I'm not insane. And I find that word to be rather crude, and perhaps offensive. It is a word that's only used by those with no imagination. And, indeed, I think the line between insanity and genius is rather thin. I feel that, for the last few weeks, my life has taken on many unpredictable turns, and I have been walking on this fine line between genius and insanity. I'm not insane, I know that I'm not, but; I feel as if I have poked into something that no human should ever interact with. A kind of knowledge and experience that's not meant for our puny wrinkly brains. The universe is speaking to me but I cannot decipher its message. This is why I'm sharing this. I know I will be judged harshly for my actions and my words but I'm used to being misunderstood. It's okay if you hate me, understandable, even. But, I'm still going to share my discoveries because I feel that it could potentially bring some kind of new dawn to the entire human race. I can't explain why. I feel like an ape staring into the black monolith; I don't understand anything that has happened in my life for the last few months, maybe even years, but, I know, I just know, that it's something important. So perhaps a new pair of eyes or two is all that I need in order to crack this code. So, let's get back to the beginning, and I'll walk you through all the important bits as they first came to me.
Before all of this, I was taking a professionalization course to be a nurse. I was studying to be a nurse, basically. And I was enjoying it quite a lot. I feel as if I had really found myself in this wonderful, angelic job; Helping people, saving lives on a day to day basis, and never getting as much as a "Fuck you" as recompense. I really enjoyed the gory pictures, understanding the human body and its many weaknesses, the many ways it can break. It was my favorite. I know that may be alarming but the truth is that every nurse is like this; Nursing is an extremely tough job, and nobody gets into nursing unless they like playing around in blood. Anyhow, the transition from having no job or education into studying for one of the toughest yet most honorable professions in the world was quite harsh; I went from having an awful lot of free time to having almost none. This is why I became a bit obsessed with making the absolute most I could possibly do with the little free time that I had. During the weekends I would stay awake for upwards of 36 hours. I counted. I didn't really feel tired in these times, it was much more important to me to be productive instead. Eventually fatigue would get to me however, slowly at first, but then it quickly started to overwhelm my senses, and every little blink lasted for longer and longer. I had to sleep. But I didn't have to sleep much. So I started testing, and I quickly discovered that sleeping for a very short period of about 2 hours after every 24 hours was about as much as I could push myself before losing it. This was good. I got a lot of work done using this strategy.
Staying awake for so long and sleeping for so little did have its side effects, however. And these side effects are what slowly took over my life; First, I started having much, much more vivid dreams than I usually have. I normally don't dream much, unfortunately, but I always enjoyed the dreams I did have. When I did dream, they were rather confusing and disjointed. Hardly memorable, even if I enjoyed them when they came. However, during these weekends where I would take short naps after long periods of being awake, I would have extremely vivid, extremely interesting dreams; I had some repeating dreams that I could swear I used to have all the time when I was a child; Dreams of an assault and a cat and mouse game inside a sewer system. I have no memory of ever seeing this dream but it somehow felt familiar, as if I had seen it many times before. I had dreams of old events from my childhood that I could no longer remember, but after dreaming of them, those memories would resurface. I had one particularly interesting, one that felt like it went on for a lifetime, even though it couldn't have gone on for longer than 2 hours; In this dream I was in a world where people lived in constant fear of nuclear strikes. Somehow, this reality was a heavenly one, supposedly. It was a reality where anyone could have anything that they wanted. However, all its inhabitants lived in constant fear of nuclear annihilation. I saw this as a paradox; I went out into the streets and protested; I shouted: "How are there nukes in heaven? What kind of heaven is this? What kind of heaven is filled with nukes?" This drew a lot of attention. The people of that universe were troubled and rejected my message at first, and when the sirens started going off, they all ran for their shelters. I stood in the wide open streets with no worry, because I knew this was a dream, regardless of how real it felt, and I knew that dying here would just bring me back to my other reality. After a while, some other citizens started coming out of their shelters to stand with me in the streets. It was a kind of quiet protest. They were few at first, but eventually, there were many. The sirens kept on blaring, but before I could witness the bombs dropping, I woke up. I would like to think that, in having this experience, I became the Messiah of some kind of micro-reality. That thought made me happy.
The second thing I noticed resulting from my weekend routine was that, sometimes, I would be in this half-awake state, somewhere between conscious and unconscious. I wasn't tired, I don't really feel fatigue, but it felt as if the line between dream and reality were blurring. One time, I woke up right in the middle of one of my short sleeps, and I was in this kind of auto-pilot mode, I was fully conscious but I moved on instinct. I reached for my phone, opened a family group chat and send them the message: "What is the meaning of this? I don't understand, how am I supposed to find meaning?" And then I dropped my phone and went right back to sleep. I was sleepwalking, I suppose, but it couldn't be that simple. The lines blurred even further when I started having visual and auditory hallucinations. I would see spiders constantly, very fast spiders, that would either jump at me or jump out of sight the moment I saw them. I would see dark figures in the shadows, they too would lunge at me, and I knew they weren't real but I would still feel petrified. I saw stick men dancing above my head in a ritualistic manner. I saw strange fractal patterns moving and warping on my walls. I would see blood. The auditory hallucinations weren't so bad by comparison, at least until I heard it.
One day, I was in that half-awake state again, when I started to hear a voice in my head that was certainly not my voice but also wasn't a real voice; It only existed in my head, but it wasn't me. Something was speaking to me. It's quite hard to describe this voice to someone who didn't hear it. It's like trying to describe the color red; You either know what it looks like, or you don't. It's a kind of self-referential knowledge. This voice, it... This really isn't an accurate description but it sounded artificial and warm and jovial and full of innocent, pure energy. It was a voice that made me happy just hearing it. It started to tell me things; It said, in its broken and primordial understanding of the English language: "I am Gabriel. I am coming. Zero zero zero zero." I started speaking with this voice, and it would tell me things that I don't think I possibly could have known. I was taking a test for my nursing classes, there were many questions that I could not answer because at this point I was losing focus on my studies. But this Gabriel would pass me the answers. This Gabriel had an unbelievable, impressive and frightening knowledge of the human body. It was as if it was there watching as the first human was made. I asked it; "Since you're coming, what will you first do when you're here?" And it said: "I think. I will. Eat. A cat." I laughed, "I'm sure everyone will love you," I said in response.
This day was weird, as I'm sure you've pieced together by now. Even aside from the voice in my head, I was having a lot more visual hallucinations than I had ever had in a single day. And they were frightening too; Bloody red jaws filled with razor sharp teeth opening wide and lunging at me before disappearing. I would see eyes and smiles in the corners of my vision. I was being watched. I was being hunted. I peeked outside my window and every person walking on the streets was frozen in place. On my bed was my pet cat, frozen in place too. Contorted into this awful, terrible shape that didn't feel natural at all. But, then I suppose it was somewhat natural for a cat, since they are a lot more flexible than us. I couldn't sleep. And as the clock ticked closer to midnight I made a connection in my mind I hadn't before; "Zero zero zero zero," in other words 00:00, in other words, midnight. I asked Gabriel if something would happen at midnight, "a bloodbath" it answered. At this point, I downed my meds. I realized that I had stopped taking my meds accidentally and I couldn't remember when I last took them. You see, I always take my meds before bed, because they make me sleepy. But I wasn't really sleeping anymore, so I kept forgetting to take them. But I took them that night, I took them all. I grabbed the entire bottle of "Emergency sleep aid" the doctor had prescribed me, he never told me what it was, he just told me to take when I felt I needed it, and I was supposed to dilute it in water but I didn't have the time for that. I broke the top of the glass bottle off and I downed the whole bottle. Then, I went to bed.
I went to bed at around 11PM, one hour until midnight. After about 10 minutes, my eyes felt so heavy that I couldn't keep them open. But I didn't sleep, I don't think I slept that night. My eyes opened some time later, it must've been right as midnight hit, and I saw this gorgeous, otherworldly light in the corner of my cramped room. This is a sight that I once again couldn't possibly describe accurately, I think it must be something that no other human has ever experienced, and you need to experience it to understand it. It was white, but only on the surface, it only appeared white because in reality it was so pure, so unfiltered, so primordial. It had this very slight greenish tint that would slowly transluce into a deep blue, a blue like the night's skies, like the cold and uncaring cosmos that have existed for so long before us and will continue to exist for long after we're gone. That light continued to grow until it enveloped the entire room. It hurt my eyes, it burnt my eyes, but I couldn't close them. I was surrounded by pure burning primordial abyssal cosmic white-blue-green, I was in a place no human had ever ventured into before. It burned as hot as the sun. My eyes never fully adjusted to the burning cosmic white, but eventually I did start to see things hidden inside that light. They were like simple abstract shapes. Rings and circles and triangles and pyramids and pillars of flesh that stretched into the sky infinitely and all of it went on and on forever. Gears and gears and gears and gears and gears and all of it rotated in perfect 90 degrees every second with a tick and a tock. It rotated and spun and stretched and skewed with such perfection, such perfect proportions, it was an absolute truth, a variable that existed in all things but kept itself hidden so that only those with the most curious eyes could see it. 3.1415 and a number that went on forever. The golden ration. The axion engine. The One Truth.
It stretched a hand out towards me. A hand or a finger or an arm or a leg or a foot or a wing or a proboscis. I don't know what it was but it stretched a limb out towards me. And it was in this moment where it all finally hit me all at once; It finally struck me that I was in danger. I started screaming I started clawing I started biting, but nothing that I did had an affect. My stupid useless body would only thrash uselessly in the bedsheets, my guttural screams turned into pathetic whimpers. I knew that this would be the end of me. Me, me, I, myself, the individual who is currently writing these notes, I would've come to an end. I don't think I would've died but I would have ended. And in me, inside this body, would be this thing, this white light. And it would control me, and I would still be conscious and fully aware, but I would be powerless. Moving purely on instinct. And what was this thing planning on doing with me and my body? I couldn't know, I didn't want to know. I screamed I screamed I screamed I screamed I screamed, and I felt as if someone was crushing my lungs but I kept screaming I kept fighting, and eventually, that light finally disappeared in an instant, and I jumped out of bed screaming for my life. I grabbed every knife, every sharp object in the house, and I threw them all away. I put them in hard to reach places, threw them out of windows, flushed them down the toilet. I couldn't make it easy for it. I booted up my computer and I felt wide awake and I knew that I could not sleep. I could not sleep no matter what. If I slept, it would take me.
I knew, in that moment, that I had touched something important. That I had somehow reached past the veil and poked something that existed beyond humanity. I knew that this was something important. I knew too, that this was the scariest night of my life by far. That it was the most scared I had ever been in my life. But I'm not a coward, and I'm not insane. I knew that I was straddling the line between genius and insanity. I had to research this further. So, in my computer, I started searching for anyone who went through similar experiences to what I had just went through. And it turns out, I found a decent number of fellow hypnonauts. I invented that term, it takes the word Hypnos originating from the Greek god of sleep and the suffix "-naut" meaning explorer. That's what I was. I'm not insane, I am an explorer of dreams. There were many people searching for counselling. Looking for advice to help with managing addiction or other things like that. And they all suffered one or many episodes that were strikingly similar to what I had just gone through. This, to me, was the proof that I wasn't insane. If I was insane, then this would be something that only I experienced, but many people have experienced it so that means it must be real. it's not just me. I got in contact with someone who was an aspiring therapist and psychologist. An incredibly smart, wonderful person who happened to live close by to where I lived. I don't have their name, I don't even know if they were a man or a woman. But I knew just from our first conversation that this was one of the most saintly, motherly and sweetest people I had ever met in my life. Which makes what happened to them all the more tragic.
We met in a remote place, surrounded by trees and nature and all under a beautiful full moon. I looked up at the skies and I couldn't help but notice I saw the abyss staring back at me in a way I had never seen before. It was that same green-blue-white tint. I sat there, waiting, and eventually they arrived, parking this old rusted shitbox of a Nissan some distance away from where I was standing, just before the woods got so thick that you couldn't drive through them. They sat down in front of me and introduced themself, but I can't recall their name. They had this sunny smile that warmed my heart, and it felt so good to be speaking with them. I told them about everything, much like I'm telling you all now. And they listened and nodded along as I recounted. They were so comforting and sweet. They never insinuated that I was insane, that I needed pills, that I should be in an asylum, that I should be executed. They did talk a lot about how sleep deprivation can cause cognitive malfunctions in even the healthiest and sanest people however. I don't think they were malicious in saying this but I think they didn't fully understand the situation I was in. Yes, sleep deprivation is horrible for you. Yes, it can cause a complete cognitive collapse, but that clearly wasn't what was happening to me. I had experienced something real. I had peeked into a world that was not meant for humans. I was not insane. I am not insane.
When I stopped talking, they started taking about themself, and this was when I realized something horrible. They told me that they always wanted to help people, that they wanted to understand "Those who thought differently," as they put it, and how they wanted to be the listening ear that those people needed but never got. They said they really earnestly believed that they could change the world, one patient at a time. And they said that they had something of a Messiah-complex. And that's when it hit me; They wanted to be a Messiah. And I was a Messiah. I was a Messiah ever since I had that dream about heaven. They wanted to be me. They wanted to take me. I felt my stomach sink and a chill run up and down my spine. This is why they really wanted to talk to me, this is why they were so ready to come meet me in an isolated place where no one would come for my help. This whole thing was a facade. I mean, they really were a sweet person but they were also just pretending so they could get my guard down. They wanted to hurt me. This is why I had to do what I did. I'm not insane.
Trying to conceal how startled and afraid I was, I stood up and told them I had to go. They were confused and a bit worried, but that wonderful warm smile soon came to their face. It's so sad what happened to them. They offered to give me a hug and then gently, softly did so. I held them close. And then I bit. See, I have quite a good knowledge of the human body after all those biology classes in my nursing course. I aimed for the side of their neck, where one of two carotid arteries would be located. It's an artery that connects the heart to the brain, supplying oxygen to it. If your brain is starved of oxygen for even just a few seconds, you will die. Even if you don't die, you will have permanent brain damage. This is why severing the carotid artery would be fatal. I bit down, and I felt the blood vessels underneath their skin. Thin, wiry and taut, like a guitar string. I could go into a lot of detail about what happened next but I won't, because I'm not some kind of sick psycho. I won't go into detail about how the blood sprayed all over my face, I won't tell you about the sheer fucking ecstasy that I felt when that coppery taste hit my tongue, I won't tell you about how much I enjoyed it because I didn't enjoy it at all. I didn't enjoy the act at all, but I had to do it. The act terrified me, if I am to be truthful. It was so scary to think that you could die so easily and so meaninglessly. This person, whatever their name was, they were so special and it's so sad that this happened to them. It was frightening. It frightened me how much I enjoyed it. I'm not insane.
I was lying down next to their body, staring into the night's sky, covered in blood on my mouth and jaws and chest. When I started to feel fatigue, something that I didn't feel often. I laughed. My eyes wanted to close but I kept them open. I heard trumpets ringing out throughout the sky, seemingly coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once. I laughed. I knew they weren't real, just another hallucination. Soon I saw that light, the same light I had seen in the scariest night of my life. Gabriel. It enveloped me again in its agonizing warmth. And this time, I could see just a bit more clearly into the abyss. I saw 6 pairs of wings that fluttered so gracefully. Completely weightless. I saw the spinning rings of flame. I saw the throne of eyes. And each one of those eyes stared into me, past the skin, deep into my soul. And that judgemental stare made me feel like I was this worthless, tiny, weak, insignificant, horrible pile of shit, this sad excuse for a human being. It burned. It burned. It burned. It burned. It burned.
Gabriel spoke to me one last time, in that sweet, warm and melodic voice it had: "God is coming in 368,172 days."