megane-kun

There’s my youngest brother, but he’s already with his family, and is the one in charge of cooking over there. I’m with my mom, who is really needing the help, and so yeah! I also told my mom to just stop hosting because it’s increasingly not worth it, but she’s stubborn and told me it’s always been this way, and will be that way until she draws her final breath.

Now, if I can only convince the others (the ones coming over) to just bring some food so that there’s a lot less need to cook here.

I read that SCP (again?) and more than the similarities (endless staircases is perhaps one of those common nightmares), I find the timing a bit strange. I am for sure wasn’t aware of SCP back then (circa 2007), but IIRC, the time that SCP was written is roughly the same time I was those dreams.

I don’t think I can write a continuation to SCP-087, but a short story based on the common elements of that recurring dream series is doable. Difficult, but doable. But first, I must recall more detail from those dreams!

Stress.

Stress about all the money spent on a midnight feast that we’re too sleepy and tired to enjoy (our Christmas meal here is at 12mn, it cannot start earlier), the gifts and decorations, and the electricity of all the RGB lights strung around to make our family to be “with the community spirit”. Stress about not having the energy to be able to smile and be cheerful all the time, or else you’d be the subject of dinner conversations, how you’re not “making an effort to spread the holiday spirit”. And worst of all, the stress of not being able to sleep and rest due to all the merrymaking, singing, and overall noisemaking (fireworks tend to be fired at random here, and increasing in frequency as it draws closer to the end of December).

I used to look forward to the food, the seasonal food, and the feasting. But now that I’ve got to prepare all that food, taste it, make adjustments based on who is going to be coming for the Christmas dinner, it’s just draining.

What is supposed to be a season to be merry, to be hopeful, and all that good cheer, has become the very cause of all the sorry hopelessness and drear.

I don’t know about it being the weirdest, but a recurring dream from my late teens to the early 20’s has been seared into my memory that goes like this:

The way the dream starts varies, but a common version is me being asked to explore a staircase that was yet to be fully explored. Some versions has me go up, the others go down, and yet still others has me trying both. In some versions, I was sent with a team, the members of which succumbed to thirst, hunger, and fatigue as the expedition seemed to have no end. Sometimes, we (or I) discover that we’ve been going around “in circles” as we encounter the corpse of someone from our team who has earlier died, or I (in the versions I was alone) come across equipment I have abandoned way earlier.

In later versions, this has evolved into me (either starting with a team, but has since been whittled into just me) discovering an actual end to the staircase: a vast expanse of nothing but darkness. In there, I encounter some people (how they got there varies, some through the same staircase, the others through other means, and yet still others don’t know how). I somehow convinced them to join me in exploring the darkness. To do this, we arranged ourselves in a circle, facing outwards with arms linked. That way, we wouldn’t lose a person. We try to go off on a direction and explore the darkness that way. As we encounter more people willing to join us, they add themselves into the circular chain. It goes on and on, seemingly without end. The dark expanse just goes on and on forever.

In still later versions, this dark expanse is replaced by a huge subterranean cavern. Gone is the staircase, and I just dropped into the bottommost cavern. The same sequence of events as with the “dark expanse” version happens, but now, we can actually see where we’re going and there’s no need for forming a human circular chain.

In one late, and rare, version of this dream, we come across a well-lighted cavern whose center lies a shining stalagmite. We couldn’t approach the stalagmite, however, and just made that as a reference point in further explorations.

This recurring dream has become more and more rare as I grew older. I sometimes wonder what it all means, and why the dream changed over time. It seemed to have to do with my mental state at that time, but some things didn’t make sense. It’s also quite coherent as dreams go, which is probably why I still remember it years after.

Sea or lake view from the mountains. Even better if I can also have a view of a lake/seaside town on the shore.

Born and raised Catholic, drifted towards atheism as I thought that if the tenets of the religion I was brought up in is true, I should be punished for eternity (and then pondered if suicide is a lighter sin than being who I am), and then questioned why that’s necessarily the case.

Later on, I drifted towards agnosticism as I began to question my own beliefs, and more importantly, why I was having those beliefs.

None of that was ever known to a lot of people, though, and I present myself as a non-practicing Catholic.

Just a bit under 180cm. Not terribly tall, not terribly short, just alright.

You’re Truck-kun’s handler?! Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to help me. Let me just wipe out my browsing history as well as all my storage here and I’ll be with you shortly.

So, you want to be an isekai protagonist. Understandable, me too!

“Noted.”

• For block writing: Google Fonts — Architect’s Daughter, but a bit more narrow. I also tend not to use lowercase in block writing.
• For cursive: Google Fonts — Hurricane, a way messier “variant” of that.