Story and art by Matthew Hornbostel. Audio by DJ_Chronos and Noromaa.

My name is Jeff Johnson. For the past 46 hours I have been staving off sleep with caffeine and exercise. It is 3:20 AM but all the lights in the house are on, and the doors are locked. I am jittery, energetic, and exhausted simultaneously. Beats. Like breathing, heartbeat, repetition, pulses of music, a rhythm which keeps me going as I sweat through push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, running, cycling. One hour after another.

I will soon succumb. I will soon find myself asleep, and while asleep, in a condition of terror, paranoia, madness. I do not want to return to the recurring nightmare. I never asked for it; nonetheless it persists in haunting me every time I drift into slumber. The insanity, paranoia, fear of that nightmare has expanded to conquer more and more of my waking life. It is disturbing and unnerving and vivid, strangely visceral, compelling, bizarre. It is so creepy and unsettling that I am afraid to go back to sleep. I cannot continue to run; the blisters and throbbing leg pain prevent it. All parts of my body ache and so I must sit down, drink water and tea, and muster the strength to continue for still another hour...

I drift into a blurred daze, lying on a metal chair surrounded by clicking machinery and computer screens and odd whirring sounds. I am now strapped there in the world of the nightmare and despite being aware that it is the beginning of a dream, am so afraid, so paralyzed by terror, that I cannot take advantage of my lucidity.

The pain begins. Cylindrical drills slice through my upper arms, and spiny tubules are extracted from my head and chest, like barbed wire or a crown of thorns, but thinner, like spiked metal string.

This is followed by tiny reflective insects, like metallic glass and aluminum bugs, skittering and crawling on my chest. Four or five of them. They sting me over and over with their glistening stingers.

Nightmares are vague, of course, blurred and odd, and not terribly coherent. In this case, I somehow experience a feeling of floating in darkness before awaking to a pulsing sound, a sharp electric shock, and a throbbing headache. I am in a chair again. There are hundreds of people in the room. Each of them is in a chair. In front of us is a large movie screen, playing a movie. I am not sure what the movie is about but it is sharp and high in contrast and features people strolling through city parks talking in gibberish or some foreign language. Layered over the screen is looping static, little white fuzzy dots and subtle flickering of light. Layered into the sound of the speech of the smiling woman on the screen is the pulse. Like helicopter blades or a droning lawnmower or some other indistinct repeating spinning noise.

Overlaid on the bottom third of the screen is text. Questions, alternating at a rate of one every 8 seconds. They are mathematical, philosophical, trivial, scientific, historical. A collection of obscure questions that seem to have been culled out of the hardest college exams available. I have a printed scroll of paper.

"Answer the questions," a voice on the loudspeaker intones. "They are fun." The voice is clearly quite unenthusiastic in his statement, as if he doesn't believe what he is telling us. Of course, neither do I.

I manage to get at least a few of the questions right. The Tierra del Fuego. UB-313. Graphite. U.S.S. Cole. If I do not get them right, the chair I am in zaps me with a jolt of electricity. Some of the hapless victims in other chairs appear to be getting every single one wrong, yet they smile and stare blankly, feverishly writing on their scrolls with total concentration, as if the test were an enjoyable crossword puzzle.

Over time my mind begins looping through ideas. The idea that human life has no value. That existence has no purpose. That my destiny is to die or kill or both. That happiness is found in slavery. I am not sure why I am thinking these thoughts but they do not go away, cannot go away, and they are somehow comforting and distressing simultaneously. It occurs to me that the static on the screen is speaking to me - that it is transmitting messages that only register in my subconscious. Someone is feeding me propaganda during my nightmare, and I have no idea who or why.

I am released from my chair and chat with a friendly lady who gushes about how wonderful this education camp is. I find myself nodding in agreement despite myself, almost instinctively, out of a preprogrammed habit. I tell her, “Yes. It is lovely.” The words come out of my mouth in the same bland tone as the words “They are fun.” I never chose to speak them, they just came out for no reason. I am not particularly conscious or lucid; this is a nightmare, after all, and people say things in dreams that turn out to make no sense when repeated later in a conscious state.

I shuffle quietly from the movie room past a very dark “Recreation Room” down a hall to a hexagonal room filled with identical off-white bunkbeds. My parents are here. They look tired and haggard and beaten-up and old. They encourage me to finish in my education, to cooperate with my captors. They don't call them captors, of course, merely “Benefactors”. They tell me it will all be over if I will only suppress my spirit, renounce these childish ideas of God and Love and Freedom and Truth and the Value of Life and all these “insidious, corrupting evils” which have afflicted me. I do not respond but glumly stand next to the bed. “It is a beautiful camp,” my mother says blankly. A beautiful, beautiful camp and I am sure you will be so much happier once you have completed your education.”

Armed soldiers escort me and the other hundred captives to the shadowed recreation room. In the shadows we can only faintly make out the titles of the books. There is a section on torture and pain, a section full of colorful, happy-looking books with titles such as “My friend the demon” “Death to moralists” and “The beauty of necrophilia.” This gives way to a catalogue of books covering sexual fetishes: Sex with robots or with animals or things so vile they are difficult to describe. I confess that I did peek briefly with passing guilty interest at a beautiful naked blond woman giving oral sex to some indeterminate alien monster. I confess, in fact, an unhealthy and habitual curiosity about every book in the room, as if it were normal for me to be intrigued by subjects like disemboweling, occult chants, and homosexual pedophilia. These shelves in turn, give way to an organized archive of books about drugs, conveniently packaged with packets of various powders which some of my fellow “students” were clearly enjoying. I heard grunting and moaning and sliding and metal clanging from the darkest, most pitch-black part of the room. I could not discern the source – abusive fighting or rough sadomasochistic sex or some horrendous beast chained to the wall, perhaps inclined to eat unwary students who ventured into the corner.

I was escorted to the room again, the very first chair, and was injected and coated in needles and spikes and exposed all the while to the humming, pulsing sound which I could still not determine the nature of. The dream faded and as it faded, I realized once again that it was a dream, momentarily, before emerging from it into waking life. I woke up suddenly in a cold sweat, a near-delirium, plastered to the sticky, plushy chair near my treadmill by the odor of my own nervous sweat. I fell asleep, I recall. I was on the treadmill and then stopped to rest. And then I slept and the nightmare had returned to torment me.

But I clung to the joy that I had another span of time awake, free from the burden of my nightmare. I felt alive and optimistic and had, perhaps, never been so glad to see my cluttered, dingy, ordinary little one-story home; its living room and bedroom and restroom and kitchen.

I stepped into the kitchen and rummaged through a pile of empty containers and a barely-cold refrigerator with no remaining contents but cartons of leftover Chinese rice and vegetables and chicken. I must have ordered Chinese. Take-out food. The only other thing left to consume was a supply of Earl Grey tea and a near-empty can with a layer of coffee grounds.

It was all unpleasantly bland. Rice and vegetables and chicken that tasted somewhere between chicken, tofu, and flavorless saliva. Slimy. Lukewarm. Not particularly filling.

I drank tea, turned on music and the TV and ran on the treadmill. My mind wandered back to the nightmare. An hour passed and I was merely walking. Step. Step. Step. The music, the TV, the footsteps, the heartbeat and breathing, all reminded me once again of that dreadful pulsing sound.

Then, for just a split-second, something on the television caught my eye. It was the same smiling woman in a city park. The one from the movie screen in the nightmare. A chill ran down my spine.

I ceased moving and picked up my cell phone. I could not think who to call.

Instead of calling someone, I chose to unlock my door and take a walk. I was going mad. The hallucinations, the nightmarish apparitions, were invading my time awake and I had to ask someone for help.

Swinging the door open, I realized that there was nothing beyond my house. Nothing but an expanse of dim light, an insufferable gray void. It was at this moment that my worst fears coalesced into a truly shocking form.

This house, this life of ordinariness – the house was the dream; the nightmare facility my real life. Unable to cope with the cruelty of my existence, my mind had retreated into fantasies of a normal home; a past life that was rapidly fading from view.

I awoke crying on the bunkbed, in the brown hexagonal room. The audio played over and over, pulsing. No other captive in the facility was awake. I myself was only barely awake. I slid out of the bed, weary, drugged, in a seemingly drunken stupor.

Two soldiers discussed the education camp in whispers, only half-discernible, outside the door. I caught only snatches at first but managed to hear more distinctly as I became more clear-headed. Gently opening the door, I overheard their conversation. “You need to keep the headphones on,” said one, “They're broadcasting isophonic tones, binaural beats, and microwave patterns in this facility, and if you are careless, your theta waves will increase to a point of near-hypnosis while you are awake.” “What does that mean?” “It means you enter a waking dream state of sorts, where you're incredibly suggestible.” “Suggestible?” “Programmable. Controllable. Like the prisoners.”

I gulp, knowing that I am one of those prisoners. My curiosity is piqued, and I listen all the more intently.

“They'll be suicide bombers. They will give their lives for the Nation, destroying our enemies in a hundred different chemical and viral and explosive attacks, destroying our competitors in every technical and military field. Their identities are being erased and their missions are being embedded into them subconsciously so that when the time is right they will carry out our orders without knowing that they even are orders. They will become nihilists, satanists, with no affiliation with the Nation, no citizenship, no record of their existence. If their missions fail, we will be able to deny all responsibility, because they won't confess, they won't break. They won't even know we sent them, they won't even know who they are.”

Won't know who they are? But, I know who I am. I'm... I pause. Oddly, I can no longer recall my own name. It takes me half a minute to remember that it had a “J” in it, and a little longer than that before I give up entirely. I cannot remember my personal history. I know my parents but not their names. All I know is that they visit this facility and that they, too, have been bribed or brainwashed into keeping me here. I surmise that the home in my dreams is where I grew up – it seemed so simple and comfortable! - but I cannot be sure about anything.

The soldiers have walked away. There is a security camera cycling back and forth, scanning the hallway.

I time my movement to avoid its view, and sneak into the pitch-black recreation room. There is a skylight here, through which stars are visible, so I resolve to reach it. This requires sliding bookshelves which are difficult to move, but I exert a great deal of effort and succeed in getting one of them under the skylight. Clambering up step by step, I balance myself on top of the bookshelf and stretch up to the panel. There is no easy way to open it. It won't budge.

The loudspeaker blares and informs all personnel to wake up. During this cacaphony of sound, I bang furiously at the glass of the skylight until it breaks. I grab the rim of it despite the bits of sharp glass ringing it, and hoist myself out of the room.

The roof of the facility is very high up, and the compound in its entirety is no less than three stories above the ground. It is built on top of a rock precipice in a tangled forest, and there is no way to climb down the walls because they are perfectly, frustratingly, orthogonally perpendicular to the flat roof, completely smooth and devoid of foothold or indentation.

Knowing my predicament, I resolve to leap from the roof into the forest. At a height of 50 feet or more, it is likely I will be injured or killed in the fall; even if I survive the jump I may die of thirst and starvation wandering aimlessly through the endless forest.

But what is my alternative? To have my mind and will torn from me, to have evil ideology and satanist manifestoes and mind control compel me to not only commit suicide, but to kill others with me? Surender to a mystery cabal that will rob me of all that makes me human?

I cannot recall much but I still remember my cherished, once-unassailed faith in God, and the idea of selfless love for others. I still hold to what few fragments of that faith and love remain in me, despite ingrained thoughts that demand, nay, insist, that I walk back into the facility and submit to the further reprogramming of my mind.

I close my eyes and my stomach churns as I stride off of the ledge, wind whipping around me as I descend to the ground. Crack. My bones break on the stony ground and my blood leaks off into the dirt, forming a pool of reddish mud. My mind fades as I tell myself that whatever has just happened, I will die as a free man expressing a free choice.

And as my last neurons fire, I await the endless sleep of death. I only hope that whatever dreams await me in this sleep, are more pleasant and beautiful than those I have left behind. Or perhaps, beyond my death, I will wake up for the first time.