Tag Archives: nightmares

Soul Theft

It happened early Tuesday morning. It has taken me this many days to verbalized it. Describing violent images is not an easy task. You see, the heart beats faster and faster. The head gets heavy. Hands shake. You close your eyes into short meditative moments, breathing and counting.

Inhale. 1. 2. 3. 4.

Exhale. 1. 2. 3. 4.

With each breath I center. This is not reality. This is violent imagery, seeping the emotions hiding inside my body’s cells.

The dream.

I am in the third perspective, observing. I have floated to the ceiling, and I am looking down upon the scene.

I am on a bed. I have on black pants and a white, short sleeve t-shirt. I am flat on my back. My arms are beside my body, which is completely straight. I cannot see my feet.
The bed is surrounded by people standing shoulder to shoulder. They are not moving. They are silently looking at me as if assessing their handiwork. They are gray forms. I cannot see them clearly. They look almost like carved out statues except for their left hands. Each one is holding a large knife in their hand. It is dripping with bright red blood.

From my unnoticed perch I’m the ceiling I am quizzically observing my own stomach and chest area. I feel no emotion as I look. It is hacked into so many pieces it mimics brutally tenderized meat. Blood is soaked into the white sheet all around me.

My gaze moves to my face. I believe I am still alive. My eyes are black. My facial expression looks peaceful. There is no scream to my mouth or contortion.

“How odd.” I think.

I awaken with a start, my muscles jerking, my heartbeat rapid, and I look at the clock. It is 7 am. I have chills in my skin. I curl beneath the covers, turn on a movie and make my mind try and forget. The images invade my day, drifting in and out. I know this will fade. I have been here so many times now, in the aftermath of violent night travel into the subconscious.

I bring out the emotion there. I hold it in my hands. It is the ghost wounds of countless stabs cast into the center of my spirit. I let it fade until I can be here now, scribing it without tears.
Digital Art ©VennieKocsis.com

Ants At the Symphony 

I am back in my high school town. Although there are no beaches in Martin, TN, I am perched, legs crossed, in front of one. This small beach boasts crystal clear, soft blue water rolling in with a slow, tender tide. I am sitting in an ancient stone colosseum. It is as if it was lifted from a fallen city and placed where it grandly sits now.

I am wearing an elegant black dress, shoulderless and simple. I glance down at my toes, perfectly painted deep blue and tucked inside of toeless, black heels. My hair is coifed and sprayed perfectly in place. I am grandly dressed for the symphony.

I am perched alone on one of the stone benches, closest to the stage which has been set up with the beautiful beach as scenery behind it. On stage is a large orchestra filled primarily with strings.

The music surrounds me. I close my eyes, feeling the soft embrace of the cello and the haunting tears of the violin strings.

Suddenly my right forearm begins to itch. I look down and see a red bump close to my wrist. It looks like I have been bitten by a mosquito. I scratch the bump, and when I do, the skin lifts and ants come scattering out of the hole in droves, covering my wrist and hand.

I panic.

I wake up.

It’s coming out.

The Three Black Hats

I am on an air mattress.  It is covered in a cotton sheet.  I am stretched out on my back beneath a soft fleece blanket. I am in the end room of a double wide trailer.  The trailer is nestled in a quiet neighborhood which is dense with trees.  There are no traffic sounds.  I am falling into sleep slowly.  

I may have passed time, into the REM and back out again because all I know is that I am lucidly awake.  I feel a prickling energy all over my body.  There is no pain.  It is electric.  Every hair on my skin is moving.  I can feel each folical.  There is a source pull.  It is coming from the large window on my left.  

I wanted to cover that window when I first arrived here, telling my nephew that it made me uncomfortable because it had only a sheer shell of a curtain. 

“Someone could stand out there and see me.”  I felt vulnerable. 

He assured me, attempting to comfort my cognition.

“It’s cool, Auntie.  No one around here will do that. Just don’t dance around nekkid.”
He did a hillbilly skip and we laughed, but I decided that this weekend I’m going to buy some thick curtains to cover this window. 

Now, on the same evening, I am here on this mattress feeling frozen with fear, having awakened in what seems to be the morning hours, two or three am.  I am wishing Inhad not waited.  I should have gone right then and bought curtains. 

 I know that I need to look at the window to be sure that I’m not just imagining things, but I am terrified to turn my head.  I am still, focused on my breathing.  I know someone is there.  I know it without a doubt.  Still, I have to see to be sure.  I finally move my head very, very slowly and just slightly enough to the left to give me an adequate view to see the window.  If there is someone there they shouldn’t be able to see through the darkness if I move slowly and just enough. 

Through the sheer of the curtains I see them.  Three men.  Side by side.  They are no more than five feet tall, each the exact same height.  They are dressed identical in dark suits and matching dark overcoats.  They have on button up shirts with maroon ties.  They wear black hats, like Hollisters, with maroon ribbons that match their ties.

Their hands are behind their backs.  I do not move. It crosses my mind that they may notice I am awake, but it seems insignificant.  They know already.  I slowly move my head back to the middle of the pillow. They are soulless.  They were not looking at me directly  but rather into the room as if awaiting orders from someone.  My heart is pounding rapidly, and I am dissociating.

I tell myself I am silly, but I am too terrified to glance again.  This will only confirm that I am not imagining all of this.  I am focused on going back to sleep.  I cannot be awake for what is going to happen next. 

“Go back to sleep.”  I urge myself. 

“Go back to sleep.” I say it over and over. 

I close my eyes. I think that I must go back to sleep so that I won’t feel what they are going to do to me.  I make myself laugh inside my head.  What a silly notion.  This shit’s not real.  Yet, beneath my attempts to convince myself, I know they have the ability to take one step and walk through that wall.  Then there will be no escaping.  They’ll be in the house.  

I tell myself that is also a ridiculous notion.  Because they’re reading my thoughts and know all of my plans.  So the best I can do for myself is to go back to sleep and get through it.  So I drift back down into the chasm of REM.

In the morning I will wonder if my memory was real or if it was really a dream.  I will wonder still. 

(Dreamt in 2010, Olympia, Wa)

Anesthetize

You stand there in your
White smock,
Arms crossed over the chest,
Same smile fifteen years later.

I wonder who you are anymore
As your voice echoes
Dismissive screams
Disguised as suggestions
For my wailing.

“Hop a bus to the Harbor,”
You say
“Over a bridge.
Live a little
But just in case you can’t…”

Medicate

I stand small in my boots,
A dandelion inside of weeds
Smashed by every brain
Who dismisses my needs;
Who doesn’t see
Things are different for me.

I fade off beyond the windows
To the skyline.
There’s a blue beneath the clouds
That could be ocean.
I swim there as his voice becomes a whisper,
And I float
As he tries to care.

Medicate

There are answers unaccepted
Even for sadness unexpected.
There’s no more bend in my back.
I’ve walked upside down
Using mirrors for balance.
Those days are long gone.

And I stared
At the scrape on your head
Wondering if you fell
Because you’re aging
And just don’t care anymore.

Not a lost heart,
But a man tired
From carrying the remnants
Of sickness hung around his neck,
Seeped into his stethoscope
Beginning to squeeze his throat.

They don’t use it, you know.
It just looks…
Doctory.

Medicate

I laugh for you.
What a beautiful mask,
All brilliant glow of teeth,
Age lines posing as dimples
Make sideways jokes
A temporary anecdote.

I am a dipping bird
Desperate for worms,
And you are watching as if
My flying is a dance
While I hope for chances.
I nose dive
Into the hive.

I count emotion as it passes.

Anger
Despair
Confusion
Weariness

My body is consumed
As your fingers type out scripts
Because letters spell loneliness
And your scientific ride
Is the most toxic drift.

Medicate

Here we go.
Papers pressed in hands,
Urgent goodbyes;
I inhale in the parking lot
Staring at the setting sun
I’m just another one
Last lock for the day.

Nothing in this is changing,
Just passing by and waving.

When a heart has been danced upon
Until it is trodden earth,
When indifference becomes
The script to numb the hurt
When you can’t see the answer
Is the atmosphere that

Where I breathe
I die.
Where I breathe
I am alive.

And you
Want to anesthetize it,
Like purity holds no power,
Pain should be pacified,
And all the while I am just
Frozen inside these boots.

So tell me, doctor, what would you do?

Medicate?

Vennie Kocsis
©venniekocsis.com

Sometimes We Hurt People

States of being aren’t an excuse. They’re just a mere explanation. I don’t use mere to minimize them. I use it to not minimize the pain that alter states of being can cause.

See, here’s the thing about triggers. They create reactions. Immediately. No thinking, just conditioned movement, even if that conditioning is self centered. Yeah, sometimes altered states of being exude manipulation as a defense mechanism. And that’s just the raw truth.

The Madge. I have no clue except that’s what she said her name is, and I’ve watched her grow into a woman.

She’s interesting. As a teenager, she is sad but only cares about anger. As a woman she is cold and calculating, because sometimes that’s just how she has to be to gain for the collective or defend for the current state of being’s safety.

She gets talked down a lot. She’s learned to be tempered. She is extremely skilled at mental self defense. She knows how to take what’s foreseen and create a thickness into that section of our dimension and to rebuild it from a hit.

She’s been compiling a book that will probably change your opinion of me. She has her own plan of emergence, and I’ve vowed to be those fingertips. But that’s years down the road. You’ll just have to stay along for the ride.

Point is, sometimes we who automatically change states of being can have some shitty actions as a result. I own that in myself. No particular story to tell yet. Just a general observation. Let it be known. It can happen. And we hate when it does. It plagues us. Makes us feel like shit. Makes us despise carrying this bi-product of what was done to us as kids.

Therapists are correct. There’s no chakra healing for this. If anyone says so, I call bullshit. You master and thrive through this by learning to work with it; by admitting when a state of being does something shitty or is in love or is flakey or needs to feel safe or is afraid or blissfully joyful. You just own it. With that owning comes knowledge and acceptance.

Okay. We’re here. So how do we work as a team? We figure it out, with the end result goal always being the greater good of the collective. No one out votes the counsel.

We follow our love fearlessly while fearing it will be stripped away. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s exhausting. So exhausting we stop giving our love and begin being it. So exhausting sometimes we shut it all down and head for respite. Because we know there is no healing greater than pure, un-infiltrated self love.

We are confusing, complicated, mysterious and quite a battalion for just one to handle unless that one enjoys observing, and has the ability to float. We are a constant interest for the watcher.

I was clearing out my voice notes a couple days ago. I came across one recorded December 2nd.

“Weird.” I thought. I didn’t recognize the title. I didn’t remember recording it. I clicked play.

It is a five minute song I free styled. It’s beautiful and funny and I have no memory recording it. I’ve wracked my brain to remember. That can be a bit maddening. Here, acceptance is key.

This is what we hide; what we experience, you understand? Because you often shame or dismiss us. So we avoid you. This is the side we keep quiet. There’s no explanation.

There’s just you telling us that we’re crazy. There’s fucks wanting to medicate us. There’s people wanting to mimic us. And there’s just us wishing for one day that you could do all of that;for one day you could experience what plays out in these screens behind our eyelids, hear the surround sound in our heads and see through the senses we use to see. The truth. And it can be, oh, so ugly.

Now I’ve the opened the door just a little bit wider into the world about this existence.

It’s real. We switch. We lose memory. I tend to create, paint, write, sing in those times it seems. And maybe that’s what memories do. They emerge through whoever feels safest. There’s always the whisper that it can happen any time. And hyper vigilance prevails just in case I’m in the right place at the wrong time if it does.

“Don’t switch in public.” Not many know these thoughts. Avoidance is key. Late night or early morning grocery runs. Stay clear of the hive.

And a lot of aloneness.

I want to go back.
I don’t.
I want to know all of the truth.
I’m happy right here.

Because you see, I am smiling.

This is my duality. And I feel every intricate stroke of this humanity.