Dream Info: June, 2009
Realism Intensity: 8
Content: R
Accompanied by two friends, one male and one female, I climbed through the collapsed entrance and into the wide tunnel of an abandoned mine. Everything was ordinary enough until several hundred feet in. There, hewn rock walls were replaced by dingy metal. The rock ground descended into wide stairs. The mine suddenly felt like an old underground installation of some kind. Rooms lined the stairs as we proceeded. They were all rather small. Some had doors, some curtains, some nothing. Occasional there were chairs but usually the rooms were empty.
I ducked into a room and stopped. My heart leapt to my throat. The room had a table, a couple of tipped boxes whose contents had spilled out, and several chairs. One of the chairs was occupied.
The person was facing the wall. I could only see his back. He was slouching. His dark hair was matted and unkempt. His headed rested at an awkward angle and both arms hung down. Their flesh was dusty and a sickly gray. The fingers were black and curled.
He was dead.
I must have made a noise for my two friends appeared at my sides. The girl screamed. The guy grunted.
It was as if I was frozen. I couldn’t move. It was incredibly eerie to come across a dead body. I had never seen one before. And here I was deep underground in the dark, in a small room, with a corpse. My mind wasn’t sure how to respond and my heart was pounding.
Somehow I approached the man. I moved the opposite direction his head was titled so as to avoid his face for as long as possible. I was not sure I wanted to see his expression. His chest distracted me from thoughts of his face. The man’s ribcage had been burned and was sunken in which allowed a perfect view of the insides of his lower abdomen. There was nothing identifiable: no organs, or bone structure. Just a yellowish orange liquid pooled down inside the black opening. The smell hit me. It was of orange juice, alcohol, and the bitter twang of throw-up.
I covered my mouth and nose, jerked erect, and discovered the man staring eyelessly at me. The face was gray and still bloated. Stains had dried where fluid had run from his now empty eye sockets. The hair on my neck stood up. I realized his body was too well preserved. Too much of his soft tissue was still on him: his bloated and streaked face, his hanging arms…he appeared to have died rather recently. This was an exceedingly uncomfortable realization.
Clarity came to my mind as I realized we were deep underground in the dark, in a small room, with a fresh corpse; a corpse that had died in a gruesome and undoubtedly unnatural way.
My skin was crawling and I was terrified. And I woke up.
