The Host in the Machine

This early morning’s dream was pretty entertaining. I love it when a dream has something really kinesthetic, something you feel through yourself in a very tangible sense, and it’s something truly different.

I was lying face down when I awoke. Slow to come to awareness. I’d fallen. Hadn’t I? I couldn’t remember what the hell had happened. Last thing I remember . . . I was dying.  Was I dead?  No. I didn’t feel dead. I actually felt as if I should have that feeling one has a bad morning after getting your ass kicked with fight or alcohol, like you were hit by a freight train in the night. But I didn’t feel bad. Just… sort of empty. Odd.

“He’s awake,” I heard a man’s voice say, somewhere across the room from the way my head was facing. Sonofabitch! It was him. Wasn’t he killing me last time I checked??  I thought I opened my eyes but it was still dark. I squinted and tried again and there we go . . . I was in a room like a large office. I lifted just my head up very slightly, hearing this interesting sound that seemed to come from my neck in a couple places when I did so,  and I looked around me. I was lying on something like a long flat couch, the sort that comes in two’s with a corner table over one of them. This one was just one, a solid flat cushion.

“Check him out,” the man said, and he got up and sauntered out of the room, followed by someone behind me. The man who left — who is he again?? I thought I knew him. But I couldn’t remember his name or anything about him. In any case this other guy was the only of the two people I’d seen who were not murdering me last time I checked, which made him the good guy by my standards.

“Sit up, ok,” the checking-out-man said kindly, and I forced myself to sit up, which was so much easier said than done. It was unusually… noisy. Somehow. I reached sitting and looked up at him, feeling slump-shouldered and exhausted in mind but not in body. Physically I felt ok. I thought about that. Physically I really didn’t feel that much at all, I considered. I did feel. I just wasn’t feeling any pain and it seemed like I ought to be.

“What is that noise?!” I asked him, hearing this vague little occasional chittering or something.

He had a stethoscope, which he was briefly placing nearly everywhere but my chest, oddly enough. “Sounds like … you might have something like… a water beetle,” he said with a sigh, as if this was perhaps bizarre  but not really surprising.

I looked at him in disgust and confusion. “How… how would I get… something like that in me?” I asked, wondering where in my body such a thing could hide, and if perhaps I had heard him wrong.

He didn’t answer at first, instead feeling around my head and ears and neck and shoulders in an unusual way. I could feel him, but it felt oddly once-removed, like when you are at the dentist and your mouth is only partly numb, not fully.

“You did land pretty hard,” he admitted, “but I think you’re ok.” He turned and left the room.

I stood up, a bit unbalanced at first, then took myself over to the large window. It was night outside and the dark of the window against the bright of the room was a perfect mirror. I was a man, black skinned, close haircut, wearing a pretty nice suit that looked seriously worse for wear. What the hell had I been doing just before this period??

I put my hand up to my head. There was a sound clearer now, as it moved. I flexed my elbow slowly. I heard it flex with me. I flexed my shoulder, all the way around. The motion seemed more limited than usual. I could hear it in my head though. I didn’t feel the way I normally felt inside, and this seemed to just underline that. I could hear inside me, the way you can hear your own chewing or heart beating sometimes, where it seems so loud but you suspect others don’t hear much.

Inside me, it sounded… and it felt… like I was… like I was a machine. Like there was some high tech, tiny hydraulic helping move my arm at the joints, my legs and hips. I stepped back, and I heard it again, as if there was more of it yet ever so slightly farther away at the bottom half of my body.

But the first man came back in the room then. He sat down at the executive desk comfortably, swiveled a bit in the chair and surveyed me with a bored dislike.

“Come over here,” he said. I considered ignoring him — since when did this dude order me around? — but I found my body, with all its internal subtle swush-slide-clicking noises, taking me across the room.

“Siddown,” he continues, waving at a chair in front of him, and I sit. But for some reason I sat much harder than I had intended, as if I weighed vastly more but hadn’t been able to feel that. I heard the wooden chair slightly crack, at the same time I heard the smallest crack-pop inside the right upper half of my head, and I clearly heard three spherical shapes, about the size of tiny marbles or large ball-bearings, shake loose and roll over then fall, bouncing, down into a more open area inside my head. I ‘knew’ they were actually a dull gold in color and had these little extrusions all over them which allowed them to function like gears, but rolling together in any direction, not just a flat circle the way most gears are. What the hell? I asked myself.

“So, I’d like to talk to you about something,” the man says. And it all comes clear to me:

He killed me. He put my mind in this android version of my body. Because I wouldn’t talk and he still wants the information.

And then I woke up.

Ironically when I sat down to meditate (and fell asleep) I was supposed to meditate on bugs. Never mind why, I will blog it eventually. I didn’t get to that. Yet it began with a bug so despite that was many hours later, I figure that’s the intent weaving into the dream.

It was cool how… realistic it seemed.

P