Now — when I woke…
Notes of a Madman
People called me strange since I was a child. They said my feelings were wrong. I learned to lie to people. I learned to say nice words about pity and love, about the happiness of loving other people. But deep inside I always believed — and I still believe — that people are bad by nature. I think that of all things called pleasures, only one is true pleasure: to feel pleasure when you see another person suffer. I think that a person in a simple, first state wants one thing — to hurt others. Our culture puts a bit of control on that wish. Many years of rules and government made people think that another person’s pain is bad. Now people cry and feel pity for others. But that pity is a kind of trick.
You can mix water and strong drink so that an oil will stay in the middle and not go up or down. It will not go up, it will not sink. The school books say that then the oil makes a round ball. Like this, there are moments when the human soul gets free. It is free from the weight of life, from chains of family and teaching, from the fear of court, from fear of what people say. In these moments our wishes and actions follow only the first, natural drives of our being.
These are not normal sleep hours when daytime thought is still a little there. These are not days of madness when other forces rule. These are strange moments when the body sleeps but the mind knows it. The mind tells our dream ghost: you are free! Knowing that our actions will be only for ourselves, and no one else will know, we give ourselves to the dark drives from deep in our will. In such moments, for me at least, I never wanted to do any good thing. On the contrary, knowing I would be free from punishment, I hurried to do something wild, cruel, and sinful.
I always thought, and still think, that sleep is as real as life when we are awake. What is our waking life? It is our feelings, our wishes, our impressions — nothing more. Sleep has these things too. Sleep fills the soul like wake life. Sleep moves us, makes us happy or sad. Acts we do in sleep leave the same mark in our spirit as acts in wake life. The only real difference is that sleep life is private for each person, and waking life is the same for all. So for each person sleep is a second reality. Which reality to like more — sleep or wake life — is a personal choice.
I liked sleep more than waking life since I was a child. I did not think time in sleep was lost. I was sorry when sleep time went away for wake life. As a boy I thought a night without dreams was a big loss. If I woke and did not remember my dream, I was sad. All day at home and at school I tried to find a piece of the forgotten dream in my memory. When I found one small picture, I would push my memory more and it would give me back the bright dream life. I would hold that returned world and remember every small thing. I trained my memory so I would not forget dreams. I waited for night and for sleep like for a wanted meeting.
I loved nightmares because they gave very strong feelings. I learned to make them come by choice. I slept with my head lower than my body and the nightmare came fast and pressed me with its sweet-pain claws. I woke with strong tired feelings and could not breathe well. But after one breath of fresh air I wanted to fall again into that black bottom of fear. Monsters came from the dark. Monkey-like devils fought each other and then screamed and jumped on me. They threw me down, they tried to choke me. My temples beat, it was painful and scary, but so deep that I felt happy.
Even more, from early years, I loved sleep moments when I knew I was sleeping. Then I felt a big freedom of spirit. I could not make these moments happen by force. In sleep I would suddenly feel an electric shock and know the world was in my power. I could walk through dream roads, palaces, and valleys wherever I wanted. By power of will I could see myself in any place I liked. I could bring into my dream all people I wanted. As a child I used these moments to play tricks on people. But later I moved to other joys: in my dreams I raped women, I killed people, I became an executioner. Only then I learned what real delight and intoxication mean.
Years passed. The days of study and control left me. I was alone. I had no family to work for and no one to stop me. I could give myself fully to my happiness. I spent most of my day in sleep and near-sleep. I used different drugs — not only for the small pleasures they bring, but to make sleep deeper and longer. Practice and habit let me more and more enjoy the greatest freedom a person can dream of. My sleeping mind in these dreams became nearly as strong and clear as my day mind, and maybe even stronger. I could live in my dreams and watch this life from the side. I watched my own ghost do things in sleep. I guided it and felt its feelings with all passion.
I made a place for my dreams. It was a large hall deep under the earth. Two big ovens gave a red light. The walls looked like metal. The floor was stone. There were tools for pain: a rack, a stake, chairs with nails, tools to pull muscles and to tear the body, knives, tongs, whips, saws, hot bars and rakes. When I had my freedom, I went to this secret place. With a strong wish I brought into this underground room anyone I wanted, sometimes people I knew, more often people from my imagination — usually girls and young men, pregnant women, children. I played with them like the most powerful ruler on earth. Later I had favorite types of victims. I knew them by name. In some I liked the beauty of their bodies. In others I liked their strength to take great pain and to not show fear. In others I liked their weakness, their no-will, their cries and useless pleas. Many times I made people I had already tortured come back to life so I could enjoy their death again. At first I was both the torturer and the watcher. Then I made ugly small men as helpers. Their number grew when I wished. They gave me the torture tools. They laughed and made faces. With them I had my bloody feasts of fire, cries, and curses.
I would maybe have stayed mad, alone, and happy. But some of my old friends found me sick and near madness and wanted to save me. They forced me to go out, to be in theatres and in society. I think they planned to show me the most beautiful girl to make me change. She later became my wife. I do not think anyone would not love her. All the charm of a woman and of a human came together in her. I loved her. I often called her mine and I will grieve for her while I live. They showed her me as a man in pain, a poor man who needs help. She started out curious and then she had full, total love for me.
For a long time I did not want to think about marriage. No matter how strong the feeling that first took my soul, I was afraid to lose my lonely life. My loneliness let me enjoy dream visions freely. But the right life — the life people wanted me to have — slowly covered my mind. I truly believed my soul could change. My friends told me I was like a man back from the grave into the sun. After the wedding we lived in a new, light, happy house. I told myself I cared about the world and city news. I read newspapers and kept friends. I again learned to be awake in the day. At night, after wild love with my wife, I had a dead, flat sleep without visions. In that short darkness I was ready to be happy about my recovery, my return from madness to normal life.
But never — never! — did the desire for other kinds of joy die in me. It was only quieted by very real life. In the sweet days of the first month after the wedding I felt in my soul a thirst for more strong and shocking feelings. Each week that thirst became stronger. Along with it grew another wish I did not want to know at first: I wanted to bring my wife, the woman I loved, into my night feast and see her face made ugly by the pain I gave her. I fought long to stay sane. I tried to use reason to stop me, but I could not fully believe my own words. I tried to stay busy and not be alone — the temptation was inside me and there was nowhere to go from it.
Finally I gave in. I pretended to study the history of religions. I put wide sofas in my library and began to lock myself there at night. Later I spent whole days there. I hid my secret from my wife. I was afraid she would find out what I kept so jealously. I loved her still. Her touch pleased me as before. But I wanted a stronger pleasure. I could not tell her why I stayed away. I even preferred she think I did not love her any more. She thought that and she suffered. I saw her grow pale and weak. Sadness was taking her to the grave. When, in a weak moment, I said normal words of love, she would come back to life for a moment. She could not trust me because my acts did not fit my words.
Although I spent almost whole days in sleep and dreams as before — even more than before marriage — I had lost the power to be fully free in my dreams. Weeks passed where I lay on the sofas and woke only to drink wine or soup and take a new sleeping dose — but the wanted moment did not come. I had sweet pain of nightmares and many different dreams in order or wild, wonderful dreams of crazy mixes — but my mind was covered by a kind of smoke. I had no power to rule the dream; I had to watch what came from somewhere outside me.
I tried all ways I knew: I hurt my blood flow, I hypnotized myself, I used morphine and hashish and other sleeping poisons, but they gave only their own magic. After the demon of the Indian poppy woke me, I had sweet tiredness, the weak swing of the dream boat on a great sea that makes new images from its waves — but these images did not obey my command. When I woke I was angry. I remembered long chains of pictures that had tempted me but were not made by my wish and gone not by my will. I was tired with rage and desire but I was weak.
I remember it was more than six months from the time I again tried to reach full dreaming to the day when my most wanted happiness came back. In sleep I felt the familiar electric shock and knew I was free again, that I slept but could rule the dream, that I could do all I wished and it would be only a dream! A wave of great joy filled my soul. I could not stop the old temptation: my first move was to find my wife. But I did not want my underground room. I chose to be where she was used to be. This was a more refined pleasure. With my second sleeping mind I saw myself standing at the library door.
“Come,” I said to my ghost, “come, she is sleeping now. Take a thin knife with an ivory handle.”
I went through the dark rooms. It felt like flying, as in dreams. From the window I saw city roofs and thought: “All this is under my power.” The night had no moon but the sky was full of stars. My small helpers were hiding under the chairs, but I made them go away. I quietly opened the bedroom door. A small lamp gave enough light. I came close to the bed where my wife slept. She lay small and weak. Her hair was braided and fell on the bed. A handkerchief was at her pillow — she had cried before bed because I had not come home. A sad feeling pressed my heart. For a moment I wanted to kneel and kiss her cold feet. But I remembered — it is only a dream.
A strange feeling worked in me. I could now do my secret dream with this woman and only I would know. In real life I could still give her love, comfort, and care. I bent over her body and with my strong hand I put it on her throat so she could not cry. She woke quickly, opened her eyes, and tried to move under my hand. I seemed to pin her to the bed. She twisted to push me away and wanted to say something. Her eyes were mad with fear. I looked into the blue of those eyes for some seconds full of strange feeling. Then I stabbed her with the knife in the side under the quilt.
She shivered and stretched but could not cry out. Tears of pain and despair filled her eyes and ran down her face. Warm sticky blood ran down my hand that held the knife. I slowly gave her more cuts, pulling the quilt off, stabbing her as she tried to cover herself, to stand, to crawl. Oh, how sweet and how terrible it was to cut the soft shapes of the body with the blade and to wrap the whole beautiful, gentle, loved body with red lines of wounds and blood! Finally I grabbed her head and put the knife in her neck behind the sleeping artery, pressed with all my strength and cut her throat. Blood bubbled because the dying woman tried to breathe; her hands moved like to catch or to push away. Then she was still.
A great despair hit my soul so strong that I tried to wake and could not. I tried with all will to see the walls of the bedroom break and to see myself on my library sofa. But the nightmare did not go. The bloody, ruined body of my wife lay on the blood-wet bed. In the doorway people stood with candles. They ran here when they heard the noise of the fight. Their faces were full of horror. They said nothing but looked at me — and I could see them.
Then I suddenly understood that this time all that had happened was not a dream.
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