Phantom Chained

Chapter 39. Where the wind blows from. Ingrid.

At the end of his monologue, after "if only lice could appreciate the beauty of Rapunzel's hair", it calmly threw me off its back, only holding me by my hand. I became suspended in the orange nothingness, completely losing my sense of direction.

Don't know about lice, but I almost had a heart attack there; if my astral form even has one, that is. Can you blame me? I found myself in a sheer mass of golden fibers; a space without direction or ability to see something other than shining spaghetti that slowly twisted and turned... An aesthete's dream no doubt, but I just couldn't see anything to marvel at.

"Are we there yet?" I asked impatiently. The threads freely passed through me as if I was a ghost, and that felt incredibly irritating. Not to mention I was starting to feel something akin to claustrophobia.

"No, we're waiting."

"For what?"

"For it."

"What's 'it'?"

"It."

I fell into an offended silence. However the silence only intensified my fear and I, barely registering what I did, asked the Incubus to hug me. I had to regain some sort of stability, even if that meant I had to lean against the Incubus' rough skin.

Elm snickered and moments later its hands locked me inside a safe ring.

My fear curled into itself and hid in the very depths of my consciousness. Now, the silent drifting of the golden disarray filled me with a drowsy sensation that almost made me fall asleep, but a hard slap on my backside made me regain my senses.

"Stop screaming!" The Incubus yelled in my ear. "And don't sleep! Do whatever you can to stop yourself from resonating with the delta-waves, got it?"

"What happens if I fall asleep?"

"Ignoramus... I mean, even I don't know, and that is the scary part. One possibility is your material body could fall into a coma and you will lie there next to the pretty girl, or maybe it could be something much worse."

Distressed by the new perspective, I shook my head. I still wanted to pass out so I decided to chat with the Incubus to somewhat hold onto my consciousness. To my question if its kind even sleep, it said that no, and the sensation was a new experience for it in a human body. Then it trailed off into philosophy and I almost passed out again. The only part I remember is that it claimed that sleep is not that necessary for human rebooting and that the entire meaning of human life lies in those exact moments, but who knows who could use that. And it didn't exactly want to find out using his own dear self, so it's done with sleep.

"Humans are but small fry mingling around the shallow waters of the ocean of Creation, for whom even a drifting plastic bag is seen as a messenger from a higher power, bringing a prophecy to the rulers of shallow waters. But most of the time the bag is just a bag and it's better if they don't swim into it... are you even listening?"

"Yeah, yeah... a bag is a bag... listen, you... Elm! So everything around us is the astral plane? So how real is everything that is happening to us?"

Elm answered as he always does:

"As real as how unreal is everything that doesn't happen to us."

"Did you even understand what you just said?" I asked.

"Of course! Self-understanding, just as self-knowledge, are the base components for the self-satisfaction of oneself. This only applies to humans on a very minimal level, that's where all your anxiety and psychoses come from. The fate of humanity is Via dolorosa; a path of thorns."