Mind Traps: Installment One

In lucid dreams he faced his greatest nightmares. Gathering great efforts, he sought to escape those horrors and pass on into the waking-world, where many a wanderer set free made their ways aimlessly throughout the world.

Idly, he pushed at the far reaches of his mind to escape the state in which he had constantly been forced into for the past three years. Three years that appeared to be centuries. A government project, they had told him. A test, an experiment, a daring little feat and in the end, he would be 10,000 dollars richer.

Such realities, as far from the truth as they were, attracted thousands from many different backgrounds, from all corners of the country. They had all came as night fell, and then by daybreak, they were all absent of true thought.

John had been able to derive a few knowable facts from the world in which he had been plunged.

It was operated on an inconsistent basis, where the vaguest details could shift on the slightest whim.

Escape, futile as it were, could be achieved at a certain time, with the greatest of circumstances.

It was taking place in a realm far above the reach of any physical being. It took place in his mind.

Such mind-traps, as they were fondly called by the scientist who labored over them, had taken many years to perfect. A means to enslave civilization through their own minds, the government had toyed with the idea for several decades before finally putting it into play.

The fateful world John, and many others, had been plunged into was as deranged as any crazy man's most disturbing fantasies, arranged in a surreal and vaguely impossible realm that seemed to defy common knowledge and operate purely on the nightmare’s of extremely disturbed children.

Objects in the state appeared to be one thing, and then another thing in the next fleeting moment. The sense of time was all but gone, and John could hardly keep count as to how many days he had been fixed in a state of horrifying solitude and inconsistency.

Beyond common reasoning, he had somehow retained his sanity long enough to recognize these facts about the world listed above. Even more impossible was the fact he knew a way to escape the place in his mind he had been confined to.

A marvelously dreadful tale could be told from the time he entered his state to present time. In his earlier life, he had been a nobody. Having no truly redeemable qualities, and accomplishing nothing, he had been flung through life from job to job, encounter to encounter. The prospect of 10,000 dollars had held an allure on him that easily baited him to trust his safety with the government. An ill-fated choice, it soon turned out.

His first day in the state was a blur, and he vaguely remembered searching for human life in the twisted landscape that was his recently corrupted mind.

Trees that were purple, dogs that were green, and cars that melted in the cold frost of winter featured prominently in his mind on that day. Roads that winded turned straight, gentle thoughts that bubbled up were thrust down by the darker thoughts that lurked out of sight. Demons laughed, and fire consumed his sleeping moments, and the soft echoes of the dead beckoned to him from the abyss. He recalled a sense of his own death – a sense that suggested he himself had passed from the earth - but the sense disappeared the further he plunged himself into the state, and it was all but forgotten later on.

The twisted demons that now haunted his life made brief appearances now and then today, but at the time of his entry into the state, dominated his wandering.

They would appear at odd times, without warning, as he walked along roads that never ended. Occasionally, he encountered a passing stranger, but that stranger always turned out to be another one of the demons, under a guise.

The state was endless, seamless, and seemingly devoid of human life besides John himself. Sleepless, he wandered through what he could only perceive to be his darkest nightmares.