In these years, my dreams started to play on me again and horrify me. Always from childhood, I had had regular nightmares, tossing and turning in the sheets and sobbing out […]
However, one particular recurring dream motif pushed to the surface around my 18th year (although I had nightmares involving it one and off rarely since at least the age of eight). By one point in my ‘home year’, it had come to me almost every time I slept. I would just be drifting off, and, suddenly, in black and white, and with internal sound, huge, spined, skeletal slugs would push into my vision out of the perceptual blackness, often coming from the right of my view, circling in front of me, all feelers and demonic faces of jutting bone and bloody teeth, but still basically giant black slugs beneath the macabre inventiveness. They were an almost infinite array of them […] tugging off chunks of skin […] engulfed in hellish molluscs, in a cold spray of my blood.
After what felt like long minutes of this, I would wake in horrified agony, leaping up out of bed screaming. I would often urinate in fear or otherwise scrabble back and forth […] Having the light on as I slept, as I had been accustomed to doing my whole life, made no tangible difference. Every single night, for days on end, I would be left run down and exhausted, terrified to return to sleep, a pronounced somniphobia and artificial insomnia developing in me […]
Over the years, I have tried many times to assuage this fear and shift the dreams by taking them out into the waking reality, drawing these devilish alien slugs, or designing them with computer art programs.
The abstract beginning of a slug dream
One of the slugs preparing to bite me
Bony slugs clambering into my vision
More demonic slugs emerge
A terrifying toothed slug gets up close to my face
Eight months after my return from Brookside, my nightmares started to get to me, no doubt aided by Dad’s continuing stress-inducing rows and an inability to relax at any moment when awake, conscious only that my door would be flung back, and Dad would storm into my room to find some new, insignificant, niggling excuse to wear me down.
Editor’s interpolated note: To escape the living nightmare, Benjamin attempted suicide at the age of eighteen.
I awoke partially in the ambulance and again on a hospital gurney, feeling the sharp scratch of a needle on my inner arm and hearing voices around me […] I had first been given a 5-pint emergency blood transfusion in the evening. […]
I had been taking both of my tablets [psychiatric meds - Ed.] for over a year now. Why was I feeling like this? I had long decided that that was a foolish question. These tablets were a sham. […]
Past all these faded symbolic worries, there was always Dad. I approached each new conversation with the hope of warmth and basic human respect, but that was rarely, if ever, the case. I realised one thing, at least. I loved him, but I was afraid of him. As for my mother […] at least she did not mock me.
4 replies on “Consumption, 11”
My biggest fear with these has always been someone going, depending who they are ‘oh cool/yuck, degenerate! Just like HR Giger!’ or some callous rubbish like that, as if it were a genuine artistic move, some pretension. I’ve never got them horrific enough (I suppose these will have to do – I’ve given up on this task). I had used to put them on album covers and page icons and the like, almost in morbid resignation, and to ‘gain power over them’, but that doesn’t work. Very occasionally – only a few times a month – I get them these days (although it’s more of the crazed snapping dogs, and other, worse things I can’t really talk about; people in terrible torturous danger and such, children hurt, blood everywhere, or just colourful, sinister cruelty).
I drew the ‘slugs’ once for an NHS art therapist. She ummed and erred at me, like examining a child’s macabre doodle, and then genuinely said to me in that patronising toddler-friendly voice they put on: ‘Oh, I see. Can you not draw something a bit different this time, something nicer?’ I quit attending the week after (and as memory serves, went psychotic for a month or so not long after, to a more schizophrenic degree than usual).
As I was saying, psychotherapists treat their adult clients like children (“black pedagogy”) because, in reality, they know nothing about real psychology. That woman told you that you had to draw beautiful things as a child, when, as we know, to understand the mind it’s not enough to imagine figures of light but to analyse darkness.
For many years I had repulsive dreams about spiders, and unsuccessfully tried to cure my arachnophobia in 1978 by putting a tarantula in a jar and showing it to my relatives. It didn’t work because I had to know what that repulsive animal symbolised (I mention something of this in Hojas Susurrantes when, in a dream I had in San Rafael, California, my unconscious painted Catholic theologian Hans Küng as a huge red-and-black spider in my bedroom).
Dear Cesar,
I’m sorry if this is a bizarre question (hideously for me, my mind cannot remember your book as well as I need to). Did you ever, whilst in California, attend anything where you met Hans Kung? I’m just browsing his ‘red tie, black’ suit picture on Wikipedia (from 2019), but I see he did a tour of the US in 1963, and assume he has been back. I see something about 1981 and The University of Chicago – Wikipedia is like C-C; they ruin you with inconsiderate text walls. I know 1982 was a gruelling year for you (I pitied you). I just wondered, given your prior troubles with home and hell, if his movement did something to annoy you.
I estimate it was in 1986 when I had the dream in which my unconscious represented Hans Küng as a huge red-and-black spider. The dream must be contextualized as the time when my dad’s eschatological introjects were reawakened in mi mind, specifically the doctrine of eternal damnation.
The previous year, I had bought some pamphlets at San Rafael Church (a very emblematic church in San Rafael). I just took this image from the same copies I acquired in 1985! I keep them for the same reason you keep images of slugs: to understand my inner demons I have to analyse the densest darkness of my mind.
In my twenties, I naively believed that the liberal theologian Küng would write against the doctrine of eternal damnation. What was my surprise when I learned that, in a book in which this famous German spoke about post-mortem survival, the idiot left the question open: claiming that God was free to condemn his creatures if he so chose!
There couldn’t be a clearer example of Black Pedagogy at its peak! And Küng’s “betrayal” hit me so hard (in my youthful mind, I imagined that liberal theologians repudiated the most terrifying aspects of the Middle Ages), just at the time when I was titanically struggling against my dad’s introjects, that my mind portrayed him as a giant spider I saw, lying on the wall, in my room in Palenque.
Of course, to fully understand the dream, I’ll have to translate all those passages myself so you can read them in a printed book. They’re in the fifth “book” of my Hojas Susurrantes.