What happens when you ask extreme metal luminaries to crack open their dream journals and share their most memorable nightmares, dreams, and hallucinations? Dream Bloody Gore. This month, members of Horrendous, Ides of Gemini, and Craven Idol invite Decibel to crawl into their unconscious minds and prowl around their dreamscapes. Ahead, our contributors share mind-bending accounts of drowning planets, dead kitten revenge plots, and fubar astral projections. Dig in and explore what Dio’s “Dream Evil” called “the dark that you find in the back of your mind.” Scream on and dream on.
SERA TIMMS (Vocalist of Ides of Gemini)
“Here’s my horrifying dream: I was at a cabin in the forest with a few of my friends; all women. It was morning. I went outside to the deck, which sits above a river. There were oak trees and ancient rocks surrounding the deck. I heard a scuffle up in the trees and some white feathers fell down. I wondered if it was a white dove. Then two giant white feathers fell down with a bit of soft brown tan on the ends, and my friend Vicky caught them. We both agreed it was an owl.
“It felt magical with the feathers raining down but there was also a question of danger and uncertainty – why so many? We discussed a possible owl nest. The feathers stopped falling. We then noticed a large sort of pile of feathers gathered in some low tree branches. Again, majestic, pure-white, snowy owl feathers. Sunlight filtered through the leaves. There was a morning soft breeze with a gentle, rushing river below.
“As we approached the branches we saw that on a sort of telephone power pole attached to the deck, a black/grey cat – it kept switching faces between two deceased cats of mine to some other grey cat – had been hung with wire around its neck. The headless white owl had been tied to the bottom half of the cat. His cute white feather “owl pants” and talons were sticking out. The cat’s eyes were open and it seemed to stare languidly at us, exhausted and tortured. The woman who owned the cat ran up to it, frantically trying to rip the wire off its neck. I knew she needed wire cutters, but couldn’t remember where they were.
“Some how we got the cat down. This woman was like a Queen of Pentacles type: practical, domestic, a bit homely, kind, round and soft figure, curly dark hair. The cat was handed to me. I knew it was too late to save it. But I cradled it like a precious baby on my shoulder, trying to comfort it as it gasped its last breaths of earthly life. It seemed I loved this cat with all my heart, and I was devastated at this cruelty which had been done. All I could think was that it was a boy, a teenager that did this as a cruel prank. But it was sophisticated, like sorcery. A black cat and a white owl? It had to be a person of great power and magic who would even be allowed to catch a snowy owl. How could we find him? In the dream, I thought this cruel sacrifice could not be left unpunished.”
Swan-dive into the hypnotic splendor of Ides of Gemini’s Women (out April 28th from Rise Above Records) in a Timms-directed video HERE. Stay current with summer tour dates and pre-order information over on Facebook.
S. VRATH (Vocalist/guitarist of Craven Idol)
“I’ve had a recurring nightmare as long as I can remember. From infant to adult, it returns from time to time. It twists, turns, and distorts, but remain effectively the same.
“The scene is black and white. The whiteness is blindingly bright, whist the blackness is darker than any color I’ve witnessed whilst awake. It has that eerie, flickering discomfort that German films of the 1920s had – think Nosferatu, [The Cabinet of Dr.] Caligari, etc. The scenery is mostly black, though.
“The location is a swamp, with low hills painted on the horizon with unidentifiable birds circling. The scene is reminiscent of Gallen Kallela’s painting named “Lemminkainen’s Mother” – which I wouldn’t see until years after – and those Otto Dix sketches from his The Gospel of St. Matthew II series. In particular, “Raising Tabith” and “Satan Tempting Jesus.” Everything’s in profile.
“What happens is one of the following – I haven’t figured out which: a man is drowning in a swamp in slow motion, or at least he is drowning into the ground. On the banks of the swamp we can see a close-up of a woman wearing a scarf over her head. She is whining, whimpering, appealing in words I don’t understand – expressing the deepest sadness of the status quo. But the status quo doesn’t change. It’s stuck in time. The man keeps drowning, the woman keep lamenting.
“In an alternate version, everything is drowning. The man, the woman, the hills, the skies. They are flowing downwards, as there is no solid land. It is all a type of black quicksand. The lamenting is ever-present. But to my frustration, no one ever does anything about it. The birds keep circling though. They are not descending.
“It’s depressing and terrifying; a manifestation of zero hope. I wake up in horror from this nightmare. Sweaty and unaware of my identity. I have frequently run to a mirror in a state of somnambulism and see a different reflection each time. Sometimes an abomination, sometimes a different person. The key element, however, is the powerlessness to usher change, but also the consequences of actions/mistakes that cannot be retracted. Say the swamp scene, when the world is sinking. Can anything be done? Nothing whatsoever.
“This dream introduced me to a very dark side of existence from a very young and naive age. It made me fearful of the dark, but also curious to discover what lurked in it. It fascinated me, and as I got older, drew me to sub-culture, into obscure literature, into music, into instruments, into bands, into Eschaton.”
Face your fears and rage out to Craven Idol’s The Shackles of Mammon, available from Dark Decent Records HERE. Check their festival appearances and news about future releases on Facebook.
MATT KNOX (Guitarist/vocalist of Horrendous)
“The dream began in a huge Gothic mansion on a hill. In the beginning, I was standing in the middle of a classroom from my past. I believe it was my grade school class, but the other students in the room were as old as they would be in the present day. I was the teacher in the room, and though no one was speaking, there was a palpable tension between us that seemed indicative of a recent argument. I felt that I desperately wanted to mitigate the situation but was unable to communicate with any of them. Worse still, their faces were completely undefined/warped, as if they were in the process of forming or were constantly re-configuring themselves, almost like the static on a dead television channel.
“I was so frustrated I left the room, following a dingy black and white checkered tile floor into an unfathomably long hallway. Once I entered the hallway, I sat on the floor and gradually began to lay supine, my body rigid as I could manage to be. At this moment, I began levitating, but only about a foot off of the tile floor. I was then seemingly catapulted forward from that section of the floor, feet first, down the long corridor. The feeling of speed and reckless forward motion was immense, and I had to crane my neck to see in front of my feet while maintaining the plank-like position that was necessary for this method of travel.
“The hallway seemed to wind and twist ahead of me in infinite labyrinthine confusion. Though I couldn’t see very much, I could sense the walls rushing past me as I approached something at the end of the tunnel. I could feel the end of the hallway drawing near with terminal intensity, and at this moment began to feel the presence of an entity. It was incredibly powerful and seemed to envelop me, stifling me as it fully materialized.
“As I approached my inevitable union with the entity, I began to scream the phrase, “Show me the inner darkness,” in cultish refrain. Mere moments before I came face to face with the entity, I woke up in my bed, still shouting the cryptic phrase, but in a garbled and inhuman voice. My body seemed to be in a state of sleep paralysis, and my tongue and throat were barely functioning, capable only of producing guttural sounds that were emanating from me in an intelligible mass of syllables. For that split second between sleeping and waking I was fully conscious and convinced that I was possessed. Luckily, this feeling quickly dissipated as I regained full control over my body.
“This is definitely the most terrifying dream I’ve ever had, and I’m still questioning its meaning. I also have wondered if this experience was akin to a form of astral projection, and if so, what exactly triggered it on that particular night. Regardless of its explanation, I can say that I have thought about it many times since, wondering, with equal parts horror and awe, what would have happened if I had remained asleep for one moment longer, and fully merged with the entity.”
While Horrendous recovers from the Decibel Magazine Tour, merge with Decibel’s favorite record of 2015 (Anareta) from Dark Descent Records HERE. Stay tuned for info on upcoming brain-scrambling recordings on Facebook.
