[Original Novella] Mansionarium, Part 1

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I go someplace when I sleep. It was the better part of a year before I could be sure of it. Otherwise referring to it as an actual place would be a touch too dramatic for what, at the time, seemed to be simple recurring dreams.

They began when I was fifteen. Most likely as a mental refuge from what happened, according to my therapist. But then, her job is to concoct believable sounding explanations for things. There’s no real rigor involved.

I found myself naked the first time. Greeted as I awoke by the cold, solid concrete beneath me. An industrial facility of some sort, although it was never clear what it was for. Roughly U shaped, with a series of tall windows inset in the outer wall, dull yellow light pouring in through them onto the dusty grey floor.

Whoever designed this place really loves concrete. It’s something that turns up in a lot of their work. I think it’s the blunt, homogenous banality of it. My therapist said it’s the physical version of depression. That the more I described the place to her, the more certain she was that it was all some elaborate cry for help. Worse, there was a brief spell where I believed her.

But, a cry for help does not have relentlessly self-consistent physical laws. Nor the same dimensions every time you visit. I’ve always been helplessly methodical, and so on the third or fourth time through the same dream, I began to map my environment. For lack of any measuring implement, I used footsteps.

There is nothing to write with in the dream, and any writing I do encounter is this garbled, ever-shifting mess of unfamiliar symbols. Signs, books, placards. Anywhere I expected to find letters. Not being able to read anything is apparently a common element of many people’s dreams. That there are common elements to everybody’s dreams somehow doesn’t trouble anyone.

On either end of the U-shaped room, I found doors to a grand hall filled with row after row of useless machinery. Designed in a way that obviously won’t work. Gears turning against each other, Pistons pushing against other pistons, electrical wiring set up deliberately to short circuit. I thought I might learn something if I were to fix all of it, so I set out in search of tools.

I found them lodged among stacked rows of rusty steel pipe. That’s the other thing that’s everywhere in the dream, pipes. Snaking up and down walls, overhead, underfoot. Often where it makes no sense, like a loop of pipe doubling back on itself. Nothing living, either. Never once saw so much as a weed.

The tools, if I can call them that, proved worse than useless. Whoever designed them either doesn’t know what they were meant to be used for, or thinks he’s funny. A hacksaw with black, glossy film for the blade. A screwdriver with another handle where the tip should be, that sort of thing.

Every night, after roughly the same duration, I would wake up. Then, while everything was still fresh in my memory, I’d add to the maps. Reams and reams of them, organized into binders stacked next to my bed. Worried my mother terribly and she never missed a chance to say it. As though her steady retreat into the bottle was any better.

I couldn’t see what else to do with it. No choice but to go there every night, may as well try to learn something. It went from a novelty at first, to disturbing, but then settled into a sort of bland familiarity. Every day, in the back of my mind, I knew exactly where I would be that night. Often making plans for some new experiment.

Could I permanently change anything? Yes, it turned out. Objects would remain where I left them from one dream to the next. Could I break any of the windows? No, nor could I see anything through them except for the dull yellow glow. Could I hurt myself? When I tried, the pain seemed real enough that I thought better of pushing it. Could I bring anything through with me? Only whatever I was wearing when I fell asleep.

In this way I began to amass a body of data about the place. And by then I was fully content to say that it was a real place rather than just a recurring dream. Being slammed in the face with it over and over, every single night, had that effect. With no other outlet, I posted to the internet about the whole ordeal. I thought maybe I’d find somebody who’d experienced something similar.

Instead, I found a post describing the exact place, down to every little detail. They’d gone about exploring and recording it differently, but there was no mistaking it when they mentioned the tools, or the unreadability of the text. I searched for a timestamp and discovered it’d been posted just minutes before I found it.

So, I hastily hammered out an account of my own explorations of the place, and included my email so they could contact me. Not really pinning my heart on it, but excited to discover I was not alone. Only the next morning, after my usual nocturnal wanderings, I found the post had been deleted.

Subsequent posts were deleted more swiftly, and I received a warning not to continue “spamming” by private message. I plead my case with the mod but received no reply. It troubled me for weeks afterward. Thoughts of some stranger halfway across the world, suffering the same thing night after night.

The same frigid, grinding, contiguous smear. The concrete. The rust. That place everybody has visited during their long, dark nights of the soul but forgets about when their fortunes improve. They move on with their lives, but it’s still there. Waiting.

The stack of binders grew and grew. More than once Mom threw it all out. I didn’t even make a fuss, just went back to work recreating all of it. By that point it disturbed her a lot more than it did me. I’d already succumbed. Living more in the dream than I did the waking world. You need only fear what’s in the dark until you become part of it.

A failure of imagination, I suppose. To think I’d already seen the worst things shadows can conceal. Because the dreams and resulting obsession with documenting them had begun to impact my health, my mother recommended I participate in the local university’s sleep study. She and I still meet every Sunday for dinner at a Mexican place. I order the same thing every time.

I did it for her. I know she worries, and really, she bears enough of a burden without me adding to it. So I submitted all of my details through their website, expecting to be turned down only for a confirmation email to follow later the same day. I found a number of forms attached to it that the email instructed me to sign, either digitally or by printing them out.

Really long, belaboured legalese. Could all of this really be necessary for a sleep study? I understood the necessity of covering their assess and indeed, it wasn’t hard to find recurring language in the documents absolving them of wrongdoing should I somehow expire from sleeping too hard, or whatever. I skipped to the end and signed, just to be done with it, then emailed the documents back to the sender.

They chose a Sunday to have me visit. I tried to reschedule as I never miss Sunday dinner with Mom, and we’d meant to discuss the matter of what to do with all of Dad’s old stuff that was still sitting in storage. When I called her about it she told me it could wait for a week, that finding some help for whatever was going on with me was a higher priority in her book.

So, with mixed feelings about the whole affair, I showed up before the beautiful antique of a building that the email indicated was where the sleep study would take place. I checked and re-checked the address, putting it into my GPS a second time after I’d arrived to make sure I hadn’t misspelled anything. But no, it really was the place.

I must’ve driven by it four or five times trying to pin down exactly where it was on campus, too. Whoever does the landscaping decided it’d be a good idea to surround it with maple trees which render the building all but invisible from the road. With my CRV parked across the street, I pocketed the folded up paperwork I’d printed out in case they needed a real signature after all, then headed for the porch.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 2!}