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as reviewed by
(10/27/2025)
For the past several months I have been beset by a strange recurring dream. In it, I am an insect, living in a world of insects. Each time I am surrounded, beset on all sides by beetles, ants, mites, spiders, isopods, wasps, aphids, gerridae, and their distant cousins in the gastropods and lesser jellyfish. I am underground, immersed fully in their bestial and violent society, constantly ambushed and attacked for my life, lost in endlessly winding caverns, without allies or protectors or even the simple human defense of shelter, as I am nomadic in these dreams, wandering without cease in pursuit of nothing at all. The chittering monstrosities come for my life, they gang up on me in packs and lock me in cages to prevent my egress, and they succeed again and again, tearing open the thin mask of my exoskeleton to drain the black pus lurking beneath. I am overwhelmed, crushed, lacerated, my wallet is picked clean, my essence is sucked away through strawlike probosci, and yet each time I awaken not fifty meters from the site of my own death, lucid and shaken but unharmed. And because I am no better than the thoughtless organisms who dissemble me time and time again, rather than walking away, or pinching myself to wake up, I only return to the scene of the crime, my exterminators still fresh and engorged from my own carcass, to fight and die anew.
In time I grow accustomed to this new insect body. I am a woman, a huntress, half-spider but with the blood of a vast and ancient earthworm, forged in unholy coupling of which I dare not imagine the details. This huntress was around long before I possessed her, in fact she is infinitely older than I am, perhaps as old as the Earth itself, yet at first I fumble in her steps like a newborn, possessed by the freshly-minted ghost of a confused and haphazard will. It is only after long hours of practice that I am able to internalize my nature as the ghost in her shell, utilizing her honed intuition for survival as though it were my own. As my bodycount rises I become at turns feared and exalted by the teeming hordes of insect life. To them I must seem as history’s greatest murderer; immortal, deathless, exploring beyond the edge of the world, leaving wet trails of decomposed organic life wherever I go. Yet I am at once a friend to some, a prophet to others, to still more a savior. I speak in their language and accept their customs, I am let into their homes, I fight off the murk and desolation encroaching on all sides. In this way are my sins cleansed, in this way do I appropriate the hollow and pointless mask of Heroism.
What whim, they must ask, what quirk of conscience leads me to act this way to some and not others? What directs my mercies and dampens my bloodthirst? They cannot imagine the truth, that I am as devoid of intention as the dimmest aknid. My wayward ramblings are always controlled by an unseen creator, a demonic puppeteer, the same malevolent force that built the universe and its miserable, dying inhabitants. I am completely ensnared in its desires, it pulls me this way and that, now to collect psalms from the lost vaults of the city, the next day commanded to tear out the still-beating heart of the forest spirit. Perhaps my divinity, which I need and worship even as I curse its name, is not so different from theirs. The little creatures exist in service to a lesser goddess, a great orb of silk with flowing white hair and pins for legs. They built her a grand citadel, dedicated to her worship, and they fill it with the symbols of their devotion. She is a weak and feckless divinity, one I will inevitably kill like all the others, yet thousands of pilgrims dedicate their lives to a fruitless, impossible quest to get closer to her. Of all the lights I snuff out in these dreams, hers is the only one for which I feel no remorse.
Alas, the one goddess I cannot destroy is the one behind the twisting caverns in which we are all perpetually trapped, that cruel and capricious puppeteer on whose strings we are all bound to dance. Its incomprehensible demands offer no respite. We imagine that in fealty to it, by developing the competences of our bodies, by turning ourselves into instruments of skill and talent, that this might move it to provide us a moment of solace in the end of days. Yet the harshest irony is this: as I developed myself to a pinnacle of talent, the surrounding environs did not grow to match my skills. They would instead become only more ruinous and decrepit, the already decaying architecture would only fall apart further. Black masses of pure nothingness would grow along the walls and rotted ceilings like warts or pustules on the face of our earthly prison, and looking into their translucent surfaces I would see the bodies of those I had killed, melding together underneath the grim blemish. My few friends would die, not uncommonly by my own hand, or be left to fend for themselves on the crepuscular planet. It seemed such that there was an inverse relationship between myself and the world, that my own exaltation was necessarily its ruin, and that in this way I was the cause of its fall into disrepair, though in truth I had done nothing. I had only been acting in obedience, after all, to my creator, my vile and sadistic artist of dead worlds.
As matters came to a head, it became clear that this pattern had only one possible conclusion: my ultimate triumph, my grand victory over the most fearsome opponents this world had to offer, would necessarily be coterminous with the final cessation of all things. That to fully succeed would be to render the final death knell, in my oneiric labyrinth of claw and chitin. Thus awakened to the possibility – the necessity – of this final ending, my closing actions grew increasingly frantic. I grabbed with vigor at ever pettier and more pointless quests, as though my desperate obsession could forestall the death of the universe. A bandit demands an exorbitant sum for a cheap pair of dice; what can I do, then, but scour the farthest nooks and crannies of the world’s least desirable corners, seeking for scraps in an abandoned sewer or soot-encrusted underground steam tunnel? There is no value to me in the minor trinkets of this world, yet I catalogue them diligently anyway. I break my back to afford useless ornamentation for a home that will never really be mine, I tear apart the hidden corners of a bilious wasteland to find nothing more than a discarded child’s slingshot, anything, anything to stave off my own success! Anything to keep the world alive just a moment longer, the hopeless quest of holding my sad dream afloat, to never need to dream of anything else.
In truth I could have stayed in this dream forever, I could have sought ever-smaller victories in the hope of delaying its conclusion indefinitely, like the runner who first travels 1/2 his allotted distance, then 1/4, then 1/8… ending as I had begun, fending off caterpillars and baby moths, only with a new air of absurdity as my powers had grown so far beyond theirs. I did not do this, maybe out of a sense of mercy, or as a final submission to the storyteller who seeks to draw purpose from our damnation. And I cannot, ultimately, regret my decision. This is not only because there was no other to be made, though that is true; but also, I increasingly believe, as my dreams grow thick and dense, their contents spilling out into waking life, that the key to each of them – the pattern of symbols beneath the visible, that when revealed, will provide us the door we use to step out of our absurd games once and for all – lies not in the interminable procession of suffering and death, but in the anomalies that chance to find us, as we torture each other in the murk.
I will conclude my recounting with the tale of one such anomaly.
Once, in one of these dreams, my path happened to return me to the initial site in which I had entered this world, shuddering and pale, as a prisoner of cold-hearted bugs. Not far from where I escaped their grasp, I had spotted a large engraving on the wall, in the shape of a huge spider’s face, with eight slanted eyes glowering down on all who passed. At the time I had paid it no mind, but standing in front of it, I was struck by the strange and inexplicable urge to play a bit of music for the iron visage. To my surprise, it responded at once to the gentle plucking of my instrument; the eyes began glowing with otherworldly light. After a moment longer, the tall face detached from the surrounding cavern, and lowered into the ground, revealing a long-abandoned passage. Frightened but curious, I entered.
Inside, to my surprise, were signs of advanced technology uncommon to the dim-witted creatures I’d grown accustomed to being surrounded by. Artificial fluorescence lit up the obsidian halls surrounding me, and small artificial beings skittered back and forth along the ceiling, made in the image of the spider-people who must have used the settlement as a nest. In fact I destroyed several of said miniature machines on my way along the entrance hallway, thoughtlessly, the same way we are constantly crushing thousands of bacteria with every step we take. We are, each of us, perpetually responsible for an invisible genocide of microorganisms, which there is nothing we can do to prevent and which, nevertheless, must surely be held against us in the final tally of our individual sins. In this way I allowed myself to destroy the little machine spiders inhabiting the nest, though they were harmless, and their presence was by no means unpleasant to me. I carried on in this manner, until I reached a large platform, surrounded by glowing engravings arranged ceremonially in the central chamber of the nest.
When I stepped onto the platform, it instantly launched me downward with startling speed, and for a moment I felt myself weightless, hurtling through the air. My life flashed before my eyes and I was certain this would spell the end for my dream. On hitting the ground, my shell would crack open yet again; if I wished to return to this nest, I would need to treat the glowing edifice as a hazard, to be avoided or destroyed. But no such end was forthcoming. Instead, I landed on another platform, several dozen meters below, with an audible thunk but otherwise unharmed. This part of the nest was similar to the area above, though the walls had broken open in a spot, moss and lesser bugs encroaching from the cave outside. I was not interested in this opening, though. I went the other direction, downward, deeper into the nest – the deepest I’d ever gone in the insectoid kingdom to date.
I am always wary of digging too deep, of the subterranean terrors beneath our feet. At the time I had no knowledge of the black abyss under the world, where tendrils of void violently lash out at any who draw near. Much later I would need to attend to the abyss directly, and would witness firsthand the pit of nothingness beneath all things, surrounded by a mountain of skulls, hostile and nearly lifeless. Even then it did not feel right to be there, it has never been my preoccupation to descend, in this dream I was always concerned with the opposite, with ascension, with paths upward. In time this too would appear absurd, for there is no great heaven above everything, after our long and grueling climb the only reward is to see what should have been evident from the start: that above mirrors below, that atop the world there is only more nothingness. Less than nothingness, howling wind over a barren landscape, empty villages and scattered, soulless beetles, who can neither speak nor fight, extremophiles who have learned to survive off the most meager of leavings. We dream of escape, we travel to the edge of things to find what might live beyond our ken, but the truth is that outside the walls of our carefully crafted prison there is only emptiness. There is nothing beyond the horizon, it is only our imaginations to tell us otherwise. To float above the surface of the world, to gaze down from a higher vantage, offers us only the privilege to witness this firsthand.
But at the time I had not yet seen this with my own eyes, and so the wariness of descending so far remained as a slight tension or premonition. Instead I found a spirit, caged at the bottom of the nest. Trapped behind opaque glass, I could not see her, but could only hear her voice. She called herself Eva, and, enamored of my huntress’s dominion over the various tools and traps I’d amassed, requested that I permit her soul be bound to my own. Out of sympathy for the lost, childish spirit, I acquiesced. In the moment her essence merged with mine, I felt overwhelmed with life, with experience, with the terrible loneliness of an eternity spent abandoned. The fullness of her mind which had known nothing but sorrow, which had waited eternally for me, lifted me off my feet, and I screamed in catharsis and relief. Before that moment I had imagined myself the loneliest soul on the planet, yet here I was, filled with a boundless store of memories, each of them a pure longing, a pure aching desire, uninhibited by the repetitive burdens of daily labor. For a moment I was Eva, the loneliest cursed child in the universe, wanting nothing more than to die, and in feeling her existence fade into mine I had finally granted her wish. The incredible pleasure of the encounter was too much, and I passed into unconsciousness. When I awoke, Eva’s cage was empty.
There was little else of note in the ancient nest, yet after this encounter, I noticed something strange. Whenever I found myself resting at a bench, in the moment of idleness a small glowing crescent would appear above my head. I could hear it breathing gently, and in its presence I felt strangely calm, even rejuvenated; it seemed as though my soul were being filled up. To my knowledge, no one else can see this little crescent. It is for me and me alone.
I cannot explain this incident. Like so many anomalies, it occurred only once. The cruelty and violence of dreams is no mystery to me: it is a constant, it is the one unchanging fact of our existence. Kingdoms will rise and fall, our children’s children will grow old and die, and still the world will be overcome with suffering. It is the mercy that is inexplicable, that maddens us with its transience and caprice. Why is it that, against all odds, a defenseless and diminutive pilgrim will wander into a lost surgical ward; travel its halls full of bodies, of morticians driven to insanity, of gurgling spirits with spiked tentacles for faces; and emerge, unharmed, on the other side? Why does a beautiful blue lake, peaceful and placid, find us at the other side of a rancid and mosquito-filled old duct? To me, these questions seem impossible to answer. My dreams of insect kingdoms have long since passed, yet these are the visions that keep me tossing and turning, craving a ‘why’. It is only through this process of recording and exegeting them, their myriad contradictions, that I hope to someday see the underlying pattern, what God our God is in service to. Only then, maybe, will I see the exit, the final victory that will conclude once and for all that most relentless and unforgiving of dreams, the nightmare we call reality.
9/10