crawl on me, sink into me, die for me, living dead girl

The dream started out in a way that should have been shocking, but for some reason, wasn't. A vision of a bloated, limbless, headless female corpse, floating naked down a river. Slow drifting of this...thing...through the summer sun in my mind's eye. I have no sense of smell in dreams, but considering I was just "seeing" it, not actually standing there "experiencing" it, the smell of rot and decay would not have come up.

I have strange dreams. I have a lot of nightmares. The nightmares I have off and on, but in all fairness, I haven't had the easiest life, and my subconscious does like to play with the generated themes.

I see this thing behind my eyes off and on, and while it is confusing, it is not horrifying. What becomes horrifying, the slow creep of dread as is often in dreams, is watching the people around me--I seemed to be working in some sort of law enforcement capacity in the dream, so family members, friends, and co-workers I was dealing with--slowly start to...turn. Lose aspects of their personalities, change from what I knew of them and their behavior, into...fairly mindless, shining-eyed drones. Cult members. Talking about the wonderful words that they were hearing. Every time I heard them talk, their eyes fever-bright, I had that strange vision of that bloated, floating corpse in the water again.

There's a lot I don't talk about, mostly because I still try to keep some distance between my "real" life and my Second life (though anyone who knows me, knows I talk about my RL a fair bit if I feel comfortable). That being said, some of my dreams just seem to be a collection of random events. This seemed...lyrical, but direct.

And then they started changing their names. To Story. Instead of Lisa Carlton, say, she began to insist that her name was Lisa Story now. That she was a listener to Story, so she would become a part of it. That was the direct corollary, and they all started sounding the same. "I listen to Story. I am a part of the Story. I will take Story's name, it will be mine, as I am hers."

There are also things I haven't shared about my work. About drama and painful events that have taken place behind the scenes at Sakura. Staff disputes, firings, viscerally emotional rumors being spread about us simply because the rumor-spreader can. I've tried to keep a great amount of this private, because I felt we didn't need any more drama and derangement than we already had.

And that's when the penny dropped, in the dream. I knew what this dream meant. I knew who Story was.

And I'm not going to address it now, but I do know what the dream symbolism meant. I still don't know why the storyteller's corpse was headless, yet speaking, but I absolutely know why she was female, and why others fell under her sway. I know exactly who she represents.

This dream has stuck with me for several days now. I'm hoping that by addressing it even in the terms of the nightmare, that it will begin to ebb now, dissolve into memory, become just another tattered shred in the dark.

That's the hope, anyway.

I will say this. As Laurell K. Hamilton says, you can't prove a negative, and I won't even try. But I am going to formally state some things for the record.

I am not involved in a real-life sex cult owned by the person behind India Canning on the grid.

I am not involved in a Second Life sex cult being run by Lynn Mimistrobell.

No one involved with Sakura in any capacity has ever reached out to my family RL and threatened their lives if I did not do something for either India Canning or Lynn Mimistrobell.

You draw your own conclusions. People will anyway. But I know these things are true. And I know the lies being spread about us, about Sakura are just that--ridiculous rumors, insane lies, being spread by someone who has no clue on who we are or how we operate.

And also for the record? "How we operate" involves solely the day-to-day operation of Sakura and Bellefleurs as businesses on the grid. No more, no less.

Hopefully I'll have a haunt or two to cover later, but I just wanted that out there, for whatever it's worth. Though I'm pretty sure that whenever I hear of one particular teller of stories from now on, I will see that rotting corpse on the river. Maybe it'll be a good image to reinforce how toxic she is.