Never Awoken

The gargantuan demon, over twenty stories tall, strode across the hellish landscape. His sword, longer than he was tall, dragged behind him, leaving a wound in the rock deep enough for a man to stand in with room to spare. Though, the odds were that no man would want to stand in said rift, for lava began pouring from the rock like blood from a wounded animal.

The demon, all two hundred feet of coiled muscle, black fur, and twisted horns, sat down on the edge of a cliff and set his flaming blade down by his side. He looked out upon the world and conjured a jar and a brush from thin air. In the jar resided the mashed up remains of countless humans, recognizable only by the occasional unmolested organ or bone that floated through the paste. He dipped his massive paintbrush into the viscera, leaned back, and raised his arm to paint a mural on the ash filled sky itself.

He could do that sort of thing, if he wanted. He could do anything he wanted. After all, his demonic persona, Morpheus, was the god of this world. And why wouldn’t he be? He was a lucid dreamer; this was his mind.

He loved his dreams. They were the purest form of expression he had left in his life, and the only outlet for the stress he felt in the waking world. Out there, he was weak, broken, and defective. He knew that well, as it had been the defining facet of his life for almost as long as he could remember. In here, though, he was god, and he was free.

It wasn’t as if he could actually tell people about his dreams. If he could, well, he wouldn’t even have a problem in the first place, nor would he be having these dreams. Neither would he say, if he could. What would his sister think of her cheerful, happy-go-lucky brother secretly harboring a desire to brutally murder and torture everyone? No, he’d be a monster here in his dreams where it would not matter. Thus, he would save his cheer for her.

Summoned by the demon-shaped-human’s musing, a dream version of his sister, scaled up to match his size, strolled up behind him and wrapped her arms around him. In a flicker faster than the mind could follow, they were no longer on the edge of a cliff in hell, but in his art studio, and he was himself once more. His sister, unconcerned by the sudden change in scenery or his appearance, leaned over and whispered a single word into his now human ear, “Love.”

Tears welled up in his eyes. Suddenly shifting back to his demonic body, he drew his sword and sliced her in two, all with the same motion. He collapsed into the expanding puddle of viscera and cried.

He hated this part of the night, despising it above all others. That thing… that was not her, and it would never be her. The sister he knew and loved had thousands of words, millions of words. Given ten minutes, she could create a masterful poem of any style, an enthralling speech, or melodious lyrics to a song.

But like every single person in his dreams, himself included, the words escaped her. He could not stand it, not one bit. To see her skill sullied by his mind was worse than any hellish landscape his Morpheus persona could conjure. For, as projections of his own mind, they had the same limits as he.

Some form of aphasia, the doctors called it. Was it expressive, was that the type? It had been decades since that diagnosis had been made, so he wasn’t sure. Regardless, he called his condition prison, no, hell. A little bump on the head as a small kid had stolen the ability to express all but the simplest ideas, be it spoken, written, or signed, from right out of his mind. Though he could understand others if they spoke slow enough, he himself could never have any talent with words.

At the corpse of the mockery of his sister, he spat, “Hate. Love.”

He paused half-way through his cathartic rampage through Generic City. His hand slowly lowered from his muzzle after having just eaten a dozen faceless, generic humans from destroyed building number two-fifty-one. Normally, the act of counting helped keep him asleep in a dream, but this was ridiculous. He’d had this dream many times before, and he’d never gotten above one hundred before waking up after a full night’s sleep.

Morpheus blinked, suddenly aware another oddity of his dream: the details. Specifically, his bland city suddenly looked much less generic and much more like downtown Manhattan. The people in his other hand also looked much less generic too, taking on a degree of detail he’d never dreamed before, including actual, terrified faces.

Suddenly panicking, his monstrous head whipped around, desperately searching the city. Morpheus’s eyes froze when they landed upon a sign protruding from one of the buildings. It was a simple sign that read ‘Starbucks’. Above it was a clock that read ‘2:35’.

He staggered backwards as if struck in the chest and dropped the people in his clutches. His panic rose higher still as he gazed upon the impossible sight of the sign and clock. Those were his tells; if he could read anything, he was awake, if not, it was a dream. So how the hell was he a monster if he was awake? Worse, had he actually killed those people?

He spun on his clawed feet and bolted away from the accursed sign and clock. In the back of the giant’s mind, drowned under the sea of panic swirling in his mind, he knew the shock should have woken him, especially since he wanted to wake.

So plagued by fear, Morpheus failed to notice the world disintegrating behind his every step. Had he seen it, he would have stopped panicking, realizing that his fears were truly irrational and unfounded. But he did not look back, and he did not realize that he was not actually a mass murdering demon.

As he charged forward, a ring of fire, based on what his mind assumed the gates to hell would look like, appeared before him. Deciding that it was his best bet, Morpheus charged through it at full speed, consequences be damned. He crossed the threshold and was greeted by a surge of energy far more invigorating than even twelve hours of sleep and the best coffee in the world. Unfortunately for him, the reality of that sensation was in fact the worst possible thing that could have happened to him at that very moment, though he wouldn’t know the truth until much later.