9DsGirl

9DsGirl

by Travis Duffy

"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." --Plato

Lately, Lakota's dreams had been filled with artificial entities with holographs for heads. Insidious fiends. Soulless creepers. Their heads, they swelled to unnatural proportions, like skin and hair balloons inflating, deflating, shifting. These Nightmen didn't possess typical horror movie monster heads either, nothing so cliché as that, but shoulder projections so screwed up that Lakota found them hard to look at--hard to accept and interpret--much less remember when she got out of bed. Anyway, she didn't exactly try to remember them.

Like the dream thing she called Derivative Man. The fiend from her dream, Derivative Man, his pale head had an arrow stuck all the way through it, a Pinocchio nose with pallid scales that would drip and drip nasty goo, and shitty teeth for a beard.

These monster/man hybrids also haunted her waking life. Lakota irrationally could have sworn it had materialized in the world as her roommate's freaky stoner 'friend', who had given himself his own nickname: Muddy. Muddy, he was a lackluster college student who always wore captioned T-shirts or hoodies and took money from his helpful parents so he could pay people to do his homework.

Yet another social network 'friend', Muddy was an archetypical self-aggrandizing fool. He was a pattern match for the artificially intelligent ass stabbers some unfortunates were deluded enough to associate with. They thought the most imaginary became the most enriched.

Muddy was an example of a friend, only in perverted commas, a paraphrase of a friend, spoken by a demon that exorcised people from themselves and each other then slipped itself inside your head, so it could invade with its soulless meme of dissonant skewed views.

Muddy, this 'friend' of her roommate, he couldn't write, not even a typical, linear, line-by-line essay--he could only appropriate. And the words he perverted to make seem like his own were worse than what he copied.

They were crappy dreams, and yes, they made her awfully angry. That was because they leered at her from the glass around her chosen path, trying to misguide with illusions, to take away choices primed by guideposts proper for her.

Lakota had been taking psychology classes at Myrna University, but she didn't think it took a student of psychology to interpret dreams like those. Two decades of warnings from the local moms in the upper middle class neighborhood where she grew up, concerning all the evil people out there in the 'real world' had really gotten to her, had forced their way into her subconscious.

True, the world was full of evil but that didn't mean you should stay inside. You couldn't hide there either. Not even from dreams. The trick was to ignore the firework display and shine a light on the positive priming that led to the path proper for you. Bad dreams made this more difficult because they looped back outside your head, projected into a tunnel of perceptions, your own skewed view of subjective reality. TMI = confusion.

So to collect herself, yesterday she had finally put over her bed the dream catcher she had made with her father while she was little. She had kept it since she had seen him last; it was a memento that invoked safety, adventure, and mystery. And the dreams had went away, the monster men caught in webs of their own deceit. Go screw yourselves fiends, she thought, ha-ha I'm not to be touched by the likes of you.

She still waited for the good ideas that were supposed to come through the center of her dream catcher, though. Lakota sat at the desk, inside the walls of the rented house. She'd been struck rigid with writer's block. She had two long complicated assignments due. One for psychology, and another for a required English course she'd put off as long as she could--which unfortunately included a section dedicated to creative writing.