I was chosen to take part in an exam.
A sinister, macabre
exam where any signs of collusion, communication, revealing your answers or leaving
without finishing the exam would spell death.
Equally, the person with the
lowest mark would also die.
The exam hall was a large, austere, grey room with
steps leading from the door to the exam floor. There were about 50 grey tables
set in lines and rows and some people had already started by the time I got to
the room. The questions on each exam paper were different to the next, so even if
one person managed to ask another without detection it would be fruitless. I
didn’t know whether breaking the rules led to an instant death or whether it
would start a ‘timer’ so to speak but I wasn’t about to find out.
I was dealing well enough with the questions they were
short-answer questions and didn’t seem particularly difficult. I decided to
look ahead; my exam finished with an essay question which asked me to
“Explain why logical reasoning is wasted on human mortals”
From this I got a glimpse of the motives of the forces that
made this death-exam.
As it happened, I didn’t feel like the question was unanswerable
and started formulating whilst I worked through the rest of the questions. I
was going to talk about extra-dimensional beings that were beyond our
comprehension, like the Eldrazi, the Great Old Ones and the other ones that live
among us undetected except for the slight shiver we get as one passes through
us.
Aside from the harsh rules, the exam would also try and make
us lose by transporting us to different locations (or giving hallucinations to
that effect). I didn’t notice anyone else being taken but I was suddenly transported to a
grassy field on a bright, sunny day. I was sitting at a picnic table decorated with
a few blooms of lichen. There was a wooden fence to my right and a dirt path which
crested over a small hill to my left. As I sat working, two walkers appeared
from over the hill. They asked what I was doing and looked at the papers on the
broad, wooden tabletop. They were looking at the questions I had yet to answer,
which I thought wouldn’t count as revealing answers, so I let them look and
made no effort to explain to them, lest it break a rule.
After this I was transported to a dark series of hallways
with one or two other people. At parts the hallways snaked round or narrowed in
to make passage more difficult but never enough to stop us being able to pass.
At other parts the hallways expanded into open plan areas where groups of people stood motionless, phantasmal, in the middle. We passed through those crowds as
inconspicuously as possible.
After we had explored for a while we heard a tremendous explosion
ahead of us. A squat creature the size of a full-grown bull with the body of a frog,
the head of a dragon and the limbs of a lion crashed through the wall ahead of
us. The name ‘Vorous’ filled our heads. The creature was stunned from the
impact but soon came to its senses and had us in its line of sight.
It gave chase.
We ran as fast as we could but soon found Vorous on our heels,
it was snapping its large, body-wide jaws and slamming recklessly into the
walls, pillars and other infrastructure in these hallways. I had the idea to
bring it to the dim-lit plazas to feed on the motionless ghost-people and communicated it to the people I was fleeing with. They were
horrified by my idea of killing other people to let us live but realised we
were without other options, aside from being killed and eaten ourselves.
We came back to the quad of people and ran through them,
hoping they wouldn’t grab us, or try to slow us down. We cleared them and kept
running. I had no idea whether Vorous would stop and eat the unfortunate people
I had brought fanged-death to, but in my mind’s eye I saw the creature tossing
the poor souls about before ripping them apart, as would a crocodile, with its
terrible jaws.
Whatever happened, we were able to put distance between us
and Vorous and thought we were in the clear as we vaulted over a stack of
trolleys that had been rolled out as a hurdle for us. Whilst we were mid-vault,
Vorous slammed back into view, piling frenziedly into the wall, sending bits of
plaster tumbling from the ceiling. We narrowly escaped its snapping, foaming,
bloodied jaws by all cramming into a lift which took us away from that floor.
After this chase, I was back in the bleak exam hall. I
thought that I had answered all but the 16-mark essay question, but it had
disappeared off my paper and several other questions had appeared instead. The words
changed positions and the letters seemed to shimmer in and out of existence, I
could not read them. I recognised individual letters but could not form the
words. It was at this point that I remembered you are not meant to be able to read
in dreams so decided I would simply not finish the exam. If I didn’t finish it,
I couldn’t die from having the lowest mark, it would also stave off the death
of another who may have otherwise got the lowest mark. I would fold up the exam
paper, keep it, and a pen, on my person always and become a mute.
Later on, I was walking in a park. There were a series of
fissures in the ground which meant certain parts had to be traversed with wooden
platforms that moved along when a dial was spun; a la Legend of Zelda puzzles with
the gust bellows, Deku leaf or gale boomerang. There was also a McDonalds in
the park whose door opened using the same mechanic. I wasn’t interested in going
in but saw someone from the choir I sing in, and a few other people sitting on
a bench outside. They hailed me over.
As I was walking towards them, I saw someone swing a tremendous
greatsword to trim a hedge and also take off a low branch of a tree too. I also
saw that if you took an immediate right after going through the park’s gate you
could scramble over a narrow bit to get to this part of the park without using
any of the puzzle platforms.
Once I’d got to the group’s table the person stood up to tell
me there was wasp and asked me to deal with it. I was mindful that this might still
have been part of the exam and a trick to make me speak, but I spoke anyway. I
told them that as a rule I didn’t kill animals and had a particular affinity to
wasps; I would be no good to them. They went and sat glumly down again.
The scene now cut to a much nicer, more opulent hallway
inside what I would later discover to be a hotel. Apparently, their wasp had
flown into a ventilation duct and I was going to get it out. I looked around for
a chair to stand on as the duct was quite high up, I found one and brought it
over to the entrance of the pipe. I unscrewed the lid and peered in. There was
a radiator-like grill directly behind the now-removed cap so I couldn’t look in
very far. I grabbed a fibre optic cable with live imaging capabilities and fed
it down the pipe. After a while I saw something very strange; there were black
veins growing all over the inside of the duct, I thought they may have been streaks
of dirt, but they seemed to be pulsating, as if transporting a fluid. I had not
been looking at these veins for long before they moved towards the entrance of
the duct and out of frame of the optic cable. I got the impression they knew I had
discovered them and were coming to get me.
I don’t remember if the black veins actually entered my
body (though if they did it was through my eyes) but soon after I was thrown into a world of
hallucination. Not a single thing in my sight retained its real-world identity.
I don’t remember particular details (except for one) but the walls, floor and
ceiling were perpetually shifting. Things appeared larger, then smaller, and their
colours swirled, changed and melded. Anyone I was previously with had
now disappeared. I walked a while, lost in this fluctuating, unreal world. On
one wall I saw a small, rectangular gap that, upon looking into, showed the
stars in the night sky along with nebulae and solar systems. I grabbed the rectangle
and took it with me. It still showed the space-scape.
The perspective then cut away to show me in the non-hallucination
world. I had pulled a mirror off the wall, laid it on the steps of a grand
staircase and was looking into it.
Later on in the hotel after I had regained my senses I was stood in a glass lift to get to my floor. The lift stopped at a modern-looking, well-lit bar. A couple got in and asked me if I’d like to join them for a drink. I declined, saying that
I’d recently been drugged, they accepted that as a valid reason and left me to
my business.
Later still, my group and I were
leaving the hotel on the ground floor. The entrance foyer held many seats
and tables to host a lot of guests. As we sat in the foyer we were brought food,
likely pizza, on wooden boards, with a red-looking garnish on the side. Everyone
else was presented theirs with the pizza as the closest thing to them on the board
and the garnish the furthest away. However, mine was given to me with the garnish
closest. I thought this was highly suspicious and didn’t eat it.
Author’s notes:
There are a lot of waking-world influences to this dream. Nothing is particularly untoward.
There are a lot of waking-world influences to this dream. Nothing is particularly untoward.
The paranoia element comes from walking home from work. It’s very dark when I walk
home from work now, so I'm careful not to be sneaked up on.
The hallucinations
and madness of the dream are likely a result of my reading a book called The
Woman in Black by Susan Hill wherein a man is haunted by a ghost as he tries to
sort through the estate of a dead widow.
Vorous and the whole chase sequence are likely influenced by a game called "Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion" where you get chased down narrow corridors by certain horrors that try to kill you.
