Inbox

[itsjustabaddream]

INBOX OF NEIL WEST

Neil would be happy to hear from you. Leave a comment below to reach out. You can pay him a visit at home, or send him a letter any time.

GAME NAV ✦ THE OCULARUM

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[itsjustabaddream]

Once Neil is decently confident that she would have entered REM sleep, he quietly lets himself into the room, sitting in the chair across from her. He drinks his own sweet-smelling beverage, holds his focus in his left hand, and closes his eyes.

Neil's consciousness fades from him. His body sinks into the chair, doing something akin to sleep, but not quite. His mind still fires wildly as his physical form reduces operational capacity to simply breathing. And his essence begins to exist elsewhere.

As it is with these excursions, Neil finds himself in a vast and sprawling landscape of moonlit obsidian sand dunes. The liquid hills of shifting sands extend out endlessly in all directions, roiling and undulating slowly in a lazy, howling wind that tangles with Neil's hair. A full moon shines down from above, setting the dark particles to glitter. This world which exists only in Neil's mind, this junction into the fiber of dreams, is so utterly, deafeningly silent. He steps forward, leaving no footprints and suffering no unsteadiness from the churning landscape under his feet. He reaches out a hand, and finds an invisible threshold before him.

He steps through, finding himself elsewhere.

[misbegottendreamer]

Neil finds himself in a narrow hallway, surrounded by walls that have an audible pulse. It’s too dark to see anything clearly, yet a red glow pervades over everything else. The air smells of sulfur, and burning, and freshly-cut meat. The floor, seemingly stone at first, has an odd squishiness to it. And over everything, there is the sound of deep bells ringing periodically, and the rhythmic beating of a massive heart.

[itsjustabaddream]

What surprises Neil most is the smell. Olfactory cues can be very strong memory triggers, but it's not often they're so pervasive that they reach dreams. But between the scents, the beating, the sonorous bells, Neil immediately recognizes the utility of this place and its sensory intensity.

This is a religious space. Filled with hypnotic stimuli intended to dull the senses to all but spiritual ecstasy.

He follows the hallway, unfazed and focused.

[misbegottendreamer]

There’s something following him.

Or at the very least, there’s something else here, moving around, that sometimes comes close to him. Its footsteps, heavy and laborious, are accompanied by an intensification of the bells and a harshening (but not brightening) of the glow.

There’s a muffled choir rising up from within the walls. It sounds like dozens of people, begging, chanting, wailing, weeping.

[itsjustabaddream]

Neil does not bother to spare a glance at what is behind him. It will reveal itself when he is in the main space. As he moves through the dream, there is almost a floating quality to his own stride, as if his feet touching the ground at all is a formality. There is no sound or weight to his footsteps. He is in complete control of himself, and how much the dream notices his presence, even the environment.

He follows the sound of the choir.

[misbegottendreamer]

The sound leads him nowhere. He turns a corner and it beckons him back the way he came. It seems like it’s coming from within the walls themselves-

-which suddenly stretch as hands reach out for him, claws just barely not piercing the membrane-stone of the architecture.