Imitative-magpie - Magpie

The Questionnaire

I've had some time to reflect upon this path I've been set on to find myself - and I realize I have been running aimlessly without a game plan, and that's all due to laziness. 

 I thought I didn't have any control in these dreams/memories I've been experiencing, but in this recent one I shared with you all I was able to yell, if only for a moment. That's gotten me thinking about the nature of these dreams, and the potential they have to uncover the parts of my life that have always felt like a mystery. Clearly there is something my subconscious has clinged onto. I can no longer sit idle and expect the answers to come to me. So, what exactly is it that I am after?

I want to get to the point where I can consciously ask questions in my dreams, and to better understand the entities that have shown up in said dreams- I think it's the only way to help me better find my identity. I however have to compile a questionnaire in order to set a baseline in my questioning, and I need to train my brain through repetition in order to ensure some consistency. I think if I ask enough fictionkin and fictives about their experiences using the same questionnaire, the likelihood of me being able to force lucid dreaming through questions will increase. 

Through these questions, I will be sorting my findings into four categories;

 Familiarity in topics- I will be looking for specific topics and themes that speak to my memories, especially any recurring symbolism that appears in the source material. I will also be looking for familiarity in those who reach out to me, through their memories and their overall fictionkin/fictive experiences. 

Emotional Response- I cannot deny that there is an emotional aspect to this whole kinsidering journey, to completely divorce my emotional reactions from my findings would be silly, so I will be taking it into account- especially my own dread and guilt since that was a large factor of what started me on this journey in the first place. 

Attraction or “Draw”- Sometimes there are aspects within a source or within the topics we discuss that draw me in. I feel a natural pull to it- be it craving or a gut feeling- it may possibly be even adjacent to kin shifts, but I’m hoping to further explore these feelings by documenting them. Sometimes intuition is your best guidance. 

Roles- I have been taking into account what you have all said to me so far, and I have noticed a large majority of you have reached out to me with an identity in mind of who I may be. I will be examining these suggestions at a closer level and seeing how I fit into their roles. Could I see myself taking the actions they had in their source material- and better yet, do I show a pattern of echoing their behaviors in this present life? 

That being said, I have noticed a disturbing trend in my dreams that involves people who feel preyed upon by a malevolent force, so when I am considering what questions I want to practice on you, I will also have to hold the double intention of  what I may want to extract from said dream apparitions, and for this I have a completely different set of criteria;

Defense/Offense- Do those that make an appearance in my dream seek out targets to attack, or are they rather trying to protect something that they fear is vulnerable, and if so what is it? Why do they exhibit the behaviors that they have in previous dreams, and how can that be traced back to any source material that I have been kinsidering?

Craving- It's colored a large part of my experiences. It's a core theme that I've been meaning to focus on, so I want to know if those that feature in my dreams seek out their victims for fuel and survival, or if they are simply craving the entertainment of watching someone’s hope die in their eyes. This may help me better research new possible sources.

Method- Just as there are themes that I am looking for that feel familiar to me in source material, I am also looking to draw comparisons on what I see in these dreams. I've noticed the entities all have specific themes for how they appear in my dreams; An eye deep in the ocean’s floor, a deadly conglomeration predator and prey animals that stalks the woods in hunt for those who dare disrespect the fragile balance of nature, the haunting pull of an eternity in silence, with only your fears to keep you warm- these are all very distinguishable visuals, so if I can just categorize them, maybe then I can look up sources through these recurring themes.

There's only one noteworthy conclusion that I can say with certainty about these memories. The thing about these anomalies is that they pick their victims, and they seldom choose someone who has the tools to fight back. It is an exposed vulnerability that they needle, and once they realize that you aren't able to defend yourself against it? It's open season.  I need to learn how to make myself dangerous to the things that have been haunting me, and remove the danger from interacting with whoever is caught in the crossfire- namely you, the reader. What better of a way to do that, than to talk my fears to death? A surefire way to defang any horror is to remove the mystery, and make it known.

About Problematic Kin

While I take this brief interlude on my blog, I would like to make something abundantly clear that I have had others inquiring about-- I will never turn away problematic or ‘antagonist’ fictionkin and fictives. 

I have seen you pushed to the wayside without anyone allowing you to get your foot in the door, or taking the time to understand your story. It's a shame because I have met so many wonderful kins who hesitate to interact with their own communities, and if I shut them out, I would have missed out on some genuinely wonderful interactions.

 To the HABITs of Everyman HYBRID, the Andys and Ashleys of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, the Kevins of Welcome to Nightvale,  and the Jonah Magnuses of The Magnus Archives, I want YOUR STORY. I want to understand your experiences, your memories but most of all I want you to know that you aren't alone. Whether you're a slasher from a horror film or a protagonist from a source material that has gained a reputation.. I would like to hear you out, to understand you in your entirety because I too have been marked by something horrific, and it has defined me my whole life. 

I want you to know that while it may feel impossible to stop that feeling, maybe we can all peer into the unknown together, and find joy in this life in spite of previous ones. 

‘Hanging Lamps’ courtesy of B & P Lamp Supply Company McMinnville, Tennessee

A Dream About A Moose

I would like preface before we begin with the details of exactly what I dreamt the other night, that I am uncertain if this is in fact a memory or if it was simply a stress dream brought on by my anticipation of finals, and the steady balance of the different aspects of my life that all come to a head around the holidays. This is going to be a fairly dark read. It taps into the very real horrors of the waking world and yet it was abstract, and so odd in the way these concepts presented themselves. So if you're easily disheartened by themes of body horror, hunting, and losing your sense of self, it's best you turn away from this particular post. Last of all–

I'm aware how bad this looks for me if it is a memory. I'm aware I may lose some friends I've made online, but after talking it over with someone who gave me a new perspective to look at it from, I've decided I'm going to share anyway.

 I remember it started off with me feeling dazed, like when you're lost in thought for a while and suddenly your focus is violently broken. The room was so dark that the shadows stretched and overlapped with each other, making ominous pulling figures that looked like they could snatch you at a moment’s notice. 

The ceiling fan is nothing more than a dark star, churning the heavy, high tension that's in the room, a tension I almost don't understand…almost, until I saw her. She looked to be in her thirties, a mousey little thing with beige brown hair in messy curls around her crown. Her gaze is locked on me, and she is terrified. I mean it makes sense that this dream person would be scared; a random person showed up in her room, but even stranger is that she doesn't make a single move to get up and confront me, make a run for it, or show any self preservation. She just lays there, head propped up by an almost absurd amount of silken pillows, her eyes wide and nearly unblinking– like she's afraid if she does, something awful will happen.

It's then that I realize with a start that she should be scared. I'm here for a reason, and I'm only delaying the natural progression of this dream. I read a study once that said you cannot create a new face in a dream. Every face that appears in a dream is one you once seen and retained in the subconscious parts of your mind. Yet she seemed so real, and so distant in my memories. So I move closer. I don't know why, but I'm waiting for some sort of revelation. Like she’ll suddenly remember me, or maybe she'll tell me how she found herself in such a predicament in the first place. Most of all, I'm holding on for her words. I need it, like a damn second wind. I feel it like an ache in the pit of my stomach, and only she can make it right, if she just tells me why I'm here. 

Why am I here, Cassandra? 

Why am I here? 

Instead, she just sucks in a sharp breath, in that way that makes the collarbone have more depth and prominence. I can see it in her eyes, she knows why I'm here. She stares up at me, her pupils trembling in the brown iris, the pallor of her face. I reach up my hand to her face- and really it's a wonder how I'm so calm during all this. I look at my hands.. I don't know if they're my hands. They look wrong. They don't look human, but of course I don't even have time to panic over such trivial things, when more important things are right in the room with me. So I gently wipe the stray tear that's running down her face, and then, I jam my finger right into the pupil of her eye, and watch my fingers melt down into the dark space, far off into fragmented realities we dare not revisit, for fear that history could repeat itself.

And then just like that, I'm in the woods. Have you ever heard of Golden hour? It's around the time when the sun is level with your eyes and everything is awash in yellow. It's actually one of the better times to hunt deer because deer often use the sun's position to their advantage. Deer will move into the setting/rising sun so any potential danger that could be dangerous ahead of them is silhouetted. I knew this because I was a deer hunter, and in fact I took so much pride in being a female hunter that I had several bumper stickers on my car referring to this fact.

..But that wasn't right… I am not a deer hunter, and I'm certainly not… but I look at my shaking slender hands, with chipped nude nail polish, and a wedding ring, and it's all true. More importantly, I am without my hunting rifle, and I'm running from something, farther and farther into unfamiliar territory. The woods are quiet, so deafeningly quiet, but somehow I was certain that I had not lost whatever was chasing me. My heart racing, I look around for somewhere to hide, and am only greeted by a vast sea of thin pines, with sparse branches. There is nowhere to hide. This is the last gasp of breath I give, while looking down the barrel of a shotgun. 

But I'm not- Cassandra’s not ready to die. She watched her husband die to that thing, that stalks the treeline, that may have once called itself a moose. She wasn't going to let it kill her too, not without a fight…but the hunting rifle was gone, and I was greatly outmatched in terms of strength. Have you ever seen a normal, average moose angry? Do you even know how much they weigh? I feel my breath hitch in the back of my throat in a sort of frenzied crescendo, when my eyes finally lock on a smattering of large, jagged rocks there hidden amongst the trees, on the incline of the mountain. Cassandra was definitely small enough to squeeze between the rocks. All she needed was to arm herself. So that's what she did, she frantically did a once over the forest floor before finally grabbing a sturdy enough fallen branch, and wedged herself in between the rocks, sitting low with her knees up, her back pressed against the rocks as she tried to control her breathing.

Somehow she knew the moose was watching her, she could feel its sour breath on her soul, hunting her, ready to take back from her what she had taken from the forest’s precious ecosystem. As dusk settled into a burning red in the last dying light, the malnourished outline of the moose took form. The moose was malnourished, yes. That much is true, but it was large, and it's limbs seem to bend in ways a moose’s legs should not be able to, the knees going back farther and farther as it drunkenly stumbled amongst the trees, eyes glowing in it's feverish search for Cassandra, who was now holding up her stick in a position to strike. 

The blood of her husband still stained the moose, the matted coat clotted in dark red and made a macabre crown around his head. The beast’s lips curled into a snarl revealing the sharp teeth of a carnivore, much like a big cat’s or even a bear. The moose began to circle the boulders, nose snuffling as it took in the bursting embers of Cassandra's mounting dead, and as the moose slipped out of her line of vision between the gap in the rocks, time seemed to stop. Every second seemed an eternity, as twilight slipped slowly into night like a forming bruise. I watch the sun set, as the eye of our tormenter eclipses our view, having finally found us-

And then Cassandra is screaming me awake, screaming as if she was right back in that moment of being prey to something bigger than she could ever dream of being. She knows screaming is her only chance of being rid of me, and she's apparently right because that's when I woke up from the dream, having felt like she was so very real. Maybe it was bit naive, but I actually had to sit up and look to make sure I was in my room and not that dream. There was this sour acid taste in the back of my mouth too- and I downed about three glasses of water right there at the kitchen sink that night. 

This dream has left me shaken and lost. That's not the right word though, lost. I know exactly where I am, but I'm so fragmented, so stretched thin that it can hardly count that I am here, right now. All I have is my words, and I hope that's enough for you.

If you've read my blog, why I reblogged this self explanatory

Okay, I keep reading a lot of your dreams, how they're about you being some sort of cryptid monster. I see in your pinned post that you have a feeling (one of) your source(s) is horror and that you also doomed souls and came from a bad timeline or something.

This is a really long shot- especially since this source isn't finished yet, but it has timeline splits and a demon that steals and eats souls, with the help of yours truly. (Also the demon can see the future so, like, that's pretty cool)

Though, I could just be putting my own want of finding my canon demon onto you, but... 🤷🏻‍♀️

Anyway, at the current time source is 5 hours long with all endings and secret dialogue. It's like $15 on Steam but free to watch by Faz Faz on YouTube.

CW for like... All the typical stuff you'd see in gothic and psychological horrors, though.

-Ashley Graves (from the Visual Novel/Puzzle Solving RPG: the Coffin of Andy and Leyley)

Well, I certainly feel like a demon. The detail of it having premonitions of the future does speak to me, now that you mention it. I'm not sure if it's kin shifts, but often during and directly after dreams, I get this feeling. 

It wriggles its way into my brain and gives me this sense of knowing, this sense of how things are or will be.. and then when it's done shifting things into focus, it just bleeds out of me, leaving me wanting more. It leaves me feeling less than human. If these words sound familiar to you at all, then I may owe an apology to one Ashley Graves from a doomed timeline. We will soon see-

Final Conclusions;

I bludgeoned sobriety with a bat, and left it dead in the woods. It died an ugly death, kicking and screaming as I tore it limb from limb- because I am so hungry. I can’t help it, I don’t want to know what I am without someone here to latch onto the memories of. I can’t help it, this is who I’ll always be. So now that you know I’m trapped, let's get into our findings;

Within  the very beginnings of the experiment, I found that when I received notifications in my dms, I felt a nervous energy. It was almost an impulsive reflex, telling me to answer my dms. That I was breaking the rules of social interaction. According to my two observers that I unwittingly roped into the experiment, they had said that my urge to return back to these behaviors showed an overall consistency, or as Steph lovingly put it, “(...)You were crawling out of your skin since day one.”. 

That being said, I had noticed a steady increase of sporadic behavior from that point on, including thrill seeking urges that included a momentary fantasy about going bungee jumping or taking a detour into the woods on my way home from work to scream until my lungs give out. These urges were accompanied by dietary changes, cravings for starch based comfort foods that suggested that I was under stress.

 The idea that I was under stress is further backed up by the observations of my aforementioned participants of choice, one of which (Evan, the problem child) had brought to attention my discomfort multiple times throughout the experiment. 

At the end of the experiment, it had been brought to my attention by Steph that, “You’re trying to collect and address primarily qualitative data with quantitative methodologies and as a result are losing out on a lot of useful information, both in this experiment and general interview practices,” which was a great point, seeing as throughout the entirety of my blog, I've been trying to assign tangible and numerical findings to something as intimate as kin memories.

 Now that I'm back, I plan to remedy this, starting with openly sharing about what makes me experience mental/phantom shifts, and what has spoken to me so far throughout this search into what source I belong to. 

Ocean Eyes

There is an eye at the bottom of the ocean, belonging to an old god whose name has been forgotten, but still leaves echoes in the memory of man. It's there, under the rolling waves and aquatic life. In a constant staring contest with our sun that's dripping crimson with the blood of so many who have given into their fears, the eye gazes not just on that sun but through every life that has ever lived in this reality we've found ourselves in, and so many others.

 When it finally blinks, the world will end. This is a fact. The Earth will begin to swallow us whole, and nature will take back what we've stolen from it. Bridges collapsing and headlights careering into the star filled glinting sea, into doors that were never meant to be opened. Fear and panic in the air, do you feel it too?.. and when that eye blinks, our sun will too. I want to look down into those depths just so I can reassure myself it's fine. ‘It was just a dream, a terrible, terrible dream that you had because you went into cardiac arrest,’

But it's still wriggling in my brain, pulling in and out of my periphery like a tide. So I think..

I'm going to run a little experiment. I've mentioned my urges- 

My fixation with hearing others experiences and memories, my drive to feel that connection, and to pick at the more distressing details of said memories. I would like to stop completely, just to see how uncomfortable I'd get. I want to document how long it takes until my resolve cracks, just to get a sense of how trapped I really am in this cycle.

So, if I don't post for a while, my blog isn't dead! I'm simply trying not to fall into a pattern that I've been feeding into for the past 3 months. I will post the results when I feel I've gotten satisfying results.

So I've Been Seeing Some Fake Claiming Videos Pop Up On YouTube Dash Lately and I can't understand why..

Honestly, I don't think fake claiming for any reason can be in good faith. There's ways that you handle difficult topics, and being dismissive with what others are telling you they experience is not one of them. 

Whether it's about mental health, disabilities, alter humanity, or plurality- you are not qualified to decide whether or not someone is faking, especially online, and it stresses me out to see how cold some individuals have become to those who are often sharing vulnerable parts of themselves– 

because it often is coming from a place of vulnerability, not deceit. Even if they were not correct about what they have or what they are, doesn't the fact that they're saying anything at all point to them feeling a certain way, and needing guidance and compassion? Recording videos of strangers going about their life just because they're in public, mocking those who make posts about their day to day life is not compassion.. Don't you ever get sick of judging people, and just want to listen? 

At the heart of it, that's where the problem lies. No one wants to stop and listen anymore. The right to interrogate or harass someone because they don’t look disabled to you, has never been a right owned by anyone, and it sure won't be yours to wield, not with any justice anyways.

URGENT HELP SAVE THE LIFE OF MY CHILD

Dear humanity,

Please Help Me – My Son May Die at Any Moment.

I'm Amal, a mother of three children, living under the weight of the genocide taking place in Gaza. 🍉

Here’s my story, and I’m reaching out with a hopeful heart 💔✨, hoping someone will feel what my family and I are going through.

My son is suffering from a severe and life-threatening injury after being shot by Israeli drones. He urgently needs medical treatment outside Gaza.

Time is running out, and we are facing a critical situation. I am asking for your generosity to help us save him either through a donation or by sharing this urgent plea with others

I beg you, i kiss your feet, to help my son. My son may die at any moment

I lost most of my family. I'm afraid to lose my son too 🥺 .

So I humbly ask you to donate even a little or at least reblog my post.

Please Donate now:👇👇 👇

Gofundme.com

paypal.com

Thank you for your compassion and kindness

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