Within the Hause Von Traumentur

The sale of handwritten diaries is forbidden by Good Will Industries. Received Diaries are disposed of per individual management personnel.

"OldDiaries.com" on the other hand is glad to sell anyone an old hand written diary, for a price. They sort their diaries according to decade, location, completion, topic matter, and of course writers surmised age. The more complete juicy diaries from young couples back in the day, especially around wartime, are way too expensive for my taste. Then again that wasn't what I was looking for. I was looking for a dream journal, or 'drug trip journal' from the sixties for some inspiration for song writing. When I found an incomplete diary of an old man going senile I knew I had an cheaper option. What I got was far from what I expected.

Any diary you get you have to go through a checklist to figure out who the writer was. Name, location, famous landmarks and dates, etc etc. This was not an old mans diary nor was it from the 70's. The handwriting was too uniform all the way through and the cultural references placed it in the mid to late 1980's. References to music bands, cartoons, and sports clearly pegged it as belonging to a young man which might explain why it was left incomplete. This was all to easy to figure out in just a few hours of skimming words something that their "evaluators" should have caught onto quickly. Why was it marked as an old mans?

At this point I had not actually "read" the diary as so much as wandered through its pages for keywords and dates. I began to notice a pattern of slowly deteriorating penmanship. Something had happened to the writer that their writing got worse and worse as time went on. Perhaps it was a side effect of some terminal disease from which they never recovered. The last few pages seemed to focus on the word "Institution". It was written in parentheses so often that It became obvious what happened to its writer.

I finally sat down to read the thing from the beginning. It started out normal enough with the writer complaining about being tired and loosing their sleep. Casual comparisons are made between exhaustion and insanity in jest but nothing serious. At this point it was just a straight 'dream journal' with wild scenes and imagery followed up by analysis and deconstruction. Most of it seemed to point toward a pulp horror novel he was reading. Then it began to descend into something serious.

His writing of the dreams began to increase in complexity and depravation to the point that I was wondering if he was actually dreaming these things or if he was simply copying stuff from other books. The style in which he would describe dreams compared to talking about his everyday life began to drift away from one another. Eventually it seemed like two different people were writing the same book. In the dreams the dreamer always seemed to be in a dazed state and forced or thrown into strange and spectacular situations. They were so bizarre and gruesome that they only seem to fit within the frame of a Horror film. That haze seemed to limit the dreamers reaction as if drugged, he only seemed to groan, gasp, yelp, or faint. The mind of the waking journalist on the other hand was something different. From the moment of waking his mind, free of the haze like state, immediately began to react to those hellish tortures. He was finally able to react to those tainted worlds with their arcane rites and repetitive deeds. At this point the diary began to have a disgusting filthy nature to it. Just turning a page seemed as repulsive to me as if watching a slaughter house's disposal pit being emptied.

The mental state of both writers, if they were two people, began to descend further into madness. The dreaming style of writing continually crept into the waking persons sections. When he began to imagine "seeing" those monsters during the daytime, or similar situations he did not react to them. Unfortunately as time passed his hallucinations began to align with other more interactive aspects of reality. The dreaming mind was not unaffected by this change either. The so called "Dreams" changed when the dreaming persona began to react and recoil in horror at what only made him gasp earlier. The separation of the dreaming mind and the waking mind began to align once more as it did earlier and the end result was confusing. Where the dreams ended and the waking world began was vague and undefined and by the end of the diary I was just as confused as I was disgusted.

The only diary I ever read before was "The Diary of Anne Frank" for an assigned book report. This was no "Anne Frank" in any shape or form. This was a "Nancy Thompson's" survivor account from "A nightmare on Elm Street". A good 8.0 on my own personal weird shit o meter. If I bought this book hoping for weird stuff to inspire my song writing then I had hit pay dirt. This diary just oozed a bizarreness about it that screamed "bat shit crazy". I was hoping for strawberry fields and cotton candy skies but I can work with this. Sure It's dark but I can work with it.

I can't post everything that I've read but I can give you a sample. This is from about midway through the diary's written pages.

I should have never purchased that damn second hand book. Fifty cents, that's all it was. A cheap second hand worn out, and almost falling apart game book. I had heard of them before but never played one. I should have never bought that book. If I knew then what I knew now I would have bought it only so I could burn the damn thing.

It's laughable. Its a stupid little book and badly written at that, but its so much more. I think it's writers must have read further than old Poe's works. There's other stuff in there. I think perhaps astral plane stuff like what Shirley McLain talks about on TV. I hear that so much of that stuff is tied into time travel, alternate realities, and cross dimension travel. Things that atomic scientist suspect but can not prove. I think that it would take a new level of nut job to pull off what this writer did. But it gets into your brain. It sort of gets stuck, infects you like a song you cant get out of your head.

That's what it did to me. It INFECTED ME. God damn it, -IT- INFECTED ME!. My aunt, the extreme southern Baptist that most of my family tries to avoid, always chided me that "Liars and cheaters go to hell". I always thought it was a warning against doing those things in excess. That and she was still angry at her husband cheating on her and leaving on their third anniversary. She was right though. Here I am sitting in my own version of hell because of some tiny little decision. A stupid little decision. WHO CARES IF YOU CHEAT ON SOLITAIRE?? who cares about solitaire?

The dreams, they do not stop. Oh god they do not stop. Wither I take a 2 min nap or over night the perception of the passage of time extends. The dreams feel as if they go on for hours, days or even years. The nightmare seems longer than my real life. I'm awake for only 12 hours or so a day and yet the nightmares last YEARS within the perception. What's worse is that it continues, night after night like a serial story written by some sadistic bastard. Where the horror of one night ends, it starts right up again.

In the dreams I am not myself. I feel as if a form of cloth is draped over my mind and senses like a drug. All the while it prevents me from reacting to horror or pain and waking myself. It doesn't matter if I wake up naturally or if its interrupted by an alarm. It keeps on going relentlessly. IT DOES NOT STOP.

Yesterday I saw something that scared me. Not in my peripheral vision but just to the left of my center It flew. At first I thought it was an enormous insect from my dreams. The thing that is there and then isn't there, like the blur of a dragonfly's wings. I knew it couldn't be real, that there was no way it could be real, but I was paralyzed in fear. I was afraid that it could be real, that somehow it found the doorway through my dreams and escaped into the real world. I did not move my body, or my vision out of terror until it got up and flew away. It's path lead away and it faced away from me that I felt safer and focused my sight on it. When my eyes finally took a clear and straight view its monstrous insect like vision faded into the form of an ordinary crow.

My parents finally admitted to themselves that I have a problem and simple sedatives can't cure it. I've told them over and over and just NOW they believe me? I hate them. They could have helped me from the beginning, they could have listened, they could have been there but NOoo. To them I was just a 'kid with an over active imagination' and not having real issues. The mere idea that their "perfect" only child could have mental issues was impossible and far beyond their comprehension.

I hate them so much. They are so useless to me.

The teen's diary is so wild and vivid that I love it's bizarre imagery. What's more is that I've decided to find the object of his torment. Anything that can inspire such nightmares ought to be worth something if not a good song. This other book, if I can find it, is what inspires me now. My casual haunting of second hand book stores have turned into a consistent hunt for an elusive prey. I find myself spending hours online looking for any reference to its existence. I have traveled to as many cities as I can searching for that hellish tome only to be met with indifference or disapproval. My friends tell me to give up searching for the book, that its a wild goose chase that will never end. They and others tell me that "The Hause Von TraumenTur" is as imaginary as the teenager was insane.

It's at this point that I quietly pull out what I found in the back of the Diary. Stuck by some unknown binding agent the back blank page had been sealed to the cover creating a kind of secret pocket that had lasted for over 10 years. Inside I found the last page from an old paperback novel, Its paper aged yellow and ink still strong and vibrant as ever. On the back side it list "Lancashire Books LTD" and all the books they've ever published including "The Hause". Even more convincing than this company page was the image on the other side. It was an beautifully drawn character sheet that was once filled in by pencil. At it's top emblazoned with large letters in the old English style it reads "The Hause Von TraumenTur". The Book is real and I will find it.

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