The hell within

   Ariana had been eating exactly the same, nothing different. She may have been trying a new trail mix, a different cereal and had a little more water in her diet but nothing else was different. Her doctor assured her it wasn’t a nutritional thing. Nevertheless, something had triggered nightmares in her sleep. Every single night she would have a different one and it was not getting better. She had been spending many nights with no sleep and that had started to affect her work.

 She was a model. Her agent would book her for several runways gigs in department stores or for any kind of brand. She would also model for artistic photographers and for several advertisement campaigns involving anything from sunglasses to miniskirts. Ariana had made a name for herself in the fashion world but that was beginning to change, as the nightmares got worse.

 When she had them, she would normally sleep for too long. One would think fear would awaken her but that didn’t happen. She just stayed there, sweating and moaning in physical pain. Then, when she finally woke up, she would normally be late for some appointment so they would hire another girl. The situation got so much worse; she lost half of her jobs in a month. Her agent, a woman called Susan, tried everything. They went to a doctor, a herbalist, a nutritionist, to the gynecologist and even to one of those crooks than cleanses people’s auras.

 Nothing worked. So they finally tried with a psychiatrist. Ariana was not very enthusiastic about it but went with Susan. She’d rather go there that keep losing work and money. The doctor asked her several questions about her family and her personal life but also about the dreams themselves. It was funny, but Ariana couldn’t really remember anything about them. She only recalled parts, feeling, maybe some images but that was it. The doctor said this was normal and asked her if she would accept to do an experiment with him. She agreed.

 The psychologist had two different plans. The first one, the easiest one, was for her to stay in a hospital, under care, so they could monitor their sleep. The doctor and his assistant would check on her sleep rhythm and maybe that way they could guess what was wrong with her. She thought it was a good idea and shook the doctor’s hand, hopeful he would find whatever was causing all of this.

 As the days went by, waiting for the experiment to be done, Ariana kept working. She had mostly photo-shoots, which were never scheduled too early and were kind of relaxing to her. The only thing was that the makeup girl had to put a second layer of everything to make her look presentable. She would hope it wouldn’t be obvious on the pictures but did her job anyway, faking smiles and poses. The truth was she didn’t want to do anything anymore. She felt worried and sick but also exhausted and in need of real calm sleep.

 The following weekend she went into the hospital and greeted Doctor Pike. He and his assistant would stay in one room as she slept in the one next door. They would monitor her with electrodes on her head and the rest of her body and also with video cameras on the bedroom. Ariana was very tired but even so it took her a while to fall asleep. Something in her brain told her it wasn’t a good idea to submit herself to the horrors of the nightmares, once again. But she didn’t want a life like that anymore. She wanted to sleep like a normal person. So, after a few hours, she finally closed her eyes and got to sleep.

 The doctor watched closely as she fell asleep and once she was indeed sleeping, they started to detect something odd. There was a part of her brain that was very active. To be precise, it had activated when she had fallen asleep. And it was sending messages all over the body. The nightmare began as Ariana began moving a lot on the bed. She would moan and pant and sweat profusely. Her brain waves were off the charts at some point but then would calm and come up again after a few minutes. Doctor Pike thought it was amazing that her body was not awaking her. Her body had no answer to the pain the nightmare was causing.

 They watched Ariana for hours until, finally, she woke up. They told her they had wanted to wake her up but they decided that wouldn’t have been a very good idea. Ariana was not looking good at all: her skin was kind of green, her lips had lost all color and she seemed dizzy, not quite there. They decided to give her a nice breakfast for her to recuperate some strength and then they send her home to relax. In her home, Susan made her some soup and left her alone to be more at ease.

 Ariana, of course did not sleep. She decided to distract herself with her computer or with magazines but she realized she couldn’t really read or pay attention to anything. Her body was numb, exhausted and deprived of energy. She had some soup and loved it, as it gave her some warmth. It felt just right, as she wanted to feel when sleeping. She wanted to go back to sleep, her body craving for it but she fought against it. She didn’t want the dreams to come back to her; she didn’t want to die from this. What if she fell asleep and it drained all of her energy? She would become a zombie, a shadow of what Ariana had once been.

 She fought the need to sleep bravely but ultimately, she passed out on the floor. She hit her head hard against the hardwood floor and was found by Susan that night, as she came to check on her. Ariana was rushed to the hospital. Doctor Pike came by too and asked the doctors treating her to tell him about her state. They told him they had too realized something was wrong with her brain. The blow to her head had rendered it erratic so they decided to induce her into coma. The doctor told them about her nightmare problems but they assured him nothing was going on with her besides the brain trauma. She was not dreaming, only in deep sleep.

 Doctor Pike realized this was true when he visited her with Susan, who told her that Ariana’s parents lived in another country and were trying to get there fast but plane tickets where difficult to find. As the doctors had said, Ariana was calm. She wasn’t moving nor sweating. She was sleeping like any normal person would. The doctor then told them that they had detected a brain tumor growing slowly. Apparently, it had begun affecting many parts of the brain that are not normally active. So now they understood the reason for the nightmares.

 Doctor Pike recalled the time she had told him about the feelings she remembered: changes in temperature, the sensation of being watched, and the presence of at least another human or creature. Was that all a product of the tumor? To doctor Pike, it was all a great mystery because he had never seen anything like it. The images she recalled were also confusing. She had assured him something like the devil, the typical depiction, had been lurking around her dreams. Also some other deformed being and a strange weather, where cold and hot coexisted.

 Ariana was in a coma for a whole month. They extracted the brain tumor with great care and when her parents finally arrived, she woke up. They were all there: her family, her doctors, Pike and Susan. But it wasn’t the happy moment they were expecting. The first thing Ariana did when waking up was yelling and crying profusely. Some nurses tried to calm her down but she wouldn’t. She would push them, jumping off the bed and crying, asking for them to step away. Everyone was very scared. Her parents tried to lure her towards them but she didn’t seem to recognize them.

 Ariana ran out of her room, up and down corridors. Some male nurses tried to catch her but she would bite and kick very hard. They chased her all over until they reached the top floor. She ran up some stairs and got out to the terrace of the building. As the hospital was in the middle of the city, they had built a nice garden for the patients there. It was doctor Pike who caught up with her first and he decided to talk to her from a distance. She looked mad, worried and in state of shock. The doctor told her to tell him what was happening.

-       I saw them! They’re all over. They want to kill us.

-       Who wants to kill us, Ariana?

-       The demons. They are planning to kill us all!

 The doctor walked towards her but she moved back, towards the railing. Then, all other arrived, ready to catch her. No one ever understood why the railing had no protective net. Ariana just climb it and jumped, in front of her parents and everyone who had followed her there. She had jumped from the top of a twelve-story building.

 In her funeral, doctor Pike didn’t talk to anyone else. He was troubled. By what Ariana had said before dying and by the doctor’s final analysis of her brain: a region that normally is not active in humans was active in her brain. They told Pike this region was adjacent to the region responsible of communications. Pike was in deeper inner turmoil than ever before in all his years as a psychiatrist.

Who We Are

   I don’t believe it. I just can’t. The pure concept of a “community” is, for me, just nonsense. If there were a community, any kind, they would be there to stop all atrocities and crimes from happening. But that’s not the case, is it? This world is rotting at a formidable speed and there’s nothing that can stop it. It’s just the way it is. Is it intentional or did no one see the signs we are just fucked?

 People say, often, that we live better now than others did fifty or a hundred years ago. That is obvious. Any person with half a brain, more than most people use, would know that. But I’m not talking about the comforts of life; I’m talking about people as people. We have gone down the drain and gotten worse with time. Of course, not to wonder much about it as humanity has been capable of killing itself in mass. What comes after that then?

 Yeah, yeah… “Humanity has done great things too”. Well, really? Medicine they say… Well why do you think we advance in medicine if it’s not for lengthening our lives, to be able to be more powerful, more than the bags filled with gas that we are? Medicine does not exist to make life better but to make it longer. The innocent that thinks that vaccines and medications are made to take care of the frail and hopeless, are just too innocent to see what’s really going on.

 So, what comes after we have killed so many of ourselves? Well, hate of course. People hate they are free from xenophobia, free from actual hate, senseless and insane. Well, we’re not. We all hate something or someone. We might not consider ourselves racists, but we still fear the people that oppressed us and those who we oppressed. It’s only natural, after generations that behave like animals. Now it’s us who have to be scared of the world around us, which has gotten more dangerous.

 And why is that, we may ask? Well, precisely because people in the past did so much to prove they were above others. Little stupid groups claiming they were in possession of universal truth, telling people how to live their lives, who to admire, who to loath and even what to eat, how to eat and when to eat it. Sounds insane? That’s because it is. We praise the human brain so much but the truth is our biology is so easy to influence. So much that today it’s not hard to make someone ill, make them have a headache or make them sick to their stomachs. We can even kill someone without using a real weapon. We are weak.

 The interesting thing is that we just won’t admit hoe fucked we are. People are killed all over the place, disease comes and takes a shitload of people and many are still denied the same rights as others. Nevertheless, less important “news”, that aren’t new at all, invade the papers to make us feel fear and hope at the same time. The grand media folk make us love someone and hate others. They just shift the pieces of the puzzle and make up dozens of variations on the same subject. So there’s a little bit for everyone but the truth, the real one, is always lost forever, known to no one, not even to the ones that make her disappear.

 It is true we live better than before. But that is because we have been taught what to think of society and we have learned the model we live by is just the best because they haven’t create a better one. Haven’t they? May there be something better? Who knows? We are in no capacity of knowing that because even the most “perfect” place in the world is deprived of something. And whatever it is, it makes that “community” and incomplete one.

 Take for instance rich people in a rich country. They can buy all they want but any of us know that that’s not very important at the end of the day. No, not because it doesn’t matter. Try to live life without money on this planet. No, it’s more because we don’t really fill our head with riches. We fill it with experiences and those who make us feel better are not specially attached to money.

 Many, for example, seek for love. The one true love. Most people are so enthralled with the idea of “real love” that they don’t even stop to think what that means. How do I feel love? Does it feel the same for everyone? And here’s comes the real news: no, it doesn’t. It is a fact that feelings are chemicals reactions happening in the brain. Rats can feel pleasure if we put some electrodes on it and influence the right area of its brain. Same thing can be done with humans. But feelings are more than that. Why? Because they are stored inside our heads and have consequences beyond the mere experience.

 When we love, hate or feel curiosity, we feel something. But we also create from that. A relationship is made by what you remember and what you don’t. And all of this is classified: this is good, this is bad, and this is weird. We keep it in mind and we use it as words or actions if we need it. Those are still feeling but they have stopped being only chemicals in our bodies. We keep them in there if we need to use them.

And we do. But not in a very good way. Humanity has always been very trivial. We have always, in one way or another, loved staring at shiny objects. Whether those are nice precious stones or a beautiful body, we have always idealized what it is to be human. We have grown as a species thinking we are just the best there is because we can speak and walk and conquer. But what’s the use of all of that if don’t have anything to show for ourselves?

 Yes, the discoveries. We cannot deny some humans have gone beyond themselves to explain certain things and create new objects from what nature has given us. That cannot be denied. But another fact that cannot be denied is the fact that most of us have no idea how to create and we are really not interested in it. We created religion precisely to do that. To explain what we, lazy as we are, won’t or can’t explain. Humanity doesn’t like when something cannot be explained and that’s why so many crazy theories exist. We just need to explain, even if the answer is obviously fabricated.

 Then again, we keep killing each other, just because they decided to lie to themselves with different lies that we did or because they eat differently or dress with other clothes. Or just, and we never admit this, because they live far and looks different. This would mean xenophobia but this is the real reason of many wars that humanity has gone through. Just hate, without sense or consideration.

 We fail to see that biologically we are exactly the same. And we are not special. Other creatures walk and breathe and speak. The fact that we don’t understand them doesn’t mean we are better. I won’t go to saying we are the same psychologically because that is a creation of man to explain what’s inside one’s head. And the explanations, often, are as ridiculous as the explanations the ancients have for why the sun was up there with the moon.

 No, the best we can do in this world is acknowledge that we are different, even unique, inside our heads but that we are all the same outside of them. Of course, this doesn’t bring any peace of mind to anyone but nature rarely cares about that. We are just one species on a small particle of dust in the vast universe. And we fail to realize that daily, we fail to see we don’t really matter in the broader context of time and space.

 This doesn’t mean we should just go in deep depression and die. It means we should really live, like real people would do. Let’s just not get into the lives of others and let’s try to learn from each other’s differences that reside inside our heads. If we took a moment learning about what others do in life and what they think on certain important matters (not politics, of course), we would see how similar we are, even inside our heads. That’s the surprise of it all.

 We are not unique, special or precious. We are flawed, simple and unimportant. But we are here and that’s what really matters.