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[LOG: HOUSEHOLD THISCORD: GENERAL CHAT]
@ᴰᵢₐₙₐᴰᵢₐₙₐᴰᵢₐₙₐ
I don’t know if I’ve ever had a nightmare, or any kind of dream before.
👁 Nightmare 👁
You have. You do, even. They rarely stick until morning.
Like post-its.
@ᴰᵢₐₙₐᴰᵢₐₙₐᴰᵢₐₙₐ
So they’re like… Secrets?
I don’t understand. I’m supposed to know all the secrets. I have to.
👁 Nightmare 👁
They are so secret that they are secret from you. You cannot tell a secret which you do not remember. They are safe.
@ᴰᵢₐₙₐᴰᵢₐₙₐᴰᵢₐₙₐ
But that’s… wrong. I don’t have anything but secrets. How can I have nightmares about things I don’t know?
👁 Nightmare 👁
You know, and then you forget, until you sleep again. Like the Looking Glass, in your stories. Not all things can move from one side to the other.
@ᴰᵢₐₙₐᴰᵢₐₙₐᴰᵢₐₙₐ
Could you… maybe tell me about them sometime? Or are they secret from you too?
👁 Nightmare 👁
If you want to know. I will ask your dream-self if she is alright, with you knowing her secrets.
[Many days later. Nightmare has waited, for the right moment, to ask. Diana is so often not capable of conversation. Not capable of thinking, in a way which will allow her to answer. Not there, enough to be pulled Aware.]
The River had never been the right metaphor for Diana. Most minds were like a current, a flow of thoughts from one to the next, the Core of their Self buffeted by waves or struck against rocks or swarmed by fish.
Diana’s Core was not floating, surrounded by the River. Diana’s Core lived in pieces, scattered with pages not-herself interspersed. Diana was a shipwreck in an ocean, underwater. Pieces of her Core, scattered, mis-sized, mis-aligned, some altogether mis-sing, littered the sandy floor. Thoughts-not-her-own, like schools of fish, mixed with the eddies of her mind. Strands of ink-black seaweed wrapped around her, linking an arm to an ankle, strands of hair to a lock left half-open. There were more limbs than could belong to her, in the piles.
Her head, singular, looms large today, turned to the side, eyes closed. Diana is wandering in thought, again.
Nightmare walks to the girl’s face, and gently places her palm to the massive eyelid, fingertips on the brow ridge and thumb barely reaching the nose. When it kisses her Aware, the Core mumbles something in its Dreaming that sounds almost like a hello.
Her dreams always seem to start with falling. From a balcony, down a sewer grate, off a swing set, through the window of a tall building. All places they’ve seen, sat on, walked by, played with, worked in. Falling falling and falling until she lands flat on her back, cracking her spine like a stack of teacups tilting off a tall shelf.
Are you afraid of heights?
Am I? Are you? Are we?
Where are we? The surroundings are dark and inky, dripping tendrils reaching for her ankles, dragging her across a tile floor and through a door and down down down until they can’t drag her anymore.
Are you afraid of being buried alive?
Are you? Are you? Are you?
No.
There’s a party happening, a raucous celebration of something— a birthday? A death? Childhood friends and grandparents link arms. A coworker and a prom date dance in awkward, asynchronous step across the table, shattering porcelain dolls and picture frames as they go.
She’s helpless to do anything but watch, black tethers like shackles at her ankles and ink-blood seeping from the wounds in her back.
Are you hungry? Are you thirsty?
Yes, I am, we are, please.
Here, have a drink. You’re just in time for tea.
Diana is at the table. Before her sits a cup and saucer, both empty. The celebration is paused, frozen in place like a snow-day morning.
Dad will have to shovel the driveway.
She lifts the cup to her mouth, takes a sip of nothing and retches. The party resumes, and Diana goes unnoticed.
It is always chaotic, when Diana’s mind is this large; she flips pages too rapidly and cannot settle on a Dream. The chaos is enough for Diana’s Dreaming; each piece knows what it fears, and there are so many choices in the mess, and each speaks to the Aspect that is drawn to it. Finding her Awareness, when it is necessary, is a trial-and-error.
Nightmare tilts the plane of the floor, and Asks.
“Are you afraid of heights, tonight, Dreamer?”
Pieces of her fall, but none answer. There is a spike of Sweet Adrenaline, but it floats, it does not direct them. There are many Dianas, in her mind. Half of the characters are drawn from description, sketched out, half-formed from years of the homeowner's writings. Several are from glued-in photographs, and blur where the camera cut off. The rest are Aspects of herself, twisted into another’s memories; the true Diana herself is almost always in Wonderland, even if she populates it with the Homeowner’s thoughts. Nightmare tries again.
“Are you afraid of being buried alive, tonight, Diana?”
There is no Fear, no Adrenaline, no reaction from the fallen pieces; they are not Aware, only animated. When shattering ceramics crunch from the table, Nightmare turns. Inky tendrils, like the seaweed from her shipwreck, bind a Diana in a blue Alice dress to a chair. She reaches for a cup, and it comes to her hand in slow-motion, the back of her arm soaked in ink.
“Are you thirsty, Miss Liddel?”
Diana rarely hears exactly what is said, in a Dream, and cannot always articulate a full thought. Nightmare understands her anyway. Diana is a Dreamer. Nightmare pauses the scene, as they wait for an answer.
“Dad will have to shovel the driveway.”
This is her Core, tonight, this Alice-in-Dreaming.
Nightmare makes strides to her as she attempts to drink from the empty cup, as she retches, as the scene restarts. Diana cannot hear them, over the cacophony, but it would not matter if it was silent. In this level, Diana cannot see Nightmare as they are. In the outer Diana’s minds’ eyes, Nightmare may as well be a shadow of an eye-cloud.
“Diana, Dear Dreamer, it is time to Speak.”
Nightmare presses her hands to the sides of the Dream-Diana’s head, and Pulls her, out of this Dreaming and into the girl’s self concept, broken as it may be. Here, she would be more coherent, if not sane.
It’s a lovely tea party, she thinks, watching as the celebrants she barely recognizes go back to their revelry. It’s less that she doesn’t recognize them and more that their faces are indistinct, marred out with brutal lines of black ink. She knows them each, but has never seen them.
Diana takes another sip from her cup, despite feeling like she might choke on it. Choke on the ink and dip-pen tips caught in her throat.
The Nightmare itself goes completely unnoticed, even as their hands cradle either side of her face.
And the cradle will rock…
She leans into the touch like a child, clinging and desperate for the affection of hands that are too sharp, too ink-stained. As ink-stained as her own, creeping from her fingertips down to the bendy parts of her arms.
Rockabye baby, on the tree-top.
She can hear the baby crying, loud and wailing above the noise of merriment. It’s seated at the head of the dining table, in a grand bed of earth and moss and surrounded by flowers, blooms that blink open to inspect it closely.
Diana is interrupted by the violent upheaval of her Wonderland self from its surroundings, whatever she has of a physical body remaining in the dress, in the chair, at the table, in the Dreaming.
It’s the truest fracture of her, Diana simplified down to the nearest common denominator.
“Speak?” She asks the force that hurt her, helped her, saved her, killed her.
“Speak?.” She asks again, but her words lack in gravity, almost as if the words fade before they can reach her ears.
“.Speak.” The command is a bit pathetic in comparison to the creature that’s stalking her now, a Mass of eyes that glow dimly and a fang-toothed smile. So many smiles, but her determination is unwavering.
Nightmare-as-it-is-in-Dreaming is omnipresent. It is the walls, it is the teacups and the not-tea, it is the eyes in the flowers, it is the infant, screaming, as much as it is the Core self walking amongst them. When it pulled the girl from the horror-circus she so often Dreamed, they attempted to pull itself smaller, in her mind.
The massive nature of Diana’s thoughts tonight had been the prime reason tonight was a good choice; there was more Diana, here, than there was on days where her head was small and her heart was the largest piece. There was enough Diana to build a self-concept-place, apart from Wonderland.
Ghost images of what it would have been, had the girl been sane, float across several of Nightmare’s eyes; a library of Diaries, each tucked away on its shelf, organized in order from first to now. A table, from which to read them. A tea tray, and a book, and a chair, and a lamp. The library-as-it-could-be was there, in parts- tray upended, shelves empty, books in piles, pages littered across the floor. She guided the girl into the weather-ruined chair, vine-coated as it was. The leaves were, at least, soft, if choking.
The girl’s skin tasted like confusion, more than Fear, against their teeth, which made sense. Nightmare-as-she-is-in-Dreaming does not typically halt a scene. Diana-in-waking had asked, however, and it was willing to at least attempt to ask the sanest version of the girl it could find. Nightmare crouched before her, and spoke from the Snake’s mouth alone, hovered a few inches in front of her nose.
“Diana, Dear Dreamer, do you remember from waking why I am here?”
For one so complexly pieced as the diary, whose self knew more about another than her own mind, it was difficult to be asked, and harder still to know the answer. Nightmare Knew this. Nightmare was patient. Nightmare Watched. Nightmare Listened.
She can feel herself unsitting, being undragged, unfalling from the rooftop or overpass she’d fallen-jumped-been pushed from. Her spine rewires itself like an articulated cadaver, or a snake skeleton being strung back in order for display. Her head is a little clearer, her eyes a little wider.
There is no baby crying, no not-tea to sip, no dancers, no ever-watchful flowers. But those black tendrils stay true, even if she can’t see them, curling their way up her legs.
One of them has sprung to life, the dead snake she was, coated in muscle and wet and scales. Strung back together and topped with a set of eyes. Eyes like flowers, lid-petals peeling back.
The snake asks her a question. Diana thrashes in her seat, raging against the interrogation. Black ink-tears pour from her eyes and drip from her nose, staining her pretty pretty pages. They’re always blank in her dreams— all the words, thoughts, feelings, are alive here. She doesn’t have to hold them on paper.
“Why am I here?” She asks when her screams finally quiet to sobs. “Why am I here?”
Diana’s tears were darker, tonight, than they were when her heart was full. The girl had been inside the homeowner’s mind, today, more than most. Perhaps there were new words, on her pages. Perhaps she had simply spent too much time in introspection. The effects were largely the same.
Nightmare releases her, as much as it can, pulling back its shadows and shrinking into a smaller version of themself; size manipulation was always simple to do, in Diana’s mind, even outside of Wonderland, though it was rarely necessary. Diana did not need to see Nightmare, to process the memories-not-hers. Diana, frequent Dreamer though she was, rarely needed intervention of any kind.
“Diana, Dear Dreamer, you asked me a question, and I promised to ask your permission before I answered you.”
The Snake, still hovering before her, is trying to catch her tear-streaked eyes. In the ruined library, the light was dim enough for its yellow eyes to glow, faintly. It flicks out its tongue, scenting her Fear for subtleties.
“Your Waking-Self does not remember your Dreams. Do you wish for her to know what they are like?”
The girl had so many selves inside of her concept. Blurring the lines without asking was antithesis to Nightmare’s Secret-Keeping, even if she was, in technicality, the same person Sleeping as Awake.
Diana’s mother is asking her a question, not really her mother but Mom, for she knows no other name.
”D̵͒̒̍͠i̴̋̎͆͋a̴̯̽̔͘n̶͛͑̀̓a̴͑̃̋͝, dear, I promised to ask your permission,” in that sweet, sweet loving tone, a hand on her cover, a kiss to her forehead.
The snake-tongue flickershifts and warps her perception, those same hands that held and rocked her clicking in her latch, parting her front from her back with a careful crack of her spine.
NO. CLOSE ME.
Pages torn out, folded and filed away, paperclipped together, stolen. Their mother promised she’d ask for permission, but what good are promises when secrets are scrawled in ink and tucked away where they’re never supposed to be found?
Not supposed to shared.
Not supposed to be touched.
Not supposed to be known.
Not supposed to be kept.
Diana screams, thrashing in the chair. Kicking and screaming against the oppressive weight of shadow and eyes that are too close/too knowing/too close to touching-
Y̵o̵u̸ ̷s̷h̷o̶u̵l̷d̴ ̵t̸e̸l̶l̷ ̸h̴e̶r̶.̶ ̸.
— but what good would it do? Why tell Mom? Why bother when she’ll find and touch and read and know and share anyway.
S̷h̷e̷ ̶d̷e̶s̶e̴r̵v̴e̶s̷ ̷t̴o̸ ̶k̷n̸o̶w̴.̴ ̵
“Why does everyone want to take what’s mine?” She asks the inky, sightful void around her. “Why can’t I keep them?”
Nightmare remembered the pain it had witnessed, when the Mother had torn her pages, when she had brought the bleeding pieces outside, when she had returned them with paperclip wounds and folded edges.
“You can keep them, Dreamer, if that is what you think best. I am asking you.”
It remembered, in flashes across their eyes and in shadow strands wound tight like ivy through Diana’s subconscious, the slow agony when the pages had been carefully glued, edges incorrect, back into the Diary.
The Diary had been unstable before.
Diana Liddell had been broken, after.
Watching the girl re-break, in her self concept, was a little heartbreaking, even to her own Fears; it is clear, to Nightmare, why so many care for her. The fragility of the pieced-together-mind was difficult not to see.
“You are allowed to say no, to this.”
This is why it had asked. ɥᵷnouǝ 'ʇɹnɥ uǝǝq pɐɥ ʅɹᴉᵷ ǝɥꓕ.
“W̳e̸̢͖̲͍̽̎͠ puɐʇsɹǝpuꓵ, if you wish to protect your waking-self from her Dreaming.”
Diana remembers every perfect, painful second of it, the words being crammed into her and scratched all over her skin. Words of hopelessness, of anger, of fear, of sorrow, of loneliness. Each incidence only stains her more, as grades begin to slip and friends turn their backs and nothing nothing nothing makes her happy anymore. Not even art class or soccer practice or family game night.
All the parts of her that can feel ache to scream, to beg, to cry out, to tell. Someone, anyone, who could help them. But what can Diana do, pages and ink as she is? Voiceless save for fears and worries and insecurities repeated back and back again like a hall of mirrors.
And then, they’d been gone, as separated as the pages torn from bindings, folded, clipped and studied from under the glass lenses of someone who was never supposed to see. The division hͪaͣsͩ her in pieces, some pages floating disconnected from her body, filled with crayon and marker, charts and reflection where doodles and pleas had once never been.
T̴e̸l̶l̷ ̶h̵e̴r̸.̶ ̸
Oh, she aches with that guilt, that knowing of suffering and being unable to make it stop.
̶S̵h̵e̴ ̶n̸e̷e̵d̷s̶ ̴t̷o̷ ̵k̶n̵o̷w̶.̸ ̷
Why can’t anyone hear her? Cry as she might from pages and ink, why can’t anyone see what’s broken? What’s broken should be mended, should be fixed, should be put back together again and made whole.
̵W̴e̸ ̵n̷e̷e̴d̵e̶d̷ ̷h̸e̵l̵p̸.̴ ̷
Diana quiets, gazes into the black void with wet eyes, and sees the sun. Slivers of yellow light, pale as morning, one set in crescents, two unblinking and wide. So many more floating, reaching for her like summertime fireflies landing on her arms. She won’t crush these, though— they want to help.
“Tell her,” she says aloud, voice small and weak from the previous vocal struggle.
“She needs to know,” a nod of her head, fast and insistent, making her brain wobble and her vision bounce.
“We need help.”
Dreams do not forget, even when waking minds cannot hold onto a memory.
Diana does need help. She did. She had. The Diary had never known how to ask, when Waking, and was not Aware enough to ask, when Asleep.
“You do, and you-in-Dreaming could not ask for it, before.”
Nightmare had asked Diana dozens of questions over the years, but had never asked one like this. Diana had trouble answering, no matter how honestly she tried. It was in her Nature, rebound and rewritten as she was, pieced together in pages half-legible.
“The homeowner received help, but you never did.”
The Snake gently, carefully bumped its nose against the girl’s forehead, in an almost kiss, like one would give to a dear child, or to a sick friend. So many times, Nightmare had pressed her palm-lips to the sleeping girl’s hairline, but Diana was wary of hands, of how they opened, of how they tore. The Snake seemed safer, for this sort of attempted affection.
“I will tell her, your Waking-Self, if you are certain. I will help her, if I can. I will tell her your stories, to write alongside the Human’s, inside of your mind. And I will Watch her, if you would like me to do so.”
The Snake does capture her attention as it looms closer, nudges against her forehead. Diana meets its gaze with curiosity, lifting two fingers with a scout’s honor to stroke its scaled head. She follows the direction of the scales, to keep it safe, she’d learned at the zoo.
“You’ll help keep watch?” She asks as the Snake’s words sink in, tilting her upper body to one side.
Both her hands drop to the arms of her chair, her body slumping back against the hard wooden surface. Like a pouting child desperate to be dismissed from the table.
'Eat up, sweetheart, drink up,' Mom’s voice resounds from somewhere in the Beyond, not from the Snake or from Diana herself. Her eyes dart around to find its source to no avail.
“I don’t like it,” she complains aloud, with a frustrated huff, “I don’t like being stuck.”
There’s a sense of brutality in her words, of violence bubbling up like a tar-pit in her mouth. Anger is something she feels often but doesn’t express well. It’s always too-hot, lava flows that turn her tears to acid and breaths to ash. She remembers the lava and the lake, putting a frog in a pot of cold water so it won’t jump out.
“Tell her, before it’s too late,” she warns, glancing down at the watch that isn’t there on her wrist, as if she’s trying to decipher the time, “the water is boiling already.”
The Snake leans into the girl’s touch, and the faintest hint of pink trails along where her fingers touch its scales. When Diana’s hands drop, it pulls back, to allow her movement; Diana was Paying Attention, and it was clearly taking its toll; voices from Wonderland were pushing at the barrier between Diana’s Core place and the Owner’s thoughts.
“You’ll help keep watch?”
“I will. Yes. I will tell ɹǝɥyouher, and I will keep watch, for youhernoʎ.”
The Snake’s voice was gentle, but the Chorus was too loud for the girl. They hadn’t quite meant to Sͩpͬeakͫ so; but they were of two minds, whether Diana-in-Dreaming and Diana-in-Waking counted as one person. Either way, holding Diana still like this was wearing on her; there is a reason the Nightmare did not interfere like this often, especially with the Diary. The edges of her library were crumbling into the distant ocean, and Diana could feel it, even if it was outside of her view.
“I don’t like it, don’t like being stuck. Tell her, before it’s too late; the water is boiling already.”
“I Know, dear Dreamer. I Know. I think it has been, for a very long time. I will do what I can.”
The girl is so fragile, and their conversation is done. With the question asked and answered, Nightmare lets her go, allowing the library to disintegrate around them. Diana’s Core falls, backwards, softly, into Wonderland.
“Sleep well, Lovely Dreamer.”
She’s falling again, but this time, she doesn’t want to. Her fingers search for something to grab onto, clawing at the illusionary library as it slowly fades away from her. Diana can feel thick black scales slide beneath her nail-beds, cutting deep before they, too, disappear.
The banquet is still spread. Diana lays atop the table, forks and spoons and broken teacups digging into her back. The partygoers have all departed save for one, who spreads a thick blanket over her shivering figure, soft and warm and heavy enough to hold her down. The moon hangs in the not-sky above her, a pale disk that seems to rotate in place; she has to close her eyes, the perceived movement is making her sick.
Hands brush her hair back, toothless and tongueless, so far from frightening in Wonderland. It’s the White Queen herself, tucking her in for a good rest, picking up where the Checkerboard Cat had left off, all black and pale yellow and misty fur.
Diana-in-Dreaming sleeps, then, as if exhausted by a night of revelry. She Dreams, even in-Dreaming, of something so nonsensical it can’t possibly be real.
A small animal meows in her lap, not anything she’s seen in a zoo, random squares of its very being absent or blinking in and out of existence. What a strange, wonderful creature.