Effects/Nightmares

[heartbreak]

...I it really was one hell of a read...

You finished it? Congratulations! That is an accomplishment to be proud of!

*if I sound sarcastic it is most definitely not intended* :)

[Shadow Girl]

No unintended sarcasm taken.

I finished it on my first go to. A friend of mine said it took him like 6 tries.

[blueyelie]

I'm sure I could finish it. Just right now I don't feel up to it I think. I don't want to think to hard anymore.

Especially with Ludovician lingering in the waves...

[fearful_syzygy]

Sleep? Who needs it?

[JuggaloStatix]

Sleep? Who needs it?

I've been saying this alot lately, I wish it were like back in the day where i needed sleep like once a week to stay functional...but Nooo...bollocks i tell you

[SirensandSuch]

when i was a child i used to have to recurring dreams which made me never scared, but always anxious and uneasy. one consisted of very long periods of wandering across dully patterned, perfectly falt dark green expanses, only to arrive at toll areas quite similar to those on highways where i'd face ridicule briefly before moving on. the other consisted of vast mazes, that were black and white and cramped, and in their atmosphere, quite unpleasant. for whatever reason, boots would follow around these odds, misshapen brown spheres, and they did it with a seemingly angry yet ignorant malice. i started having these dreams again the night after i finished reading exploration #3 and have them on and off now.

[NoTrace]

In most of my recent dreams, my knees have been snapping the wrong way, resulting in my death. Not sure if it has anything to do with the book, but it's fucking weird all the same.

[noevilstar]

Sleep? Who needs it?

my wife enjoys riding the cusp between being asleep and being awake, in a stage of the morning she calls her 'imaginings'. She sets the alarm 2 hours ahead of when she plans to actually get up. Its always driven me nuts, but perhaps I should appreciate the extended state of hypnagogia she creates......maybe??.....

[Ellimist]

Hypnagogic hallucinations!

[JuggaloStatix]

my wife enjoys riding the cusp between being asleep and being awake, in a stage of the morning she calls her 'imaginings'. She sets the alarm 2 hours ahead of when she plans to actually get up. Its always driven me nuts, but perhaps I should appreciate the extended state of hypnagogia she creates......maybe??.....

so there is a word for that thing that i do to myself in the mornings for over an hour....awesome

[Ellimist]

Yeah, when it happens unintentionally to gullible people, we occasionally get ghost stories and alien visitations.

[JuggaloStatix]

Yeah, when it happens unintentionally to gullible people, we occasionally get ghost stories and alien visitations.

so what you're saying is talk my roomies into doing it to me randomly?

[Ellimist]

YES.

Make sure they know when you do it... and fuck with you.

[JuggaloStatix]

YES.

Make sure they know when you do it... and fuck with you.

Sounds good

[darkstar]

Haha

[Nnamdi]

Ok, I'm a tiny bit mad since I tried posting it, and didn't get through, and lost it, so shorter version.

Basically, I'm reading of Leaves. The book is not a book but the pages set on a reel projector, and I'm reading the reel. There is an inch wide reel below it with two red lines that follows with it. I'm reading the part about the guy (Holloway?) who shoots himself. The text is exact, and I mean exact, especially for a dream. At least until where he shoots himself, where it turns into this:

The sees Holloway
It gets closer
He sees Holloway trapped in a cage like a rabbit
It moves closer
It almost makes it
But the cage explodes

(Not exact, but the main point)

Very odd, especially the rabit part.

Pheeew, quick short version.

Ps: On another note after the dream I found out the Ultimate Question to 42 from HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy and am quite happy about it. Just wanted to say that, since it's enigma almost rivaled that of of Leaves.

[Lexan_Lens]

I dream I'm standing at the top of my basement stairs, I descend the stairs and as I take my foot of the very bottom stair, I am back in my old childhood home, but it has obviously been remodeled. The carpet is not the same, nor the wall color. I realize this. I turn back to ascend the staircase only to find one leading down. I am bewildered.

I awake. Always at that same moment.

[Scone]

That's probably the only time I've heard of anyone becoming more extroverted due to the book.

It happened to me too. I think it was a direct side effect of not being able to bear remaining inside for any length of time. Though, that is simply a symptom of the immense virus of Leaves has inflicted upon me.

[On a Map of Swirling Cord]

So, I was reading this last night (since I work late, unable to celebrate the election) and I was pondering the origin of the expression "Here's a big toe for ya." My wife dreamt about someone biting my toe and that I wasn't paying heed that this was going to happen. Earlier yesterday she told me that I played the stereo too loud (but the neighbors got evicted! I say. Who cares, nobody can hear).

So then today I was listening to CDs (as opposed to itunes) and it switched to a song that was way loud. I was in the middle of cutting my hair (I do it about as often as trimming nails) and I turned quickly to get to the living room to turn down the music. In my spinning my hip pulled out the entire drawer (laden with all the crap my wifey uses) and WHAM the corner of the whole flippin' drawer lands, you guessed it, on my big toe (right foot). It bled. I've gone through three bandaids. Funny thing is that I didn't learn of the dream until after my wife came home from work, after the fact.

[Short_Fuse]

[Luke]

I haven't had any dreams really that I'm aware of, but there have been times where I have woken up just thinking about the book, and I keep accidentally calling girls I know "Karen." No joke.

As for other effects, I just finished it yesterday, and for the past couple of weeks it has actually sent me into a seriously deep depression. I can't even interact with people anymore. I go to a therapist once every couple of weeks and I told her about how I was feeling. She asked me why and I replied with "...I don't know." But I really just wanted to go "IT'S THAT FUCKING BOOK!"

[julystana]

I was pondering the origin of the expression "Here's a big toe for ya."

Is this an expression used commonly elsewhere from HoL? If so, is the meaning along the lines of 'god luck to you'?
I remember a story, which I have mentioned to several people to no avail of recollection, concerning a child's toes being eaten by mice/rats while lying in bed. I correlate this book to a tin soldier, so maybe it is a Christmas story. In any case, it scared me very much when I was about 8 years old, to the extent of panic if I were drifting off to sleep and realized my feet were not entirely on the bed. Recently I read that strange sensations of the feet sometimes occur along with sleep paralysis - on a stanford edu page. Interestingly, I began experiencing sleep paralysis around the time frame of the rat-toe story memory, although I think the distortions I imagined were of the head and hands, not the feet.
Perhaps this is not at all instrumental to "a big toe for you", but someone here may have heard of this story.

[julystana]

^ 'good luck to you' was my meaning.

[LJonesy]

my wife enjoys riding the cusp between being asleep and being awake, in a stage of the morning she calls her 'imaginings'. She sets the alarm 2 hours ahead of when she plans to actually get up. Its always driven me nuts, but perhaps I should appreciate the extended state of hypnagogia she creates......maybe??.....

I get that all the time, and it's not normally a good thing for me, i'm uncontrollably stuck between that point, yet within the dream-state i've near complete control, although it tends to become a struggle between the concious and the unconcious, resulting in some very strange images and... stuff... i'm not sure where i'm going with this, but the short answer to this quote was "yeah, i've been trapped in that place to"

[Short_Fuse]

Not a dream, but something weird that I think goes in this

Similar to a Cow boy Beep bop Episode, I was smoking weed and i started to go up some stairs, and when I looked up, the stairs seemed endless, and it felt like hours of me moving up the stairs, but when I looked down, I hadn't moved, normally i just see sound as color.

I have had one dream from reading HoL, and strange coincidence from the story. For example, before I ever read then book or knew about it, I was talking to someone who thought he was hearing ghosts and cant remember some of the things he had done, told him i thought he was a schizophrenic. Next day my friend brought HoL to school...

The day I decided to look at my friend (same guy) Only Revelutions book, and my mother came back that night with the story of her finding a family ring that we had lost abut 30 years ago that was green and gold...

[rend]

I finished it on my first go, but it was a slow read as i was trying to take in everything possible (as if that were possible).

The first week or two i don't remember having any nightmares, just being afraid to sleep without a light on. but my sister and parents say they heard me yelling out in my sleep, although they couldn't tell what. But that is long gone.

Then just last thursday (the day before i finished the book) I had what my mom has written off as a panic attack. It was not induced by me panicking, so I'm just going to call it an attack. I had not been reading the book for a few days, so it was nowhere near my mind. Then the walls of my school hallway suddenly seemed to get longer, wider, bigger. I was sinking into mid space as if I was going to simply melt through a rift in light, into a place where there is only darkness. I felt them (the shadows) congregating around me, inside lockers, and pattering under the shoes of my classmates like rain drops upon a field of florescent dim, as the sweet scent of humanity filled my nostrils, making my heart race and my stomach wrench.

I quickly rushed off to my next class, blew off the teacher's lecture and immediately began reading the book again.

It hasn't happened again since then although I am starting to have nightmares that i can remember although not much of it. Only the recurring confrontation of a large, featureless, pitch black, human creature, sometimes it preaches darkness that my mind refuses to accept into memory, and sometimes it just looms above me as if it were a sentinel.

[Ellimist]

rend - how old are you?

Welcome to the forums!

[On a Map of Swirling Cord]

I finished it on my first go, but it was a slow read as i was trying to take in everything possible (as if that were possible).

I was sinking into mid space as if I was going to simply melt through a rift in light, into a place where there is only darkness. I felt them (the shadows) congregating around me, inside lockers, and pattering under the shoes of my classmates like rain drops upon a field of florescent dim, as the sweet scent of humanity filled my nostrils, making my heart race and my stomach wrench.

I quickly rushed off to my next class, blew off the teacher's lecture and immediately began reading the book again.

It hasn't happened again since then although I am starting to have nightmares that i can remember although not much of it. Only the recurring confrontation of a large, featureless, pitch black, human creature, sometimes it preaches darkness that my mind refuses to accept into memory, and sometimes it just looms above me as if it were a sentinel.

Yesss, well put and echoing something so similar to what I experienced after the first 3rd of the book or so. I work overnight and I too recall the darkness itself becoming something more menacing than I had experienced since childhood. I sense that MZD had included something in those words that only our subconsciousness grasps but what a powerful realm the mind is! Yeah, you hit the nail on the head with that eloquent account and I thank you.

Welcome to the jungle.

[rend]

I'm 17 btw

Its nice to have some people to talk about the book with.

[Short_Fuse]

For me its not waiting in bed or being in the dark, its the little thing you see in the corner of your eye that freaks me out. I've imagined the Minotaur ripping off my arm, and breathing heavily behind me but when i look at what is there, its gone. I have had this happen since before i read the book, but the book brought it back