of red. Nothing I did got me back into the air. I couldn’t even jump higher than I did in the real world. Whatever this place was, it had me trapped more than the rest of the God forsaken realm.

There weren’t any creatures or people nearby, yet I still felt fully exposed, so I made the only logical choice in my mind. I went up the dusty driveway, past a tilted and empty mailbox, and used the rickety old steps to get onto the porch. The door was unlocked, and I ventured inside the perfectly typically old farmhouse, where it was even darker and grayer.

The interior was full of furniture and décor that looked like it had come out of the 1960s, and every chair, lamp, and surface was covered in dust. It had an old tube TV in the living room, which was the only source of light and provided some through the static and snow playing endlessly on its screen. The kitchen had one of those old latch-operated refrigerators kids could get trapped in, and a checkerboard linoleum floor.

I went upstairs—every step creaked unnervingly loudly, no surprise—and found a clawfoot tub in the bathroom, and a single, very plain bedroom that could have belonged to a child, though it was impossible to know for sure since there were no toys or wall hangings whatsoever. I climbed out its window and got up on the roof for a better look around outside, but saw nothing else in the pit. Just more grass in all directions, until it hit the wall. There was no way in this hell I was going out in that, not when it reached my shoulders.

After returning to the 1950s couch in the living room, I had a seat and considered what few options I had. My situation was shit. But if I could find some way to fly again, the extra distance the pit gave me meant I had more room to accelerate. I figured I’d be able to pick up enough speed to become unstoppable on my way up to space. In any case, no living things seemed to exist down here, and nothing on the surface was in a hurry to come down to pursue me.

Thinking about the house, I soon grasped the only two truly odd aspects about it, other than how normal, peaceful, and locked in time it was compared to the above world. For one, it had no mirrors anywhere, not even in the bathroom. Mirrors hardly ever appeared in my dreams to begin with, and it’s not like they worked right when looked into anyway, but it was noteworthy to me.

And, secondly, there were no photographs on the walls, but there were paintings covering almost every available surface, to the point where I couldn’t even see the floral wallpaper underneath them enough to describe its patterns. Most of the art was well done, and made in oils. They all seemed to be original, as well, and none appeared to be a reproduction of anything I’d ever seen.

They were mostly rural landscapes, or cityscapes at night. Few depicted any people, and the ones that did… Well, the figures were either facing away from the viewer, or their faces were obscured by shadow. Combined with the no mirrors thing, it was like this home belonged to some artistic recluse who either had facial blindness, or trouble connecting with other humans to the point where they either couldn’t draw faces, or refused to.

That wouldn’t have been a problem of my own, if I were an artist. I might not like most of the people I meet, but I do try to be outgoing. Strange. So many things in dreams are there to represent our fears or confusion, and yet, this house seemingly had no connection to me at all, and shouldn’t have been something my mind came up with. For that matter, I grew up in a city. I didn’t even have any relatives that lived on a farm, and no reason to visit one.

I got up after a bit to head outside, maybe to circle the house or check out the decaying barn, and on my way to the door, I noticed the one I’d missed earlier. It was under the stairs, a little smaller than usual. It was open a crack, which made me question why I hadn’t seen it before. Had it opened a tiny bit while I’d been in the home? It felt ominous and beckoning, absolutely, but I was desperate to find anything at all that might help me leave this world, or give me some clues about its nature. As much as I prioritized escaping, if there were a few explanations to be found and taken back “home” with me, then maybe this horrific misadventure wouldn’t haunt me quite as much for the rest of my waking days and sleeping nights. Knowledge pushed back fear, didn’t it?

With nothing to hold to light my way down the stairs, I cautiously went down basement steps. I won’t lie and say I was brave, or that it was never not a stupid thing to do, but at least it wasn’t pitch-black down there. There was a dim but warm and flickering light… coming from an old iron furnace with an open hatch. Inside was a bare, dancing flame; it didn’t look like anything was burning.

The cellar was otherwise mostly plain and empty, but the floor looked bumpy at first. It took until I was on the last step to understand why. Covering every square inch of the bottom of this house, at the bottom of a deep pit in a hell world, on the floor of someone’s inner sanctum… were bodies. Dozens of them, laid out neatly and compactly, each covered by a white bedsheet. They were shaped like adult humans, from what little I saw of their forms. In this dream’s demented narrative, maybe they were the former projections of the world? Before it was taken over by those failed science experiments?

I didn’t need to see anymore. There was nothing among the bodies worth exploring. And worse, I had felt the rising sensation of either being watched, or that I wasn’t alone, since the moment I had opened the basement door. I was ready to be anywhere other than there.

I turned to leave, but when I did so, I noticed the final, hidden element in the room. Back at the top of the stairs, hanging above the door, was a single, small painting, barely visible in the low firelight. It was the only piece of artwork down there, and it was as if it were keeping an eye on all the bodies. Guarding them, or… making sure they didn’t come to life and try to leave.

And I say “keeping an eye on,” because it was also the only painting in the entire house that fully depicted a person, facing forward.

That person appeared to be a boy around the age of thirteen. He had short blond hair, and wore a little black suit with a tie. He seemed to be posing for the artwork. The scene depicted the barn up above, before it was burned and partially collapsed. It was set at late dusk, and made heavy use of the color red in its darkening sky. Wait, I thought. Red? So far, everything in this house had been grayscale. Even the furnace fire flickered bright white.

The other paintings had all been drab, boring depictions. But this one, relegated to the basement… Something was wrong with it, other than just being creepy as shit. That boy’s sinister little smile, his dead stare like the kind seen in cult members, the dark colors of the artwork and its general vibe—it was real horror movie or haunted painting type crap. I was done with this house. For that matter, fuck this whole farm.

I took one more step upward, and then heard the faintest sound of something like wind, or the rustling of fabric. Given how still and quiet the pit had been, that might as well have been like a gunshot going off. Dread filling what little was left of me that had yet to be filled, I felt compelled to look back up at the painting.

The boy was now missing.

“Hell no,” I remember exclaiming out loud.

Absolutely God damn done with this place, I ran up the rest of the steps and turned towards the front door, which I’d left open. There was a feeling of a presence now—it was strong, and different than any of those abominations up top. I can’t describe it in any other way other than by saying… I felt violated. Like something was tearing through my memories, my very being. Judging my entire existence. And it could see me, no matter where I was.

I’d almost made it to the door when that creepy ass teenage boy from the painting stepped into the doorway, like he’d been waiting for me on the porch. He stopped, and then… stared at me. His face was placid, but his eyes were cold and lifeless. He was also in full color—what little of it there was, seeing as how his clothes were black and dark gray, and his skin was pale. I stood there stupidly, and he tilted his head and spoke without speaking.

By that I mean… To say he could talk to me telepathically feels like an understatement. Rather, I felt his words in the essence of the world. They weren’t thunderous or loud, but were still the words of some god of that realm. He spoke without moving his mouth, and the sound was everywhere, brought into existence for anything with or without ears in this place to hear.

“Who are you?” he asked me stoically, without emotion. “How did you get here? You’re so different than the things I’ve painted.”

“I… I-I…” I stammered out, and said the only thing I could think of. “I’m sorry for trespassing… I just want to leave. C-can you help me do that?”

His neck craned even further, to an unnatural angle, and then snapped back in place before he rendered judgment by saying, “Wow. You’re so ugly. You are really, really ugly, you know that? A misshapen bag of guts and clay.”

I stepped backwards as he produced a butcher’s knife from behind his back and shuffled towards me, as if to lift a leg took too much effort or was beneath him. Its metal gleamed in the darkness of the house.

“But I can make you beautiful,” his voice promised me.

Survival instincts finally kicked in, and I turned and ran—which, as we all know, isn’t always easy in dreams. This time, however, I had no difficulty getting my ass out of that cursed farmhouse via the backdoor that was in the kitchen. I didn’t even look behind me until I was halfway down the driveway, and saw no one chasing me.

I went past the mailbox, and beyond the end of the driveway where one might expect a main road. Instead, the dirt and gravel transitioned to grass, and then the tall grass, but now I didn’t care; I only wanted to put as much distance between me and that hellmouth of a home as possible. I’d just woken up whatever person or thing lived there, and didn’t want to find out if it could move freely throughout the pit.

I quickly learned that I was screwed from the beginning.

It hit me the instant the knife did, when it was just suddenly there, pointing outward in front of me. It cleanly slid into my stomach all the way to the hilt, and I came to a sudden stop. The boy, still partially concealed in the tall grass, looked up at me from behind the overgrown blades as tremendous pain and fire ripped through me. But I did manage a single cohesive thought.

This little bastard can teleport.

“You’ll look better without your insides,” he told me, and yanked the knife out as swiftly as it had gone in. “Those parts are only good for the paintings.”

Jesus. I was going to die. I didn’t know how a dream could actually kill you, but I felt sure of it. My rotting corpse back in bed wouldn’t be found for weeks. The toxicology reports would tell the world I’d died from an overdose, and that would be my existence. I died as a lonely junkie, and no one would ever know of the terror I felt in my final moments.

I fell backward onto the ground, and tried to push myself away on the dirt and grass from the monster with the face of a boy, but the agony I felt nearly paralyzed my arms and legs. That demon in kid form walked towards me and watched me squirm before him, but it was impossible to tell if he even enjoyed it. And if it didn’t, maybe nothing did.

The little shit said one final thing to me: “I think you’ll be my next masterpiece. If only I could show you to the world.”

He kneeled at my side. He pinned me to the ground in the middle of the grassy field with a single hand, his strength far surpassing my power to get up. He stared at me a few seconds longer, and then raised that knife of his. It was already clean again, with none of my blood in sight.

I closed my eyes.

And then… a familiar, distant sound rang out from above, filling the sky with its faint echo. It was usually one I dreaded, and that I only heard on the rare occasion… when my internal clock didn’t wake me up at the usual hour.

My phone’s alarm, and the most annoying one available. I’d set it the night before, as a precaution of sorts. But I had no idea it could actually reach me here.

Maybe the boy didn’t, either, because he looked up into the sky instead of splaying my entrails all over the field. I’d like to say that the distraction gave me the break I needed to get back up, learn how to fly again, and rocket myself towards the heavens, because it would paint me as maybe kind of cool after spending the whole night fleeing in terror… but it didn’t happen that way.

It was much simpler. My body made me wake up.

But, not instantly. Some invisible force ripped me right off the dirt, and pulled me towards that hole in the sky even faster than I could fly while on the brew. The last I saw of that kid, he was shrinking beneath me and staring as placidly as always, not a hint of curiosity nor anger on his face.

Flailing my arms and legs as I went and still feeling a sharp pain in my stomach, I blasted up through the atmosphere and left the pit and the hell world behind. After a brief flight through space, where I could no longer think a single thought clearly, I reentered my normal dream world’s atmosphere. The instant I made impact with the ground somewhere just outside my most-visited city, I was startled awake and jolted up in bed. My alarm was still looping, and must have been for less than twenty seconds. That was all it took to get out of there.

Sweat had soaked through my pajamas, my head was throbbing as much as the phantom pain in my abdomen, and I could barely walk or distinguish dreams from reality for about an hour… but I was alive.

I took a long, hot shower, binged some stupid reality TV all day just to ground myself in other stories, and didn’t get to sleep again for about two days. All the while, I felt that stab wound, and the pain only slowly lessened.

After taking a sick day off, which I never usually do, I finally passed out on my couch. Somehow, my dreams were typical nonsense and non-lucid, set purely in my own good old places. The only thing out of the ordinary was the persistent ache in my belly that became a frequent topic of the stories. At one point, I was running around town frantically looking for a “stomach doctor.”

I woke up to a familiar sound, and it didn’t occur to me at first that I shouldn’t have been hearing it again. Loud, obnoxious jackhammering. Was my neighbor starting another home improvement project? Dehydrated and hungry, I got off my couch and looked out the window to see a scene weird enough to make me think I was still dreaming.

My neighbor’s house was completely cordoned off by a police barricade. Several cruisers and a mobile forensics lab were parked out front and blocking the street. News crews were trying to get footage of whatever was happening, and my other neighbors were being questioned. I got on my phone and found the story hitting national headlines before I even checked the local ones.

Apparently, I had slept through a predawn raid following an investigation that had lasted over a year. My sixty-year-old neighbor, who was thought to be a recluse who kept to himself, was surrounded and dragged out by the authorities. And now they were tearing apart his new patio to find… and count the bodies underneath it.

I won’t write publicly who this man is or share which nearby house is mine, to give me some privacy, but you all probably already know. The most prolific serial killer in recent American history, thought to have been murdering people since the 1970s, and I was living and sleeping right next to the psycho. Rumors are that he grew up in a small town and considers himself an artist, who has used some… exotic paints. He ran away at a young age, and his parents’ bodies weren’t found until years later.

So, to everyone on this forum, I don’t recommend looking for Dream Brew. I changed the name of the cocktail to obscure it, and I closed the incognito window where I once kept its recipe thread open. Hopefully I’ll forget the name of that website sometime soon so I won’t be tempted.

To make this story and this long post mean something, I’ll leave a warning here. This drug is too powerful and dangerous. I now know just where I went, uninvited, and I really think I nearly died. I still have a dull ache in my belly, and I’m not sure when I’ll be able to enjoy dreaming again.

Boundaries exist for a reason. Keep your own masterpieces in the lines.