In the scientific community Germans are regarded with a disquieting distinction. This accolade is not one of accomplishment, however. German scientists are notorious for being the first to identify new horrific maladies and the last to tell anyone about them. Whether they simply don't want to be the bearers of bad news, or they derive some sick pleasure from discrete diagnosis is anyone's guess. Regardless, they always step forward and take credit after someone else has broken the news. Thus it was for Frau Doktor Professor Doktor Sauerbrun who in 1923 accidentally stumbled upon the cause of Pink Eye. Instead of informing people, though, she giggled at her crusty-eyed Austrian cousins. So too Herr Doktor Schultz when he defined the debilitating psychological disorder known as Gawker Speak and neglected to tell anyone. For years innocent people suffered the incensed bloviations of these deranged idiots without recourse. Even so, this most recent German remission is by far the most grave and attacks humanity at its most vulnerable point...and I'm not talking about the balls.
"Traumzeit" that's what she called it. Dream time. I chortled when she told me. Was she fucking with me? I had fucked Lara's boyfriend back in med school and I always got the sense that she wanted to vivisect me for that. You know, cut off my vagina, wear it as a hat, and then diagnose me with irritable bowel syndrome and a case of hysteria. Still, she said it with chilling clarity, like Nietzsche after a syphilitic paroxysm claiming he could see humanity's extinction, but with tits and a lab coat. In deference to the gravity of her professionalism I played along, slipping into the orbit of her seeming insanity. I told her about Steve, my patient, who had first begun to have the symptoms. She confirmed them, even cutting me off to elaborate in precise detail the nature of specific traits. Her research matched my own but for the label of Traumzeit. When I inquired for her notes she became erratic, confessing to me that she herself was having difficulty sleeping. She said that she had bought a carrel at the Berghain and did her research among fiends and perverts. A significant portion was lost after her desk was mistaken for a fisting booth. Alarmed by her increasingly agitated and voluble speech, I begged to come see her. Thursday would be sufficient, she said. She walked away from the receiver and I heard a bang then a thud.
Lara's colleague contacted me the following day to tell me of her suicide and designate me as heir to her research. This surprised me as she and I were not at all close. He explained, however, that German primogeniture is determined by whoever spoke with the deceased last. A policy too peculiar and moribund not to be German. Though grieved by the loss, I forced myself to return to work and my patients, repeating to myself that grief, terror, uncertainty, and toil are all important players in the gangbang of inspiration. That day Steve came to my office. Steve was a preeminent shlub, a forty something with monster truck sized thyroid and debilitating fear of exchanging money. He always joked that he would have been a hit in communist Russia. He looked as if he had skipped puberty and went straight to menopause. This was my patient zero.
Steve had been coming to me for around eight months after having been abandoned by his last three therapists. I had sized him up and after several months it was my professional opinion that I would rather die than see his jowly face again. However, by such time as I was about to drop-kick him out of my cute ass office, Steve threw me a psychological curve ball. Showing up uncharacteristically bewildered, Steve gushed that he had met someone. Upon further inquiry, it seemed that a young woman had appeared to him in his dreams. I tried to explain through a series of gifs of Jung and Freud crossing swords that this woman was merely a projection of his subconscious desire for his own mother. Steve begged to fucking differ. According to him, this woman (Natasha was her name) acted not at all like any other person in one of his dreams. She was reactionary, confused, and seemingly sentient. Probing further about the nature of their interaction, I learned that Natasha had cut off Steve's dick when he tried to graze her nipple. I laughed but Steve insisted that this was not an ordinary behavior for a dream vixen. Over the course of the following weeks, Steve detailed to me these strange visions. Every time he would dream he would see Natasha and she was not happy about it. Sometimes she would conjure a weapon and force Steve to sit in a horribly stinky port-a-potty (also manifested by her) for the duration of the dream. Other times they would chat and Steve would tell me anecdotes about Natasha the next day. She told him that she was real, that she found great displeasure in twitter narcissism, and that whenever Steve dreamed she would fall asleep in her real life, only to awaken once his dream had ended. The persistence of his experience and the nuanced psychological profile of Natasha led me to believe and that Steve was indeed the victim of some strange phenomenon; it was this oneiric convergence of unknown origin that led me back to Lara.
Hoping to avoid the academic sloppy seconds of an over-researched topic, I assembled my notes on Steve and awaited Lara's posthumous analysis. I was certain that, if published, my research on "Traumzeit" would make me famous. Finally, I could hold the face of the puppy of my dismissive colleagues over the pile of the hot, stinking shit of my genius! Also, I could hire a harem of sexy, banana-hammock-wearing interns to do my bidding. That night I went to sleep with the confidence of Kanye, but, much to my dismay, my psychopomp was not to be of Kardashian stock. As a trained psychologist, I take some pride in my own dream awareness. It's not uncommon for me to turn the bestial terrors of my psyche into laughable, micro-penis-ed Tea Partyers. Thus, when my Traumzeit began I was not at all disturbed. The first symptom is a rift, some tear or delineation in the horizon of your dream. So, when I saw a sun-sized sphincter floated through the air, I thought, "Goddammit, my subconscious wants to talk about butts again." However, instead of a bootylicious metaphor about anal fixation, I got Dylan. The celestial sphincter dilated and grew to eclipse half of my dream. There I was standing a midst the non-euclidean architecture of my dream town and staring into a black disc with a pinkish border. It was abyssal and I dared not enter. Then a towheaded doofus sauntered through. Dylan somehow combined the idiotic zen of an early 90's surf jock with the pedantic smugness of a dubstep DJ. Sporting oversized, pooka shell headphones and more facial piercings than the Gathering of the Juggalos I thought this tool could only be the twisted machination of my subconscious. This idea was quickly dispelled when he told me that my tits inspired P.L.U.R. Not even a think tank of misogynists could come up with something so lame, let alone myself. Even more unsettling, though, was the sphincter which had gone from black to transparent. Through this dubstep looking glass I saw Dylan's dream and it was horrifying.
His dreamscape extended interminably and was tessellated by images of breasts, bongs, and dogs wearing sun glasses. It looked like an infinite tumblr and was awful to behold. Unable to endure the gaze of this other realm, I ran deeper into my own dream. Terribly, the portal remained and Dylan followed me. Eventually, we spoke and through our conversation (he told me a story about surfing with Sublime's tour nanny) I came to the nightmarish conclusion that Traumzeit was happening to me. I awoke that morning and poured over my notes while anxiously awaiting Lara's data. It did not come and it would not for several more weeks. In that time I had the harrowing privilege of getting to know Dylan. Needless to say, he was a fucking idiot. As if watching Dylan attempt to take selfies in his dream were not bad enough, I was coming to a realization that was far more dreadful. The portal, the liminal space between our dreams was begging to erode. Images, structures, and even persons from his dream were bleeding into my own. This fetid hemorrhage brought to my dream legions of vape heads and scores of bimbos mutilated by Dylan's imagination to be nothing more than giant breasts with legs. Neither was his dream immune, though, and before long Dylan approached me and asked that I "unfollow" his dream. Apparently, my increasing agitation was warping his dream into a nightmare too brutal for his fragile psyche. I took some pride in that, but I knew that Dylan was right.
Lara's research arrived in the mail precisely two and a half weeks after I was stricken with Traumzeit. Her findings were less the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel and more accidental-discovery-of-ex-boyband-member-mass-grave. They outlined the pathology of Traumzeit. Though uncertain of it's etiology, she confirmed the dream fault, the blending of dreams, and (most disturbing) their ultimate fusion. Was I really going to have to spend the remainder of my sleeping life shackled to this turd jockey and his lame ass imagination? I strongly debated murdering Dylan in an attempt to free my dreams from his vapid oppression. The researched indicated, however, that there was some connection between the two dreamers and that any disruption to that could be fatal. I was devastated. I didn't know whether to kill Dylan anyways or masturbate on my divan and laugh as my patients confessed on a bed of pussy juice. An old psychology professor of mine used to say that the shame of masturbation is great perspective. So I followed his advice...hard.
After a marathon of clit clobbering, I fell into an almost catatonic sleep. Of course, Dylan arrived and he was rather miffed. Supposedly, I had taken him away from a particularly productive meeting where he was trying to pitch a time traveling Surf Ninjas prequel with a dubstep soundtrack. As he berated me, another surreal sphincter appeared or rather collided with our dream. It produced a seismic event, effectively prostrating Dylan and me before this quivering orifice. Out of the blackness stepped two persons, a svelte twenty something hipster girl and a paunchy euro trash slum lord, Katy and Jens respectively. Dylan was amazed, but the newcomers were both rather blase about the whole experience. This perception was reinforced when Jens began conjuring slutty, male capris and Katy told me in condescending fashion about dream gentrification. Apparently, Dylan and I were "like at least 20th wave dream gentrifiers" and therefore very lame. Resisting the urge to impale this pale imp, I questioned her further. With rolling eyes, Katy explained that her and Jens' dream had been fused for months and that several other dreams had begun to merge with their dream as well. In time I met these baby dog dicked shit kickers. There was Ralph, Naoko, Jenny, Afua, and of course Trevin. All had come to the dream at different times and were in varying stages of fusion with the original Jens/Katy dream.
Since the time of the merging between my/Dylan's dream and that of Jens/Katy and the others I have spent at most two hours awake per day. I often awake covered in my own shit and piss, my pajamas looking like a Rorschach of feces. I spend my waking hours gorging on food and organizing what research I have. It seems that the sleep of any one dreamer forcibly draws the rest into the collective dream, thus explaining my impromptu narcolepsy. Worse still, the dream is accruing more and more dreamers. So it is that I have gotten to know trash from all walks of life. There is even a fucking baby in the dream now. I fear that this oneiric convergence is approaching a singularity. By my estimation, humanity will share one collective dream within two months. We all will be sitting on the same hypnagogic, furry-tailed butt plug. This will no doubt spell the end of humanity, as everyone will be ensconced in a communal siesta unable to stir or live a waking life at all. Perhaps once the majority of humans have died those with the greatest endurance may awaken to a mostly dead world. It is not end of humanity that scares me, however. Rather, I am terrified by the prospect of this collective Borgesian nightmare to which we are all running. The thought of spending a relative eternity haunted by the maudlin machinations of teenagers is anathema to me. Furthermore, I cannot be sure what the geography of this dream will be. A psychomanteum of malformed tweets and half-assed fetishes? Were I a younger psychoanalyst, I might revel in this opportunity. I am old, though, and much too afraid of sharing a sex dream with my mom.
