Nightmare: Suicides and Parasites

I had this dream about a week ago, but it was memorable enough to have stuck with me throughout the week. It’s time to tell you about it.

The dream begins with myself, one of my brothers (we’ll call him Nick), and some unidentified friends hanging out at a park. It’s a clear, overcast day, and there are lots of people. The park is a flat, grassy area with a few trees dotting the landscape. Strangely enough, there was also a small cliff (about 7 feet tall) that dropped down into a long, endless, dark blue ocean.

I laid in the grass people-watching when I saw a person acting strangely. A woman was walking toward the ocean. She looked like she was in a trance. Before I realized what she was doing, she reached the cliff and dropped, limp, into the rough waters, never to be seen again. The woman had ended her life.

The feelings I was experiencing were very real. I had watched another person kill themselves in front of my own eyes. I sat, shocked. No one else in the park seemed to notice as they went about their day. Then, a man driving a large tractor drove toward the ocean. He, too, looked like he was in a trance. I couldn’t stop the huge machine, so I watched helplessly as the man drove his tractor into the ocean, sinking into the abyss below.

Two suicides in a matter of minutes. I felt like I wanted to cry, but I was still in shock.

In a sudden change of scenery, the ocean was now a large, bowl-shaped, rocky pit. The bottom of the ravine was hundreds and hundreds of feet down. The sides of the ravine were spiked with jutting rocks.

Yet again, a person came, in the same death trance, and walked off the cliff that lead down into the ravine. This time, everyone else noticed. The park-goers stopped their games and stared at the spot where the man jumped off. Then, we all heard a cry for help as a pair of hands appeared, reaching up. The man had changed his mind and decided not to go through with his suicide. A half a dozen people, including myself, ran to help the man. In a frenzy, we all tried to help the man up, but ended up hanging from the end of the cliff ourselves. I was toward the bottom of the stack of people hanging for dear life. I was able to squat down on a piece of jutting rock below me. I kept my body close to the end to keep gravity on my side. The suicide man was being held by another random man. We all waited for another to come to pull us up.

I watched the suicide man as his expression suddenly changed from scared for his life to the emotionless trance from before. He started wriggling wildly and escaped the grip of the man trying to hold on to him, nearly bringing us all with him. He started falling into the ravine, laughing madly. There were a few seconds of silence among us until we heard a blood-curdling scream of pain. Then it came again, and again, and then silence. The man hadn’t died instantly. He had hit the edges of the bowl-shaped ravine several times during his descent, screaming in pain, before finally dying.

Now free of the extra weight, the group of would-be good Samaritans started pulling themselves up. I remember looking down in the ravine and feeling a very real feeling of fear of my predicament. I didn’t want to fall. I knew I’d die a painful death just like the man who ended his life.

I was pulled up by another and brought to safety.

The dream then changed to me laying in my bed. The lights in my room were dim. As I sat up in bed, I felt something cold and wet fall on me. I searched the bed and found a small maggot. I hate maggots, so I was thoroughly disgusted. I looked up at the ceiling to find the source and was mortified to see a swarm of maggots begin raining down into my bed.

That was the end of my visceral dream.