Our Darker Minds

Chapter 1

Something about this isn't right. I'm losing control, my strength leaving me one cell at a time. This for sure is the least controllable Lucid I've had.
I find my head tilted down, aches wrenching in my neck as I lift my head as if my neck was craned that way forever. I'm sitting in a cold leather chair, that raises my hairs to the touch. The house looks like shit. Banged up, snow glistening in the moonlight as it swirls and twists through the caved in roof. The windows are smashed, floor boards missing. The green wool couch thrown against the window is decorated with tiny glass fragments, creating an eerie figure with its shadow against the faded denim blue walls.
This isn't real, it's in my head, but not created by me. How long have I been here? How long have I been sitting in this hole wondering where I came from? I feel so weak, like something is falling on me. I can't hold it, but I have to sit here and pretend like I can. Almost like I'm trying to impress something I don't know is there, even though I know it's sitting in my brain, growing and sculpting every thought into a swirling anxiety I can't withstand. It won't give up, and I just might.
It's my subconscious taking over, unbinding with my conscious mind. That is how lucid dreams are created. The binding of your conscious and subconscious bind and create third party super-subconscious that recognizes the dreaming process and hands control of each process to my subconscious.
A cold breeze strikes my skin and I curl up in the chair for warmth. Nothing but this chair is intact, like someone just put it here and watched this place corrode. I stir, the hairs on my arms still bristling.
"Adam."
I slip slightly, my grip on the Lucid coming loose. My eyes twitch to the direction of the noise. My body twists to the right. I grip the arm of the chair for leverage. My eyes are locked on the large hole in the wall, made by the arm of the couch launched against the wall. For a brief moment, I see something with two eyes, staring through the hole like headlights. I observe them with the few seconds I have. A sheet of orangey blonde hair, slips over my eyes. I groan. I grip the arms of the chair and get up, then sweep my hair from my face. Obviously, the eyes are now gone. I brush the hair out of my face, frustrated.
A possible blip in my vision and hearing? It better be. As if this Lucid weren't difficult enough. It's more than just the abstract horror of being here alone in this destroyed house with two eyes watching, or the taste of ash everytime I inhale, but it's the terror or worrying I'll lose control and never wake up. I can't be weak or it might just cost me. This thing in the dream with me is taunting me with these terrors, the eyes, the shadows, everything just closing in on me, shoving me to my breaking pointing. It's certainly not anything I want to be a part of.
I get up from the chair, my head craned to the right, my eyes fixed to the wall. The thing I'm in the dream with has lost its leverage, struggling to regain control. I take a cautious step forward, another struggle. It's like every move I make, every thought is a blow to its chest. I keep watching, waiting for the eyes to appear again. A head rush catches up to me, eating away at the corners of my vision. I shake it off, still staring.
Nice try. It keeps trying to distract me, to attack me, but it has just a little more energy to attack me once more. I watch out for it, while still staring at the hole. Something appears in the background, it looks like a tentacle, like a vine waving back and forth, but that's exactly what it is, a vine waving in the wind.
That was good. I didn't see that coming at all.
"Adam."
I hear it again. My eyes twitch back to the hole. My jaw clenches as I watched the eyes fade away once more as if they were always there. I'm infuriated, I want to catch this thing, it's like trying to capture a fleeting feeling of nostalgia. My control slips in the wrong direction. I can barely keep control of this fight longer than thirty seconds. I'm right back where I started.
"Dammit," I say, the words slipping past my mind.
I clench my jaw harder, strangling every muscle in my face. My wobbly legs take me to the door. I grip the cold bronze handle before my sweaty fingers loosen my grasp and slide off. I can feel it now, the sudden psychological adrenaline, the physical feeling of being trapped, the constant sweat. With the other hand, I grip the door handle and twist it all the way. A screech rings out, tearing at my eardrums. It echoes without effort. It seems to come from all around me. My hand jerks from the handle as my adrenaline spikes. I turn and my throw my arms above me to protect myself. It feels like hundreds of daggers closing in on me, until they suddenly stop, turning and shooting back into the sky. In my head, it feels metaphorical but suddenly feels real to both dimensions.
This is not okay. This level of stress is not natural for me. Usually, I can move objects with my hand and now things are coming at me almost as if their doing it on their own. Definitely not. That's not possible. My Lucids are controlled by me and me only, and I have to keep it that way. It's smart, turning my fear into a weapon to manipulate me.
My gaze focuses back on the door. I reach back once again for the handle. A wind throws me to my back against the destroyed floor. I've done it, I've finally lost control, all the leverage tilted, or thrown, to the creatures side. The house fades from my vision, nothing but the doorway I once stood before and the tree in the from yard.
The door suddenly flies off its hinges and rockets toward the yard. The door smashes into the ground, cracking and falling into pieces in the dead of the night. I'm dizzy, cold, stunned. I'm completely and utterly terrified.
I get up and step into the cold blackness of the night, fighting the white in the corner of my vision. The cold breeze strikes my skin, raising goosebumps to accompany my stunned and freezing arm hairs. It feels like stepping into a battlefield. Anything could come at me. Especially now that the being has control now.
A thought not belonging to me flies into my mind, something I should have thought long before. My shoulders drop, relaxed. This creature doesn't want a fight. Maybe it just wants my attention.
"Adam."
I don't turn my head, I know it's there, I should have known the creature, with it's vicious yellowish white eyes, was my enemy. It was the other mind fighting me in my own conscience, and now it has all control.
But how? How does something so terrifying, something that stares and lurches this land, appear in this world and fight my mind at the same time? In my mind, it's just now possible. It's alien to me, just like the creature fighting the every thought I think.
I suspect it's going to delete me, or torture me, or destroy my thoughts, but it doesn't it just stares, waiting for me to turn my head and look at it, maybe I will.
I gather the courage and turn toward it, every muscle aching as if it were my brain. My eyes land on it. Wow. All I can see are its beady eyes staring into mine. It's so black, I can't even see it against the light of its eyes.
"Adam."
"Yeah, I can hear you," I whisper.
It keeps staring, not a blink, a twitch, or any hint of movement. The creature's eyes are locked on mine.
A flash of lightning illuminates the sky. Blue light beams across this poorly crafted wasteland for only a millisecond, which is all I need. It's standing tall. Maybe eight feet. It looks like a mannequin, standing almost lifelessly still, but I guess I can't tell.
Its head is ovalish, mouth absent. I can't see a nose, or anything reminiscent of a nose. My gaze transitions to its arms, lying uselessly by the creature's side. They have three joints like goats legs. Hideously long, almost touching the ground. The thing looked like a giant fly.
As the light blinks out, its eyes stay on me. Another flash. It sits there for a few seconds, as it should. I wait for it to stop, but it doesn't. It just stays in the sky. A massive crack in the air illuminating the night sky. In a blur, the creature is on the ground. Grumbling and twitching, it shuffles on the ground, knees in the dirt, twisting and squirming in agonizing pain.
"Please," it murmurs. "you must help me."
I lift my aching leg, taking a step toward the brute. Stepping carefully around the concrete and broken glass of the door, I approached the creature. It twitches, a rushed, painful jerking movement, completely inhuman.
It's head cranes in an inhuman twisting motion. The eyes land on me again, I squint and look away. A ache begins to taunt me in the back of my neck, growing to my spine.
I grit my teeth ignore the blinding light. "What do you need? Where did you come from?" I stammer. It backes away in fear. What a show. I don't even know why it's acting this way after that whole battle, I can tell it's clearly not exhausted by the way it holds the world in place with such ease. I inhale, "Why are you here?"
It twitches again. It's clawing at the nonexistent fabric that is my sanity. Showing me these terrors is backing me into a corner that is only compliance, like a negative influence. It uses brute force to scare me, so I will do anything it says. Genius.
But maybe it's just testing me.
"You must do me a favor." it quivers like a naked man in the winter. It's head twists and turns like frightened worm. From another's perspective it's probably funny, but after what it's done, for all I know it's summoning the energy to swallow me whole with this dream.
"Go to the barkless tree."
"What barkless tree? Where?" I ask, intimated. I step forward, fighting for composure. I don't want to fight it, I don't want to stay here. If don't take my chance to wake up before it kills me, I'll regret it.
I attempt to force myself form the dream, but it won't work. I'm throwing myself at a net, hoping it will snap and let me free. The creature keeps me clutched in this nightmare, I don't even know how it has control over that. It might be an illusion, I just need to find my way around it.
Lots of people have this struggle with their dreams, the feeling of not waking up from a nightmare is utter horror, having to see how you die just to wake up. However, not a lot of people found what I did about having control waking up. It's an illusion, just like this. You are trapped in the dream by your own panic, you wake up when you die because your mind thinks it's all over and it shuts you out. But that's how you escape. What you do is take the initiative control and reshape the dream however it suits you. The first step, is realizing it's not real. That lets you relax and you can wake up with ease. It goes the same exact way here. All you need to do is find a way to bypass it. But in this case, this monster can hold me still and do whatever it wants because it has control. All I have to do is find the illusion and get the hell out of here.
I search for the illusion, weaving together every corner and hole of the dream trying to uncover something. There. It's a simple formula, but I can't access it. The creativity of this monsters technique is beautiful. It's definitely got a higher psychological IQ than mine.
I construct the procedure, there are many steps, and I can't manage every one, but I can get the root-steps. Piece by piece, my energy drains as the steps come together. I finally have it. The steps shouldn't have taken so much from me. But now that I have it, something doesn't feel right.
It's not working, it's being blocked. There's a new illusion, I should have guessed it was another illusion. I found the illusion, the fake illusion, and I put it together. It should be working properly, and now I've spent all my energy on it.
Another protocol activates suddenly, an extinguish protocol. It shuts me out, sweeping me away like a man falling from a waterfall. There would be so many contingencies. There's no way it would have known which one I chose, so it created a plan for all of them. I wonder how many protocols it has running to get me out of there. One of them is keeping me in here, I don't know which one, but it's in there somewhere.
My mind is shut out of the dream and back into my body. The creature now has my full attention. It won't let me back out, another protocol. I have got to outsmart this creature, but how?
"Go now. If you wake up now, you will make it." it grumbles.
The protocol stops, and the dream is open to me again. The real formula to the waking illusion sits right in front of me like it's inviting me to leave.
It wants me out?
The monster pokes at parts of my mind, fragments of memories and nerves. It's convincing me to use the waking illusion. It wants me gone I can feel it more than anything.
I rush back into the dreams control. Finding the waking illusion. It takes no energy, no effort, all I have to do is see it and it starts to activate. Time slows to a crawl as a realization flies into me.
This isn't a real waking illusion. It's another fake. It shouldn't be this easy. I know what to do now. My thoughts separate, creating a whole new thinking dimension, like another person inside my brain thinking simultaneously. But it's me. Thinking in two dimensions.
It's also known well as multitasking.
Multitasking is possible, unlike everyone says, they just don't know how to do it. It's an easy trick I found when doing some homework. You're brain thinks thousands of things every second, they all come from different spots in your brain, but I found they all overlap in your mind, to form a perspective. Your brain hears, sees, feels, smells, and tastes all at once. You focus on them all at once, while one primary has more focus than others, which is normally sight. They say it's not possible to focus on all of them equally, but all you have to do is put your mind into primary perspective and all focus becomes equal. All you have to do is think fast enough to substitute it with another thought before you double over to your mind. You divide your primary focus to the other thought and another thought dimension is created. You need more energy to generate more focus. But overall it's easy to get once you do it enough.
I have one dimension on the creature and one putting my plan together. I have it in my trap.
"What are you?" I yell. I lure it back to the dream. It's eyes twitch. It's confused. It listens to my mind, but the only one the creature is listening to is the one focusing on itself."I want to know!" I howl again. Maybe if I keep yelling at it, it would tell me what it was.
It wonders out of the dreams controls. I watch the the waking illusion fall apart, like it decided it wasn't using it anymore. Strange things like shock triggers and dream simulations simulations unfurl from the fake waking illusion. But something catches my eye. It's a waking signal. It's plan was to shock me, put me in a dream, then wake me up, wiping every memory I had in the Lucid. Like a real dream.
It's not trying to hurt me, it's testing me. Testing my psychological IQ, like it's seeing if I'm good enough. It tells me to meet it while simultaneously testing if I'm qualified to, otherwise I'd wake up like nothing happened.
But I'm not like that. I'm taking control and it has no idea. I don't want to fail, and I won't.
I wander around the dream controls with the second dimension. I search for the creatures thoughts in the controls. Now that I have control again, the readings of the creature will come up, and I know where to find it. I wander into the interface, where the physical construction of the dream elements are made. I set off a protocol in my brain, summoning the status readings of everything in the dream. There it is. It has it's plan. It's trap is set. Looks like I didn't outsmart it quite yet.
It looks like it's going to pull me out of any access to this dream, locking me in another dream like an endscreen to a video game. But there's more. Fourteen terror triggers will be set. Along with set of panic triggers. It would be so terrifying, my adrenaline would skyrocket. That would send me from the dream, which is different than just fleeing the dream. It's like being locked out of a piece of your mind. It would disrupt my mind's recover process. I would be permanently trapped in this state.
I have to show it I'm here. Once it sees me, the protocol would deactivate and I could escape with the bare waking signal. The second dimension starts to fade, the wall in my brain crumbling. My mind is one now. It sees me in the controls now. I watch the protocol disassemble. I smile and flee the interface.
It slowly tilts its head toward me again. It's eyes are hurt, but there's a kind of impressed imbedded in it's vicious eyes. "We are Widows" it groans. I feel like I've been hit in the gut. Control slips from me once again, but it doesn't matter, I have it thinking I'm weak again.
It's perfect.
My trap is laid, and the Widow snaps at the bait as bolts to the interface. I practically fly from the interface back to the waking illusion. My panic is overwhelmed excitement, it makes the dream controls seem real. I fight for composure, I can't slip up now.
I'm already at the waking illusion before it realizes I'm gone. I search for the waking illusion, activating it. I relax as I feel myself slip from this hell of a dream. There's a long pause, until everything goes white and it's only me and the Widow. I give it a smile before I go.
I jerk up in my bed, my back aching, followed by cramps and a headache. The sound of nothingness soothes my frantic mind. I think over what happened in the Lucid, I'm still not sure how that monster got in my head. The Widow was really there, in my head battling me for control, if it weren't I would have found the dream faster because I'm not that weak anymore. But it physically hurt my brain to fight it, that means it must be real and it got into my head. But how?
I feel proud that I beat it, but something's not right. I can't help but feel the overwhelming sense that I failed. I had to have failed, but how? I outsmarted the creature, I should have passed this stupid test.
But I failed.
But how would I know that? It's just a feeling. Unless it might have been something in the waking illusion. The Widow must have added the trigger underneath the illusion. I should have known to look, but I got lucky.
I throw the covers off of me, exposing my short pale legs to light of my window. I whip my legs around the side of the bed, letting them dangle off and poke the floor. I take a step onto the floor, the cold stings against my aching feet. I felt my legs wobble beneath me. I take another shaky step forward, adjusting to the acting in my legs. My feet meet the rug as stumble out of the room into the hallway.
I look down the lengthy hallway, my eyes meeting the window at the end. There are a couple of rooms, but it's mostly empty. My head turns back in front of me. The bathroom is in front of me currently, it's dark inside. The quartz sink glows in the dark amongst the other dark elements of the bathroom.
My wobbly aching legs take me to the bathroom. I step inside, the feeling of the cold tiles on the bottom of my feet make me shiver. I flail my arm behind me, slashing at the light switch. Light fills the room as the light bulbs burn, it makes a slight whirring noise I can never get out of my head. I step in front of the mirror.
I see a stranger in the mirror, he's unfamiliar to me, I don't know who he is. It's funny, I always picture someone else in the mirror. Now it's like I'm some homeless man. I look beat up, my hair is practically smeared across my face. My eyes are bloodshot and my eyelashes are tangled. My lips are chapped and my brow is furrowed.
It really is like a stranger. I'm nothing like the handsome fourteen-year-old that I really am. With my bright red hair, muscular neck, small pointed nose, small forehead, blue eyes, small ears. Not like the exhausted "morning-me".
I'm fighting the burning feeling of churning vomit that I can't help but know is coming. I need something, I'm hungry, but I don't want to be. I want to be in bed sharpening the psychological skills I'm so desperate to master.
I breathe heavily, trying to get the cold air to sooth my flaming throat. I lean out of the doorway, I listen close to hear Dad making breakfast.
Not a peep. Must be a quiet day today.
I shrug and open for the bathroom cupboard to the left of the mirror. The inside is unorganized, filled with pills, band-aids, combs, brushes, hand sanitizer, and a lot more scattered lazily along all six wooden shelves.
I angle myself over the sink and grab a comb, style my hair, and put it back
I stumble back into my bedroom clumsily. My bed is wrapped in my stainless white sheets, my glass lamp left off and the golden curtains wide open, letting the sunlight fill the room.
I walk toward my dresser, it's tall, made of maple wood with five drawers. Countless books, objects, and other accessories decorated the top of it.
I grab the handle of a drawer, the second drawer to the bottom. I pull on the handle and the drawer slides out. I get myself dressed and make my way downstairs, my legs finally climbing over the ache. The massive rug laid out across the hallway seemed out of place, more than usual. What is it this time. Are the roses too red? The singing woman's mouth to wide? I'm still not used to it. I don't want to take it down, it's more important to Dad than me, but he holds on to the fact that she'd gone better by having her essence up here with us. It's not our rug, it's my mother's.
My mother, Natalie Krodis, was in a car accident that threw her into an inescapable coma. It's been six years since it happened. Having the rug upstairs is like having her upstairs, but it's not the same.
I walk to the stairs, a bacon smell becoming evident. I walk down the stairs as I find there's a man in the kitchen, brown hair neatly cropped to the side, black T-shirt, and grey sweatpants. He's bent over a stove, the salty smell of bacon wafting from his position, floating about the house. It was Dad, Kyle Krodis, my father, making breakfast.
"Hey Dad," I mutter. He turns toward me, his face beaming.
"Good morning, Adam," he says. I cringe, he speaks the same name that creature did. I clutch the wooden railing on the wall and jumped down the remaining two stairs. "Making bacon for my favorite and least favorite child."
I laugh quietly, he'd always say that. I'm an only child, but I wasn't always an only child. I used to have a sister, Sonya Krodis, she would be twelve years old in a few days. She had an amazing sense for visual arts, I'm certain if she were still around, a spot for her would be held among the best in the world. She was the best I'd ever seen. She always drew things, even after she went to bed, she turned on her lamp and started to sketch in her notebook. She went missing four years ago. She hasn't been found.
"What's for breakfast?" I ask, leaning against the dining room table.
Dad laughs. "What did I just say? Also, I made you some pancakes. They're on the table."
I look at the table, a large white tablecloth spread across it, and a plate of three pancakes covered in syrup sitting there on top of it.
"Thanks, Dad," I say. I walk to the table and yank out a chair out a chair. I sit down and pick up my fork lying next to the plate.
I sink my fork into the top pancake, cutting it off and shoveling it in my mouth like a starving dog.
"So how's your life going?" I ask.
"You live with me," Dad chuckles lightly, pondering the question. He didn't want to admit how empty he really felt. "You should know,"
I look back at him. He smiles, already looking at me, like he was watching this whole time. He wants to show me that he's happy, but I know it's only his coffee keeping him up. "Plus, I see everything differently, so you'd probably know better than I do."
Dad puts his tongs on the counter next to him. He walks across the room, ruffling my hair. "You're fine, I assume. You get to put that 'Ben Shin' kid in his place." He kneels beside me
I sigh, smiling a little. I rest my fork to the right of the plate. I turn back to Dad, his head hovers over my shoulder.
"You know about that?"
"Adam, I know everything. Don't you know?" Dad smiles while. I let out a sigh, expecting a laugh. "It's not that bad. He deserves it. Plus I know that you're a little fighting machine so you can take care of him. Just make sure there's a good reason. If he'll leave you alone, I'm all for it."
I roll my eyes, Dad still looking at me. "He's seventeen."
"So?" he says, almost jokingly.
"He's only an extra year worth of muscle and experience than I have," I protest. Dad face is unreadable for a moment, the corners of his mouth lowered, his eyes empty as he searches for a reply. He rolls his eyes, finally coming up with a small "whatever" and he returns to the stove. My head rises as he returns with a plate of bacon, steaming and wafting. He puts it on the table. I cut the pile in half with side of my hand.
"Left is yours, right is mine." I say. I lift his head to meet his eyes. "Deal?"
"Whatever you say, boss," he says, sitting next to me. "So how'd you sleep?"
I ponder for a moment. There's no fun in not telling him that I won a psychological battle with a monster that rocked an IQ of over 300, at least that's my guess. But I don't want him assuming or overthinking. He's never been able to control his mind as well as I have.
"Tense,"
He scoffs, then tilts his head back. "Harsh" he barks. He eats a piece of bacon and meets my eyes again. "Bad dream?" he asks. I siffen, images of the creature's warped body filling my mind like poison.
"Sure." I murmur. I rip a chunk of pancake with the fork and toss it in my mouth.
Dad laughs quietly, watching as I chew my food. "You're awful quiet, very fierce with your food, though. Are you sure you're okay?"
"I'm fine." I mutter. "Just a little freaked out. Gonna be hard to get through this day, I'm a little spooked."
Dad throws his elbows on the table and leans in. "Spooked? Why?" his eyes tune to my face, almost like he's scanning it. I picture myself in Dad' eyes. Bags under my eyes, syrup dripping down my chin, and a tired angry frown under my nose. "Another entity?"
I stop chewing. What a perfect explanation. An entity, in my case, is a copy of my mindset, a system to challenge my mind. It's my insecurities coming to see if I'm good enough. It can make whatever it wants. It's happened before, mostly when I'm in doubt, or when I'm missing composure. It sounds like a disorder and Dad thinks I should see someone about it, like a therapist or doctor, but I disagree.
It's got to be an entity, it's the only way something could enter my brain and toy with a world I constructed myself. The only thing that could give me such a challenge, and with such a vast variety of illusions I use, it's very likely I could have masked myself and fought against myself.
"Yeah!" I bark. "Must be, yeah." I quiet down and glance at my feet.
"I really think you should see a doctor." he says in a quiet and gentle tone. I sigh and give him a dirty look. He sighs back, almost mockingly. "You should do something this weekend. With friends, I mean."
I scoff. "I don't know anybody."
"How about Jean? We like him, don't we?" he leans in toward me.
Jean Bethel, my beloved best friend and classmate. Closing in on eight years, we've stuck for each other since third grade. He's helped me from the beginning. I see him everyday, but being spring break, we don't do a lot of other things. I could do something with him, but nothing comes to mind.
"Of course," I pause. "but I don't really know what could do together."
Dad pushes back in his chair. "How about a hike? You know, through Vaste Vide's canyon."
I push back as well, despite not being finished my pancakes. "Sure, that normally works."
"Alright, sounds like a plan."