The Things We Carry Inside Us

It was not quite a lucid dream, but it was something I was meant to know. It had been given to me. I don’t remember dreams very well unless I wrote them down. I didn’t have to write this one.

I was a member of a clan, an extended family of peaceful farmers until the bad times came. We were attacked and drawn into a terrible battle with a rising empire of vampires. And this was way before vampires had ever come into vogue. The war with the vampires had gone badly. The human race had been massacred down to a small bunch of which I had become the unlikely warlord. My friends had been killed. I had seen my family killed. In despair I wanted only revenge before I died. I was filled with a hatred and bloodlust I would never have imagined could exist inside me.

Through turns of events I can’t remember anymore, we turned the tide and the vampires were defeated. The king and queen captured and brought before me in a kind of Viking hall, bound in silver chains. These were the two who had destroyed my world, and forced me to a life of violence.

I ordered the King vampire chained to iron rings in the floor, while the queen sat on a chair helplessly and watched.

The King and the queen were quite close. They were not monsters between themselves. I think in context of the dream they did love each other and had a great connection to each other. I wanted the Queen to watch. I wanted her to feel what I felt. The King spoke some final word of love to her as they chained him to the floor. I took the hammer and stake in my own hands and killed him in front of her eyes as she wept blood tears. Now there was only her, alone now that most of her species had been killed and the remainder being hunted down.

I had intended to just kill her and there an end.

I’m sure that was my first intention.

I saw her there in her doom and helplessness. At my mercy. I thought of all the bloodshed and all the harm she had done me who would have been happy to have been left alone. Where had she had mercy for me? And yet she was a woman, with heart, capable of love. Knowing that she was not a beast, that she could feel pain and loss and humiliation, I was filled with an implacable, insatiable hatred. Killing her, it was not enough. I wanted to make sure she spent a few minutes in Hell with me first.

I wanted to make . . . a statement.

“Strip her!” I shouted, throwing my armor and jacket to the floor. Suddenly every warrior in the room knew what was going to happen. Women fled from the room crying. Some women covered their mouths with their hands and turned away. My warriors stripped away her clothes until she was nude. Her body was pale and clammy, like meat in a supermarket. She was not beautiful or desirable. But I didn’t desire her. Not at all did I desire her. I wasn’t interested in beauty or even pleasure. I remember that emotion clearly. I was interested only in the most extreme humiliation I could possibly commit on another person who had ruined me so completely. “Stake her out. Legs apart!”

My warriors chained her to rings in the floor. She screamed and resisted, fought them with teeth and nails and tears, protested she was a queen as they splayed her legs far apart and chained them. When she tried to bite them, they beat her on the head. I kneeled beside her and put the wooden stake between her long teeth as a gag so she couldn’t attack me. She was nude. She was gagged. She was chained to a stone floor, her legs spread eagled.

Yes I did.

I did it with gusto and the utmost violence. I did it with the all hate and rage I could feel. This was not an erotic dream. There was nothing erotic about it. It was me using my male body as a battering ram of emotional violation. I was using my body as a weapon of degradation, a messenger of rage and hate, to drive the story home to her of her ruin, to crush her utterly, to drive home my personal rage for all the death she had caused me. I wanted her last thought on earth to be of me, her conqueror mounted on top of her, inside of her, against her wishes, against her dignity, against her personhood, tearing her and striking her and showing her how completely I had crushed her spirit beyond healing. I wanted her to hope for rescue and yet not be rescued. I who would have been only a peaceful farmer raising a family, if she had left me alone.

When I was done with her I took the stake from her mouth, her face filled with a kind of despair and resignation. I had shattered her, and the knowledge gave me bitter pleasure. I think if I had unchained her she would have lain as she was, hoping for death.

I took the stake and hammer and dispatched her. The warriors roared their disapproval. They had lost loved ones too and had hoped for a go at her. It was the only touch of mercy I showed her.

As I looked down at her face, streaked with blood tears, I felt the rage drain out of me and a great sense of despair, because I knew also in that moment I was no longer human.

And I woke up.


It makes me wonder what kind of things I’m capable of, what any of us are capable of, and in what circumstances those things might come out. I suspect that we are not what we seem. Joseph Conrad wrote often on the theme that our decency and civilization are a veneer as thin as paint that can be stripped away by the howling mob around us, or by circumstance. It’s easy to judge the wicked. But maybe the rest of us, maybe we’re just luckier that’s all.


C Sanchez-Garcia