An Unfortunate Vision

More Painter experimentation. What I love about the idea of cloning is that it lets you use photographs, etc, that have low resolution as the basis for high-resolution images.

Night before last I think I got some sleep, but that's based purely on circumstantial evidence. Last night I crashed at nine forty and fell asleep fairly quickly. Unfortunately, I woke up at one. I read for half an hour (The editorial material in James Gunn's The Road To Science Fiction, Volume 5.), then tried to sleep again.

After forty-five minutes it was obvious that I wasn't going down, so I went up to my studio so as to avoid disturbing the missus. At five, I went back to bed.

I focused on relaxing my jaws, hands, and feet. I played Bach's Sheep May Safely Graze in my mind and focused on random visual images. At first they were nothing but phosphenes, but after an hour or so they resolved into a hypnagogic vision of young girls at play.

I'd guess their ages were between four and seven, and they were dressed in brightly colored hippy-style clothes, knits and patterns. The landscape around them seemed as though it was uncultivated and richly green, but the shapes of the plants, bushes and bunch-grass, resolved themselves as a fuzzy glow.

I retained lucidity through the vision, and thought to myself that this was not the kind of thing I usually saw while going to sleep. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

After a while, the girls stopped playing. Instead, they attacked each other savagely, clawing and biting. Many of them lost their eyes, and the sight of their empty sockets weeping tears of blood is still right in my mind's eye.

Worse was the way some of them bit at each other, struggling mouth-to-mouth as they chewed out one another's teeth. I could feel it. The grit of bitten enamel, the wrenching in the gums. I can feel it now.

It seems that while I was experiencing this, I was writhing and making noises. The missus left the bed and set up camp on the couch in the living room. I regained consciousness at eight, and have been almost entirely useless all day long. I wound up watching The Host and weeping.

I believe that my brain and I are due for a trial seperation.