Tentacle Monster

One of the denizens of my nightmare world, I believe, is my mind's response to my body's physical pain. I suffer from chronic, widespread, unexplained pain. I've been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. There are things I am able to do to reduce that pain, but sometimes, in the depths of sleep, I end up letting my body fall into a position that makes it worse. If I roll onto my back, my lumbar area seizes up and the muscles across that area get sore. If I don't wake up right away, that moves around to my belly and lower ribs. Then, I dream about the tentacle monster.

I never seem to be able to see the monster itself. Its physical impression is more of a warping of the light that comes from sources on the other side of it. However, I do get a definite sense of how it looks. Its main body is a solid but soft, fleshy, slim core. It's almost kind of cylindrical, but it's rounded and puffy at the top and bottom, like a half-deflated souffle, or a jellyfish.

Like a jellyfish, it has a multitude of long, soft, fleshy tentacles. These seem to be attached to the top and bottom. Some of the ones on the bottom are shorter and more solid, though it's tough to say if there are bones. Those, it uses to propel itself about. The others seem to range from around a foot to around four feet long, at about an inch to two inches thick. These, it uses to prod and, I can only guess, feed. Its attack involves initially searching with those longer tentacles, until it finds something solid. Then, it pushes, wraps, and squeezes.

I can feel the tentacles wrapping around my waist and my ribs. Wherever it touches, it gives little jolts of electricity. This feels almost like being tickled, except that it is really, really painful.

It pulls me in toward that solid center. As bad as the pain is from the tentacles, I'm really afraid of what will happen if I can't escape.

I fight by grabbing at the tentacles, squeezing and pulling them apart. It hurts my hands to be zapped by them, but if I don't fight, this thing will devour me.
When I start hurting it, I am hit by the sensation of of something pushing against the top of my head, but it pushes beyond the skin and into the inside. It makes me feel drugged, with that heavy-headed sensation that happens as a side effect with some pain medicines. I know that is a defense of the monster's, and that I am injuring it, so I continue to attack the tentacles. I can feel them pressing into the flesh in my back, breaking through the skin. The pain is excruciating.

The battle continues this way, with more tentacles wrapping around me as I tear apart the ones that are all ready there. The longer we fight, the more covered in tentacles I become, until I can barely breathe. It is a losing battle every time, lasting until the pain becomes too severe for me to take.

When I awaken, I always feel like I lost, and something was taken from me, but the real pain is never as bad as the pain from the dream. I don't know if that last bit is because when awake, my brain masks pain I all ready know I have, so that I can pay attention to my surroundings and activity, or if it is because when asleep, my subconscious multiplies the pain in the dream because of the nightmare setting. Either way, a change of position alleviates some of it, and if I go back to sleep, it will fade further throughout the night. Only rarely do I ever have that dream a second time in the same night.

When I was a kid, though, I used to sleepwalk.. I would dream of fighting this thing in my room, and I'd hide under my desk to limit the directions from which tentacles could attack and the number that could get to me. I would bite, scratch, kick, grab, punch, anything. Every time I had that dream, when I woke up, I really would be under that desk.. I know that scientists say that sleepwalking does not take place during the dream state, but in my case, either it occurred in response to the dream, or the other way around, because the two went together more often than not.