Author's note: This one may be a bit more complicated/abstract due to the nature of it's topic - this dream really did happen.
Ever since I was little, I have been more or less averse to touching. This does not necessarily include family and friends, all of whom I love dearly. Although, that prickly, ‘dangerous’ sense still kicks in from time to time if anything stronger than a gentle tap or palm placement grazes my body. I just really appreciate my space, and I try my best to accommodate the people I meet on a daily basis in the same way. There is nothing more nightmarish than not having sovereignty over one’s own body.
This is probably why the nightmare I had as a kid has stuck for so long with me. At least, it felt like a nightmare - that's what I tell myself even now.
I don’t really remember how it starts, but I am always in my childhood home. It's pretty much exactly the same - same ugly blue carpet pattern, same 90’s style wood paneling, same dingy, yellow bulbs that dangle downward like eyes from above. I reach for the lockless bathroom door, and push my way in. Even as a little boy, I remember my hands feeling so large and clumsy. As I peel off my clothes and start the bath, I feel at peace. Water has always been fundamental in preserving my peace, I realize. It covers the skin in a protective layer, one you can see through, but not entirely. It conceals me.
Then, as I sit there in the quiet, surrounded by dirty white tiles and the gentle lapping of bathwater, I feel it. A plunging sensation coming from the pipes. A disturbance underneath.
When the gum woman arrives, she does so with no particular sense of urgency or announcement of intent. Her texture is this pinkish-flesh toned mass of gum, like a constantly sticking and unsticking mound of vaguely-humanoid taffy. The only thing human at all about her is her bulbous head featuring two divots where her eyes should be, a wormy-lipped mouth, and black, stringy hair which remains permanently embedded and knotted in her flesh.
She simply and efficiently pours out of the drain, and begins to rise and crash down on me like some awkward, fleshy wave. She moans loudly, her wormy lips yearning for my neck, tickling and weakening me. I am not laughing in the dream. She has no hands to speak of, since her entire body is an unshaped hand - she uses it to smother me, pushing me down into the bathtub. And in a way, I feel sorry for her. It's not like her molestation is some sort of willing, malignant force. It feels more like . . . an animal, aggressively and unconsciously pushing itself onto me from all sides. This is nature, this is how the world feels to me, an unfortunate dance that many living things have no choice but to take part in. In my helpless thrashing, I’ve turned into some sort of uncomfortably human smoothie. An arbitrary, defenseless plaything for her. I cry out for help to someone standing nearby. But either due to willing ignorance, inability to help, or simply not hearing me, the figure jitters away into the background dream haze that has replaced the walls and floor.
I remember then, waking up and crying out. Breathing heavily as if I could still smell her damp hair sticking to my face. There’s a pool of sweat, and sometimes else, growing beneath me. I have never had that dream again since. I think what particularly sticks out to me, is that my aversion to unhealthy touching has persisted to this day, despite my parent’s adamant stance that they kept their eyes on me my entire childhood. I’d be inclined to agree with them, all circumstances considered . . . but how do I know that that fear isn’t just a neurological quirk?
These things are primal, dark and ravenous. I look at my own fingerprints and I shudder in horror at their inevitable desiring. I curl up in my shower sometimes, and I try not to look at the congealed mass of black hair growing on the marble rim. I know it's mine - and yet, separated and dead, it grows on its own. I peel and pick at the ingrown hair growing dead center between my brows until it's a bloody mess. I hate being in my skin.
Most days, it's tolerable. I enjoy the presence of other people sometimes, even as they gently brush up against me and remind me my flesh is not a prison. It's one I can reshape in my image. But then I remember that dream, I remember her pasty, toy-like flesh, I remember how eagerly she devours me. I feel myself getting hungrier each day, as I distance myself from everyone once more, and become a yearning stranger. And as the months turn into years, as this paranoid aversion becomes a sort of strange perversion of intimacy, I seek to replace that which was taken from me, by taking it from other people.
And I find infinite regret in realizing that part of me likes it.
I want to devour, and be devoured in turn. I’m the same as the animal that lives in my sewers.