Dirk Strider (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
string_instrument) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thenashira2025-11-09 03:49 pm
string_instrument) wrote in thenashira2025-11-09 03:49 pm
Awakening Dream: Nova Pastos
Who: Dirk Strider and his unconscious
What: Awakening Dream
When: The night before he meets a bipedal latte... and Nova Crescent too ig
Where: Again: Dirk Strider's unconscious
Warnings: CW: death, drowning, thalassophobes do NOT read, derealisation, depersonalisation, general identity bizarreness, inhumane treatment of canned soup
He isn't aware it's a dream, of course.
To him, in the moment, it's real.
Swimming underwater, with the cold and the salt and the full-body sensory pressures of motion enveloping him on all sides. He can't surface, but he's not trying to. Or is he? He can't surface, but he's trying to. Or isn't he? The pull of the surface is there. Like a current, a magnet, a light. Buoyancy should push him up towards it. His brain should demand it. He should be striving to return.
The surface, breaking as waves overhead, the source of warmth and air and life.
He can feel himself avoiding it. Something beneath him has his attention. His heart aches with it. Not as his chest aches with lack of oxygen; this is more vital, more desperate a need. His throat burns, his vision distorted--but the burn in his eyes isn't salt. His movements become smaller, faster, and more desperate.
He needs to go down.
No, he needs to go up.
No--
No,
No.
He's spiralling. Mentally, emotionally, physically. He remembers how he got here. Falling. Hitting the surface of his self--no, not his self, the ocean--with a smack that should have broken him, but instead only split the surface tension of the ocean's selfhood and submerged him metres below the waves in a single moment.
The ocean's selfhood? Is the ocean a self? Is he? Is he a self? He has no other. There is no other but him.
But there's him, and there's the ocean, and he sinks into it.
Is the ocean's self his self? Is his self the ocean's?
Still he sinks. Unresisting. Stunned.
Something about the ocean is speaking to him. Not literally, but in a more intuitive way. He longs. Like he's been--like he's been supposed to be here. Like he's still not here, but he wants to be. Like he needs to be here, and he's still not there yet, wherever here is, and the ache, the sharp and piercing ache and its accompanying rawness in his throat, the heat that his body generates, it's not enough, and it's preventing him, and he's so weak and fragile and desperate but where is the here except here, where is there if not out there, who and what and where and he can't breathe and he opens his mouth but nothing comes out. Not even oxygen. His body heat is nonexistent, the ocean's deepwater chill devouring it and pressing icy absolutes against his infinitely complex, infinitely inadequate, and inherently finite organic flesh.
Finally, he begins to swim.
He's so deep now. Past the sunlight zone, down into the twilight. The sun must be up there. He needs to go back. He needs to go down. He swims, unsure which direction he's taking. He has to trust it's the right one. If he surfaces, he can live. He can rejoin the world. He can breathe, and he can see.
But he doesn't try. He keeps swimming, machinelike. His need for air is killing him every second, the mounting agony searing in every muscle fibre, every vein and every cell of his body. He imagines he can feel them collpasing, or exploding. He doesn't stop. He lets it fuel him. The pain keeps him going, worse by a new exponential magnitude every seeming-second, never relief--
He's not afraid. Or he is--he's deeply afraid, terrified in a way he has never felt, or at least has wanted to forget feeling, a small and powerless toddler waking up every day alone, alone and alone and alone and the ocean outside his window as unreachable as ever. But it's too late. Much, much too late. It was always going to be too late, and he would one day simply stop being afraid. But the ache never stopped. The pressure inside is building. The pressure around him is crushing him. He's erupting, he's collapsing. He struggles in vain. Swimming, fighting, writhing--something is pulling him deeper, and he can no longer resist it.
He descends.
Deeper.
Deeper.
Deeper.
It hurts.
A mind, his, consumes itself, bodymind recursive, burning fuel as he devours himself, his mind an existence, a reality. A circuitous ouroboros of being, endlessly spiralling as he yearns, painfully. He can feel every atom of his being screaming--to be heard, to be saved, to be relieved. He deconstructs to reconstruct and reconstructs to deconstruct, and he swims, and he spirals, and it feels exactly like being alive, every day he wakes up and every day he doesn't sleep. It feels relentless, and endless, and inexhaustible and unattainable. His flesh is carrying him, but he has no connection to it any more. And yet he can't escape it. This flesh, this living state. He wants it to go. He needs it to go. He can feel his heart struggling--it's missing beats, his basal brain's fear driving its rate up but the pressure of the abyss slowing it down, compressing veins and arteries.
But when his body goes--as it was always going to do--it's not a gradual thing. He gasps, finally, spasmodically, his body begging not for air but for release from carbon dioxide, and it receives neither. He chokes on the sea, which burns his sinuses and lungs and fills his stomach, and it fills his every part with itself. His throat closes back up, his brain turns off--but in the dream, he is aware, and he feels his unconsiousness the same way he feels the ocean speak. Even as his body twists in the darkness and the depths. Even as he waits, anticipating. Knowing.
It's coming.
He's (be)coming.
Death takes his body in an instant, obliterating him with the same suddenness as it might have obliterated a can of soup, crushed out of existence in the depths. The rupture releases him--the soup, and the can. The can, free of its integrity, no longer inviolate. But it was never that, and was never meant to be that. It was simply a shell. The soup--
Soup?
What soup? There was no soup. He was never a soup. He was never a can, whose remains drift downwards, carried along by icy currents and forces beyond the understanding of the can or its makers, to be eroded over days and weeks into the atomic material of simply more ocean. The soup, too, is not so much incoporated into him as it is returned unto him. A simple reintegration of matter into a vast, moving, all-powerful and all-being self. He means sea. He means self. He means he, the sea, the self, the here. He was already here. The sea was already here. The soup is a metaphor. The ocean is a metaphor. He is a metaphor. The ocean is here. He is the ocean. He's here.
Here.
Already.
Here.
Now.
Here.
Now here.
NOW.
HERE NOW.
HERE.
NOW HERE.
ALREADY.
HERE.
ALREADY HERE.
ALREADY.
HERE ALREADY.
HERE.
NOW HERE.
NOW.
HE'S.
HERE.
ALREADY.
HE'S HERE.
ALREADY.
HERE ALREADY.
HERE.
ALREADY HERE.
HE'S.
HE'S ALREADY.
HE'S ALREADY HERE.
(I.
Wish.
I wish.
I.
Wish, I--
Wish I might--)
The tides move, and the world moves with them. He moves, and the world moves with him. He breaks upon the shore, pulling tiny lives in and casting them out. He does not breathe, but he swells and ebbs. He is immense, and powerful, and self-contained. He is the ultimate force, devouring gravity and returning energy and finality. His endless depths are crushing, unknowable, and absolute. He reflects light only on his surface. He is indifferent to life and to death. He is worshipped, and unmoved by either supplication or damnation. He is--
He--
He's awake, and his throat is dry. His eyes are crusted shut--like he must have been congested, or weepy or something in his sleep. It's not light out. He exists only in the dark. Cal exists too. Soft felt and cool, comforting solidity against his face. He is not dressed. No one is there to see him in his nakedness, and it wouldn't bother him if they were.
Instead of the ocean, air touches his skin. Instead of waves and surface tension, his surface is comprised of skin, in contact with air. He clears his throat, and finds it gunked up--he clears it in a coughing fit, and finds his head hurts. He does not want to get up. He tries again to clear his throat, his eyes squeezed shut and cold where the crud is exposed to air. He has a weird kind of vertigo. Like his flesh should be motion, should be water. Like the ache in his chest, clenching tight and threatening to take his heart with it, should be a bottomless, hungry depth of pressure and darkness.
The sensation of the dream won't leave.
Spitefully, he shoves himself off his mattress onto the floor.
Which does wake him up a little more. But it makes the vertigo worse.
Why is it worse.
He reaches up, pawing for Cal--
And finds him. That feels more normal. That's something real. Okay. Okay, he's awake.
He has a weird kind of vertigo. Like his flesh should be motion, should be water. Like the ache in his chest, clenching tight and threatening to take his heart with it, should be a bottomless, hungry depth of pressure and darkness.
The sensation of the dream won't leave.
Ugh.... he pulls Cal to his chest, and focuses on how to breathe.
Unlike the ocean, he needs to breathe.
What: Awakening Dream
When: The night before he meets a bipedal latte... and Nova Crescent too ig
Where: Again: Dirk Strider's unconscious
Warnings: CW: death, drowning, thalassophobes do NOT read, derealisation, depersonalisation, general identity bizarreness, inhumane treatment of canned soup
He isn't aware it's a dream, of course.
To him, in the moment, it's real.
Swimming underwater, with the cold and the salt and the full-body sensory pressures of motion enveloping him on all sides. He can't surface, but he's not trying to. Or is he? He can't surface, but he's trying to. Or isn't he? The pull of the surface is there. Like a current, a magnet, a light. Buoyancy should push him up towards it. His brain should demand it. He should be striving to return.
The surface, breaking as waves overhead, the source of warmth and air and life.
He can feel himself avoiding it. Something beneath him has his attention. His heart aches with it. Not as his chest aches with lack of oxygen; this is more vital, more desperate a need. His throat burns, his vision distorted--but the burn in his eyes isn't salt. His movements become smaller, faster, and more desperate.
He needs to go down.
No, he needs to go up.
No--
No,
No.
He's spiralling. Mentally, emotionally, physically. He remembers how he got here. Falling. Hitting the surface of his self--no, not his self, the ocean--with a smack that should have broken him, but instead only split the surface tension of the ocean's selfhood and submerged him metres below the waves in a single moment.
The ocean's selfhood? Is the ocean a self? Is he? Is he a self? He has no other. There is no other but him.
But there's him, and there's the ocean, and he sinks into it.
Is the ocean's self his self? Is his self the ocean's?
Still he sinks. Unresisting. Stunned.
Something about the ocean is speaking to him. Not literally, but in a more intuitive way. He longs. Like he's been--like he's been supposed to be here. Like he's still not here, but he wants to be. Like he needs to be here, and he's still not there yet, wherever here is, and the ache, the sharp and piercing ache and its accompanying rawness in his throat, the heat that his body generates, it's not enough, and it's preventing him, and he's so weak and fragile and desperate but where is the here except here, where is there if not out there, who and what and where and he can't breathe and he opens his mouth but nothing comes out. Not even oxygen. His body heat is nonexistent, the ocean's deepwater chill devouring it and pressing icy absolutes against his infinitely complex, infinitely inadequate, and inherently finite organic flesh.
Finally, he begins to swim.
He's so deep now. Past the sunlight zone, down into the twilight. The sun must be up there. He needs to go back. He needs to go down. He swims, unsure which direction he's taking. He has to trust it's the right one. If he surfaces, he can live. He can rejoin the world. He can breathe, and he can see.
But he doesn't try. He keeps swimming, machinelike. His need for air is killing him every second, the mounting agony searing in every muscle fibre, every vein and every cell of his body. He imagines he can feel them collpasing, or exploding. He doesn't stop. He lets it fuel him. The pain keeps him going, worse by a new exponential magnitude every seeming-second, never relief--
He's not afraid. Or he is--he's deeply afraid, terrified in a way he has never felt, or at least has wanted to forget feeling, a small and powerless toddler waking up every day alone, alone and alone and alone and the ocean outside his window as unreachable as ever. But it's too late. Much, much too late. It was always going to be too late, and he would one day simply stop being afraid. But the ache never stopped. The pressure inside is building. The pressure around him is crushing him. He's erupting, he's collapsing. He struggles in vain. Swimming, fighting, writhing--something is pulling him deeper, and he can no longer resist it.
He descends.
Deeper.
Deeper.
Deeper.
It hurts.
A mind, his, consumes itself, bodymind recursive, burning fuel as he devours himself, his mind an existence, a reality. A circuitous ouroboros of being, endlessly spiralling as he yearns, painfully. He can feel every atom of his being screaming--to be heard, to be saved, to be relieved. He deconstructs to reconstruct and reconstructs to deconstruct, and he swims, and he spirals, and it feels exactly like being alive, every day he wakes up and every day he doesn't sleep. It feels relentless, and endless, and inexhaustible and unattainable. His flesh is carrying him, but he has no connection to it any more. And yet he can't escape it. This flesh, this living state. He wants it to go. He needs it to go. He can feel his heart struggling--it's missing beats, his basal brain's fear driving its rate up but the pressure of the abyss slowing it down, compressing veins and arteries.
But when his body goes--as it was always going to do--it's not a gradual thing. He gasps, finally, spasmodically, his body begging not for air but for release from carbon dioxide, and it receives neither. He chokes on the sea, which burns his sinuses and lungs and fills his stomach, and it fills his every part with itself. His throat closes back up, his brain turns off--but in the dream, he is aware, and he feels his unconsiousness the same way he feels the ocean speak. Even as his body twists in the darkness and the depths. Even as he waits, anticipating. Knowing.
It's coming.
He's (be)coming.
Death takes his body in an instant, obliterating him with the same suddenness as it might have obliterated a can of soup, crushed out of existence in the depths. The rupture releases him--the soup, and the can. The can, free of its integrity, no longer inviolate. But it was never that, and was never meant to be that. It was simply a shell. The soup--
Soup?
What soup? There was no soup. He was never a soup. He was never a can, whose remains drift downwards, carried along by icy currents and forces beyond the understanding of the can or its makers, to be eroded over days and weeks into the atomic material of simply more ocean. The soup, too, is not so much incoporated into him as it is returned unto him. A simple reintegration of matter into a vast, moving, all-powerful and all-being self. He means sea. He means self. He means he, the sea, the self, the here. He was already here. The sea was already here. The soup is a metaphor. The ocean is a metaphor. He is a metaphor. The ocean is here. He is the ocean. He's here.
Here.
Already.
Here.
Now.
Here.
Now here.
NOW.
HERE NOW.
HERE.
NOW HERE.
ALREADY.
HERE.
ALREADY HERE.
ALREADY.
HERE ALREADY.
HERE.
NOW HERE.
NOW.
HE'S.
HERE.
ALREADY.
HE'S HERE.
ALREADY.
HERE ALREADY.
HERE.
ALREADY HERE.
HE'S.
HE'S ALREADY.
HE'S ALREADY HERE.
(I.
Wish.
I wish.
I.
Wish, I--
Wish I might--)
The tides move, and the world moves with them. He moves, and the world moves with him. He breaks upon the shore, pulling tiny lives in and casting them out. He does not breathe, but he swells and ebbs. He is immense, and powerful, and self-contained. He is the ultimate force, devouring gravity and returning energy and finality. His endless depths are crushing, unknowable, and absolute. He reflects light only on his surface. He is indifferent to life and to death. He is worshipped, and unmoved by either supplication or damnation. He is--
He--
He's awake, and his throat is dry. His eyes are crusted shut--like he must have been congested, or weepy or something in his sleep. It's not light out. He exists only in the dark. Cal exists too. Soft felt and cool, comforting solidity against his face. He is not dressed. No one is there to see him in his nakedness, and it wouldn't bother him if they were.
Instead of the ocean, air touches his skin. Instead of waves and surface tension, his surface is comprised of skin, in contact with air. He clears his throat, and finds it gunked up--he clears it in a coughing fit, and finds his head hurts. He does not want to get up. He tries again to clear his throat, his eyes squeezed shut and cold where the crud is exposed to air. He has a weird kind of vertigo. Like his flesh should be motion, should be water. Like the ache in his chest, clenching tight and threatening to take his heart with it, should be a bottomless, hungry depth of pressure and darkness.
The sensation of the dream won't leave.
Spitefully, he shoves himself off his mattress onto the floor.
Which does wake him up a little more. But it makes the vertigo worse.
Why is it worse.
He reaches up, pawing for Cal--
And finds him. That feels more normal. That's something real. Okay. Okay, he's awake.
He has a weird kind of vertigo. Like his flesh should be motion, should be water. Like the ache in his chest, clenching tight and threatening to take his heart with it, should be a bottomless, hungry depth of pressure and darkness.
The sensation of the dream won't leave.
Ugh.... he pulls Cal to his chest, and focuses on how to breathe.
Unlike the ocean, he needs to breathe.