This post might be a little disturbing, so just as a warning, you may not want to read this one if you’re sensitive to certain subjects. It’s also very long.
My doctor just recently switched my sleeping medication because Ambien stopped working for me, and I took it last night. It worked well, but I’m not sure if this crazy dream was a result of the medication, or if it was just my sick mind fucking around with me again. I have a lot of disturbing dreams, but often the only nightmares that affect me when I wake up are the ones involving emotional distress, usually caused by reliving my childhood, coming face to face with Erin, or being unable to take my medication. They say your greatest enemy is yourself, and that couldn’t be more true. My greatest nightmares make me experience the side of me that I’m afraid of. Anything else, no matter how disturbing, doesn’t usually get to me.
Now, I’m not sure if this certain dream is actually bothering me, or if I just want to document it because it was so… dynamic and detailed. It was pretty damn crazy, I’ll give it that! Even though the memory of the dream isn’t really upsetting me while awake, it upset my dream self, and I need to write it down. Dreams fascinate me, so I like to reflect back on the really complex ones to try and understand what dreaming actually is. I’m no expert, so I’m still just as stumped as anyone else, but even so, it’s still somewhat helpful.
I watch a lot of documentaries on different types of murderers; serial killers, mass murderers, spree killers, impulse killers, et cetera. I do this for multiple reasons that range from research to just entertainment. It also makes me feel better to say, “well, at least I’m not as crazy as that person.” Certain common elements bug me when they go over the killer’s past, and that is history of being sexually abused, and torturing and/or killing animals as a child. We hear these things all of the time, and it’s the only part that ever disturbs me. I mention this because it plays a big part in this dream.
Enough beating around the bush, let’s get down to business. Remember, everything I say is fictional (except when I go over certain elements of my own past) and only occurred in the dream. Any relevance to actual people or occurrences are purely coincidental. The dream starts out with me checking my YouTube comments, and I received one from the director of a recently released online documentary. I think the director was a Freelancer, so he posted his work on his own channel instead of it being produced and distributed as a film. Seeing the comment didn’t surprise me, and I recognized the username. The comment read, “it’s done, here it is,” and then there was a link to a video. Clicking the link brought me to a video called, “A Broken Mind: The [name I can’t remember] Story (Part 1).” In the “related” section of the page were parts two and three. The description read, “the upsetting story of [name I can’t remember], one of the most disturbed murderers of America in the last decade. Special thanks go to…” Then there was a list of names of people on the crew, people who were interviewed, people involved in the case, and so on. “Reitanna Seishin” was listed in these credits, and next to it was a link to my YouTube channel.
None of this surprised me, and I remembered being asked to be a part of the documentary. At the time, my dream self did not provide my conscious self with the information as to why I was in the film, or what role I played, so I clicked “play” on the video and began to watch. The view of the dream changed to where, instead of watching the video on a computer screen, it was like my eyes were the camera lens. It was pretty surreal, honestly. The issue I had in this dream was that the names kept changing, specifically the murderer that the documentary was about. I can’t remember all of the names it changed to, so I’ll settle on the one that stuck out; Carl Dawson. I will have to make up names for everyone else, so bear with me.
I don’t remember the exact date this happened, but it was within the last ten years, and apparently it happened in Alpine. I lived in Alpine from ages twelve to fourteen, so I’m going to guess that the time frame had to be between 2002 and 2004 at least. Carl Dawson was a couple years older than me, so he was in high school when I was in middle school. The film went over Carl’s past, and it was this that upset my dream self.
Carl’s real parents were killed in a car accident when he was a baby, and later was adopted by a couple with the last name “Dawson,” so he inherited that name as well. We’ll call the woman Anne Dawson, and the man Will Dawson. At the time they adopted Carl, they already had a three year old biological son, and we’ll call him Kyle. Pictures were shown of the family and the house, and these pictures included birthday photos that were mostly of Carl and Kyle. Carl had medium-long, wavy blonde hair, and Kyle had short brunette hair. Anne honestly looked like a meth addict. She had badly bleached blonde hair with dark brunette roots showing, alarming bags under her eyes, yellow teeth, and just looked pretty trashy. Will was a little on the chubby side, but he was tall, looked strong, had greying hair, and was very intimidating. The house was also messy and poorly taken care of; you could tell the family didn’t make a lot of money. They also had a grey cat.
The parents had a history of drug abuse, alcoholism, and could never hold steady jobs. On the upside, Anne cared very dearly for her sons, even if one of them wasn’t her own flesh and blood. However, her relationship with Will wasn’t a healthy one, and Will would beat the shit out of her when he was drunk. He didn’t hit the children, but I consider what he did much, much worse. This is the part that upset me, and it’s also the reason why Anne and Will fought so much.
Will had a habit of molesting Kyle, and poor Carl fell victim to it as well. Unfortunately, Anne didn’t even know about it until Carl was two, and his behavior toward Will started to change. He became afraid of him, less talkative, and didn’t like to be touched by anyone. Kyle had always had behavioral problems, being hyper active, somewhat violent, and Anne had to keep him from hurting the cat. She assumed he was just that way, but Carl had shown noticeable changes that made her worried. She tried asking Carl if daddy ever hit him, and he said, “daddy told me not to tell.” She ended up calling her best friend, saying she suspected her husband was abusing Carl, but she had to hang up quickly when she heard Will walk through the front door.
Then, when she was changing Carl’s diaper, she noticed bruises around his lower body, and came to the horrifying conclusion that her husband had raped their adopted son. This caused a huge fight between Anne and Will, resulting in her being savagely beaten in front of both boys. Will also took the opportunity to tell her that he had been doing the same thing to Kyle for years, and that if she knew what was good for her, she’d keep her mouth shut. Will threatened to kill her if she even tried leaving. Anne was sickened by this entire thing, but couldn’t help but wonder why Kyle hadn’t shown drastic changes in behavior like Carl had. Then she figured that all of his behavioral problems must’ve come from the abuse in the first place.
Kyle got less “attention” than Carl did as the boys grew older, and that’s because Kyle was now “too old” for Will’s interests. Kyle continued to be a very bad kid, torturing the cat, killing random animals outside, breaking objects, fighting at school, and hitting his adopted brother. Carl spoke less and less, and became very afraid of people, including other kids at school, and this caused him to be bullied. It didn’t help that their family was poor, so his clothes were shabby. He spent a lot of time in his room where he’d pin up doodles he made on lined paper to the wall. Even as childish scribbles, they weren’t very happy looking.
Things escalated for Carl as time passed by. Kyle was hitting puberty, so now, on top of his preexisting problems, he now had to deal with hormones. Being raped by his own father messed with his mentality, and made his view of the real world and social interactions very warped. Kyle started sneaking into Carl’s room at night and molesting him as well. With both his adopted father and brother sexually abusing him, and with his mother constantly drowning her sorrows in substances, Carl’s trust in humanity was broken, and so was he. The only living creature he seemed to want to even be around was the cat.
When Carl entered middle school, he was still quiet and afraid of people, but he was now entering the transition into manhood. On his first day in sixth grade, he wasn’t sure where his first class was, and a seventh grade girl named Mary (this was her actual name in the dream) noticed how lost he looked. She was very petite, having long, straight dark brunette hair, peachy skin, and was wearing a black shirt, grey skirt, and black leggings that stopped below her knees. Lastly, her shoes were simple black flats, and wore no socks. I’m not sure why she stuck out to me so fiercely, but I think it was because this documentary was showing this past segment as if the camera man had been there while it happened, which was impossible. There were quite a lot of moments like that, some I’d rather not go into detail about.
Carl immediately took a shine to Mary, but he wasn’t used to speaking to people, so he was very nervous. He stuttered when he spoke to her, stumbled over words, said words wrong, and sometimes said the wrong thing completely. This didn’t bother her at all, being smart enough to recognize shyness, and being kind and confident enough to tell him it was alright. After this first encounter, Mary considered Carl her friend, and he’d follow her around like a puppy following its master. He practically idolized her because she was so caring and nice to him, and she even stood up to his bullies for him. Having a girl stand up for him didn’t emasculate him, but caused him to fall for her even harder.
It seemed like life was getting just a little better for Carl. The police were called by their neighbors after a particularly violent outdoor domestic disturbance between Will and Anne, and Anne took the chance to tell the police that Will had raped their sons. She didn’t know about Kyle doing the same thing to Carl because Carl wouldn’t talk about it. Will was arrested, and Anne took her children and cat to live in a small house in Alpine (I guess they were living just outside of the town beforehand, so they didn’t have to change schools). It wasn’t much nicer than their old house, and was even a bit smaller. Carl didn’t mind, because the house just happened to be right next door to Mary’s, and could even see her bedroom window from his own.
However, even though one of his life’s horrors was out of the picture, it didn’t change the fact that Carl’s mind had been severely messed up. Even after Kyle started “visiting” him less frequently, Carl still viewed the world very differently. He and Mary entered high school, but he never asked her out, and she was oblivious to the fact that he was madly in love with her. Little did she know, his “love” was actually a very unhealthy obsession. He wrote her name all over his walls, drew pictures of her, and watched her through her window using a cheap telescope. Whenever she had any interaction with another boy at school, Carl would draw pictures of himself killing them in many different and horrific ways. In these pictures, it always depicted Mary praising him for “saving” her from the filthy men of the world.
Kyle was a senior, and still a very bad kid, committing juvenile crimes, abusing drugs, and getting violent for pointless reasons. After school one day, he actually came up behind Mary, wrapped his arms around her, and tried to feel her up, but she turned around and pushed him away, shouting at him. Carl flared up as well, telling his brother to keep his hands off of her, but he punched Carl in the face and told him to shut his mouth, or he’d regret it. Mary didn’t take too kindly to this, so she socked Kyle right in the face as hard as she could. Enraged, and not afraid to hit a girl, Kyle lunged at her, but a teacher stopped him. He was suspended for about a week.
This would be the biggest week of Carl’s life. Anne worked two jobs, so she was rarely ever home, even for days at a time. One of these jobs was prostitution, so she was mostly gone at night. Kyle was now forced to stay at home for a week, and due to Carl’s and Mary’s retaliation, he was extremely hostile toward Carl, hitting him whenever he had the chance. Carl constructed a home made lock to install on his door to keep Kyle out of his room so that he’d finally have peace, and he spent his time spying on Mary through the window, writing in his journal, or writing and drawing on his wall. Some of it was written on scraps of paper pinned to it, but most of it was written on the wall itself. It showed obvious obsession over Mary, and when she couldn’t be seen through her window, he’d stare at places he had written her name.
Carl also had gotten his hands on an inexpensive digital camera that could take low quality pictures and video, though it wasn’t capable of recording audio. (I’ve actually had a camera like this, so that’s probably how my dream fabricated it.) He didn’t use it much… at first.
Kyle had recently started going out with a girl from another school named Wendy (actual name in the dream), so during his suspension, he’d bring her over. This was actually the first time Carl had ever seen her, and he found her very beautiful. Incredibly quickly, he became just as obsessed over her as he was with Mary, and started writing her name all over his walls as well. There were now two girls in his life he was madly in “love” with, and Wendy didn’t even treat him nicely. Why did he become obsessed with her? Maybe he idolized beautiful women because one had never harmed him in the way that his father and brother had. He even considered his own mother a lost cause because she was so far gone anyway, and she was never able to stop the abuse. Plus, she was so junked up, she had long lost her beauty, if she even had any to begin with.
Carl had an unhealthy obsession with spying on Kyle and Wendy when they had sex, and his obsession with Wendy was already unhealthy enough. Midway into the week, Kyle spotted Carl and became enraged, as was wont to happen, and Carl tried running away. Kyle, only wearing his underwear, chased Carl outside and grabbed him, tackling him to the ground and punching him repeatedly in the face. Wendy had gotten dressed and followed them, and she simply watched with satisfaction. Seeing Wendy with her arms crossed and smile on her face became Carl’s breaking point, and he went into a sort of blind rage where he had no control of what he was doing, and didn’t even realize he was doing it. This caused him to summon strength he had never used before, and he pushed Kyle off of him, standing and grabbing a nearby shovel that was sitting in the yard. Terrified that Carl had a weapon and a bloodthirsty look in his eyes, Kyle and Wendy ran back into the house, but didn’t think to close the door behind them.
The two hid behind the couch, and once Carl entered with the shovel, Kyle jumped out and kicked it out of his hands. Wendy ran back outside to keep away from the danger, sitting against the side of the house and crying. Now that Carl had no weapon, Kyle thought he’d have the upper hand, but was proven wrong. The two fought violently, both getting covered in cuts and bruises, and Carl had landed a punch that broke Kyle’s nose. Kyle pushed Carl into the wall next to their mother’s open bedroom door, and Carl ran inside, grabbing the gun that Anne kept under her bed for protection. This made Kyle frightened again, holding up his hands and backing away, trying to apologize to his brother. As they slowly made their way back into the living room, Carl was breathing heavily, but the gun he pointed at Kyle was held in very steady hands. Kyle attempted to dash out the open door, but was shot in the head, collapsing to the floor.
Hearing the gunshot, Wendy screamed and made to run away from the house, but Carl had come out and smacked her in the temple with the gun handle. She fell to the ground, still conscious, and started screaming when Carl dragged her back into the house, where he shot her in the head multiple times. Both her and Kyle were dead, blood covering the floor, and some splattered on the nearest wall.
Alone next door, Mary was doing her homework when she heard the yelling coming from Carl’s house, then became horrified when the first shot was fired. It was followed by a series of female screams, and the next few shots caused her to run downstairs and out her front door. She sprinted over to Carl’s, seeing the door was open, and she ran in to see what had happened. This had not been a good choice. Mary screamed upon seeing the two dead bodies on the floor, and an unrecognizable Carl with a gun in his hand. At this point, Carl had come out of his blind rage, but he didn’t regret what he had done. Realizing she had stumbled upon a dangerous situation, Mary immediately made to turn around to run through the door again, but Carl grabbed her from behind, wrapping an arm around her throat, and choking her. She struggled, but became limp as she lost consciousness.
When Mary woke up, she was lying on the floor of Carl’s room, which she had never been in before because he had never even invited her over to his house. She soon realized that her hands were tied behind her back, and her ankles were tied together very tightly, so she could only squirm with fright. Her eyes scanned the room, and she saw hers and Wendy’s names written on the wall in multiple places, as well as obsessive expressions of love, drawings of the girls, and drawings of Carl killing other guys. Mary also spotted the telescope pointed at the window, which she knew was right next to her own bedroom window. The next thing she noticed was Carl scratching out Wendy’s name with a knife, though he hadn’t gotten to all of them.
Scared, Mary demanded Carl to tell her what was going on. He knelt next to her, telling her how pretty she was, and that he loved her so much. He took the knife and cut into his palm, which didn’t seem to hurt him, and used his index finger to touch the blood, applying it to Mary’s lips as if it were lipstick. This, naturally, did not calm her down, but scared her even more. Then Carl took the digital camera and started taking pictures of her, showing her each one after he took it. He also leaned his head close to hers, taking a picture of himself with her. Mary told him he was sick, and that she regretted ever being his friend, but this angered Carl. He slashed her upper arm with the knife as he shouted about how she was just like everyone else, that he couldn’t trust anyone because everyone he ever cared about only ended up hurting him. After being maimed, Mary tried a different approach, apologizing to him and saying that she did care for him, and that she could help him.
Carl used the digital camera to take a video, propped it on his bed, made perfectly sure that it was pointed at Mary, and began stabbing her repeatedly in the chest. When Mary was dead, he untied her, grabbed the camera, and filmed her lifeless body up close for about a minute. Then he turned it off. He didn’t take care of any of the three bodies in the house, but instead sat on his bed and wrote in his journal, explaining about what he had done in a fit of anger, and then what he had done when he had come back to himself.
A lot of this part of the story was told through showing the scenes of what actually happened, which, as I mentioned before, would’ve been impossible. However, I soon found the role I played in the documentary. I was chosen by the director to interview Carl’s parents, Will having been released from prison just a year before filming. They lived in the same house, and Will and Anne had “found God,” so they no longer indulged in unhealthy and criminal vices. Will said Jesus had come to him in a dream, saying he’d be forgiven if he vowed to never harm another human being, so he believed he was saved. I asked them questions about how Carl was as a child, and about everything that happened in their household, so a good chunk of the story was told by them. The rest of the information had been gathered from reading Carl’s journal, observing his bedroom wall, and recovering photos and video footage from the camera.
To my conscious self, there was still the mystery of why I was interviewing them in the first place. I watched myself interacting with the cat, who was now very old, as well as being led around the house by Anne while she told me where everything happened. Will was raking leaves outside when I asked him questions, but I didn’t want to spend too much time with him because of his disgusting past with his children. The director did his fair share of interviewing as well, so I was not alone.
We went to the police department to ask the officers involved with the case some questions, and they told us everything they could legally disclose. We also interviewed the families of the victims… and this was when I found out more than three people had been killed. It was one of those “but Kyle, Wendy, and Mary were not the only ones to lose their lives to Carl” moments to increase suspense. Two more girls had been murdered in Carl’s bedroom, but his would-be sixth victim had escaped her fate.
I watched myself being led up to Carl’s old room by Anne, and she opened the door, turning on the light. The blood had been cleaned up, the digital camera and journal had been taken in by police, but everything on the walls was left the way it had been. The police had taken pictures of the walls as evidence, and Anne and Will decided not to clean them up as a reminder of how they broke their adopted son. It was a form of self punishment. I examined the walls, seeing the names “Wendy” and “Mary” crossed out by a knife’s blade. There were three other names written on the wall as well, but I can only remember the name of one of the two other girls that were killed: Morgan. We’ll call the other girl Sandra. Both “Morgan” and “Sandra” were crossed out, but the third name was not, and that was because Carl only crossed the names out after he killed them.
There were poems, drawings, and words of longing expressed toward the three girls he captured after Mary. He had fallen in “love” with them the moment he saw them, stalked them, kidnapped them, and brought them to his house all within the span of a few days. First to get caught after Mary was Sandra, and as she lay unconscious and tied up on the floor, Carl wrote about her on his wall. This is what she would wake up to, as well as the dead body of Mary laying right next to her. According to his journal, he had already met Morgan and the third girl by the time Sandra was taken, so his obsession over them were on the walls as well.
Using his mother’s makeup, he applied heavy eye shadow and lipstick to Sandra’s face, and then took pictures of her like he had with Mary. He explained to her that she was a beautiful girl, confessed his love to her, but said that her beauty had made her as corrupt as the rest of the horrible people on this planet. “Even though I love you, you have to die,” Carl said, “but we have to learn to let go of the things we care about.” She screamed as he set the camera up on his bed, pointing it at her and using the video function to record a video. He watched her struggle for a few minutes, and she pleaded with him to let her go, that she didn’t even know who he was, but the camera was unable to record her voice.
Carl ended Sandra’s life by beating her mercilessly with the shovel he had almost attacked Kyle with. Even after her body stopped moving, he hit her face constantly, and by the time he grabbed the camera to show the details of her body, her face was unrecognizable. After the video was stopped, Carl untied her, left her body where it was, used his knife to scratch out her name in the various places he had written it on the wall, and sat on his bed to write the event in his journal.
Next to come was Morgan, who actually was one of my friends at my middle school at the time. This is the reason I could remember her name. She woke up on Carl’s bed, but was able to see Mary’s and Sandra’s corpses on the floor, which was stained with huge amounts of blood. Carl was sitting next to her, stroking her brown hair, and she started crying and whimpering. He said, “even though you’re a few years younger than me, I still find you so beautiful.” Once again, he confessed his love for her, and she asked him if he had raped her. Carl was overcome with rage and yelled at her, saying he would never do such a thing, that he was insulted she’d even think that. “Don’t you understand? I love you, Morgan! I don’t ever want to hurt you!” he said. She asked why she was tied up, and Carl responded by saying that beautiful women need to die so that they don’t hurt him or anyone else ever again. He somehow didn’t count killing as “hurting” someone, but felt that pain was more of an emotional thing, and that’s what he meant by “I don’t ever want to hurt you.”
While Morgan had been passed out, Carl had dressed her in one of his mother’s dresses, which was a little too big for her. After explaining that she needed to die, he did her makeup, but cut his hand again, running it over her hair and tinting it red. It was now damp and slightly sticky. Carl then told her he’d spare her life if she smiled for all of the pictures he took of her, so she did, even smiling for the ones that Carl included himself in. Of course, when he was done, he told Morgan that he lied, and set the camera up on the bedside table to video record her. She pleaded with him to spare her, but he held up the gun he used to kill Kyle and Wendy, then emptied the two remaining bullets into her head. As usual, Carl filmed her body, then left it on his bed as he crossed out her name, and added another entry to his journal.
The name of the third would-be victim sent me into confusion and distress. I watched my face fall while my eyes scanned the wall, seeing certain things that I recognized. Carl had drawn Divel and Sticky the Female Mad Man in some places, which were two of my very first characters that I invented in middle school. I found the name “Kara” written everywhere, included in the mess of obsession. “Kara” is my real name, and I definitely did not remember being kidnapped. While this was filmed, the director explained to me that he asked me to help him with the documentary because I had been the only person who survived Carl’s killing spree. I was so confused, I started crying, asking him how that was possible when I had never even met him.
Apparently I had met him. In fact, stalking me was the only reason he had discovered Morgan. The scene changed to back at the police station, where they handed over the journal for us to read. The officer turned to the first page that mentioned my name, and it told the story of how Carl and I met.
He was in high school, and I was in middle school, but Alpine was a small town that I often walked around in with my friends, or even alone. I didn’t feel unsafe there; nothing bad had happened… that I knew of. I had met Carl at the grocery store not too far from my apartment, but I’ve always been pretty afraid of people myself because I have my fair share of mental problems coupled with a traumatic past, though I later admitted to myself that Carl’s situation was much worse than mine. I encountered him while picking out some candy, and ran straight into him as I exited the aisle. Shyness being one of my flaws, I avoided eye contact as I apologized repeatedly, stumbling over my words like I always did in front of strangers. I had dropped my candy, and Carl picked it up for me, handing it back.
“Are you shy?” he asked in a surprisingly quiet voice that had a bit of a stutter. My fear of people made me want to get away from him and out of the store as quickly as possible, which was normal for me, but the question intrigued me too much to make an excuse to purchase my candy and go. I finally looked him in the eyes, and I could see there was something very dark behind them. He was so pale and sickly looking, and his expression was completely blank. I wasn’t sure if I was afraid of him, or even more curious. I told him I wasn’t very good around people, and he said he had the same problem. I tended to get along better with boys anyway, even since I was a young child, so meeting one with fear or social interaction made me feel a little more comfortable.
Carl followed me as I bought the candy, and then we sat outside to talk. I shared the candy with him, and he told me that he’s only had one person he’s felt comfortable enough to really talk with, and that was his friend Mary, who had moved away recently. Now he had no friends, was bullied constantly, and life at home was less than desirable. I told him I was bullied too, that many of my only friends had been special education kids when I was in sixth grade. Even though I had never been in a special education class in my entire life, I was called a “retard” because I hung out with them, but the reason I hung out with them was because they were the only ones who were nice to me. When I entered seventh grade, I changed the way I dressed to fit in, and stopped hanging around my old friends to try and stop the bullying, which was a very unkind thing for me to do, and to this day, I’m not proud of my decisions. Bullying didn’t stop, but I was able to make new friends, one of them having been Morgan at the time.
We actually connected a lot even though he was older, and he offered to walk me home, saying it wasn’t safe to go anywhere alone. I humored him because I was enjoying his company, so we went back to my apartment complex, and I said goodbye to him. He asked me for my phone number before I headed up the stairs so that he could talk to me if things got bad for him, so I wrote it down and gave it to him. He watched me as I entered my apartment, which was on the second story.
Reading this entry caused heavily repressed memories to return, and it terrified me. The director asked me if I was remembering something, so I filled in the blanks, the things that Carl had not been able to write about in his journal.
Carl didn’t call me for a few days, but when he finally did, he sounded like he had been crying. He said something really bad happened, and that he wanted to talk to me, but in person. I told him to come over, and we could walk around while he told me what was wrong. I met him outside, then we left the complex, and he asked me to come to his house so that he was in a place where he felt more comfortable. I was nervous, but agreed, so we walked to his house.
As I read the journal entries about me, I learned that, during those days I hadn’t heard from Carl, he had been stalking me. He followed me to school, watched me from afar while I was at break or lunch, saw me talking to Morgan in PE, and followed me home. He sat outside my apartment, staring up at my window, which I usually shut the curtains to. I kept the actual window open to let cool air in because I hate getting too hot, so he could hear what I was doing. I usually listened to music while drawing or doing crafts, but I also had an old hobby where I used my dolls to record plays and stories on an old tape recorder. I had actually done this since I was little, which eventually evolved into my interest in video making and narrations.
Morgan was mentioned a lot after seeing her with me at school, and he had stalked her as well. Then the journal mentioned that he had killed Morgan, and now I was next to be taken for the sake of cleansing humanity, though Carl admitted in the entry that I was less of a cancer to the world than most people he’s met. Still, to him, I was pretty, and pretty girls will do nothing but hurt others, just like all men will. There were even doodles of Divel and STFMM in the journal, and it never told me how he even knew about those characters.
Upon entering Carl’s house, I immediately saw the bodies of a teenage boy and girl lying on a large brown stain near a wall. When I was younger, I was much less desensitized to gore, and was definitely afraid of death, so this was a terrifying sight for me. Before I could let out any sort of scream, Carl had grabbed me and put his arm around my throat, choking me until I passed out just as he had with Mary.
I woke up, wrists and ankles tied together, inside Carl’s bedroom in front of the door, which was closed, but I had a full view of the three dead girls in the room. I recognized the one on the bed as Morgan, and I started crying. Carl had been sitting on the bed, watching me as he flipped a knife over and over in his hands. He smiled as he stood, and then knelt next to me, a digital camera in his hands. “Don’t be scared,” he said, “you’re much more beautiful when you smile. See, Morgan was smiling…” Carl then showed me the pictures of Morgan, and she had indeed been smiling, despite being tied up and wearing way too much makeup. Then he showed me the video of him killing her, and told me that pretty girls have to die so that they don’t hurt people, and even though I was a lot like him, I was no exception.
I have been convinced throughout my life that I am not at all pretty, and that stems from the fact that I look exactly like Erin. I told Carl that I wasn’t really that pretty, but he insisted that I was beautiful and that he loved me. “But even you have hurt me,” he said with spite, and he showed me a comic drawn on lined paper of him killing a boy that looked familiar to me, and then showed a girl that looked like me smiling about it. “You’re dating this boy,” he stated. It was true that I had recently started going out with a boy named Lance. “I almost thought you were the exception, but I was wrong.”
I was scared an confused, wondering how he expected me to feel the same way about him if we only just met, and spent barely an hour together. Carl said this is why pretty girls need to be eliminated, because they can’t help but hurt people, even when they’re not trying. He compared them to all men, but said men are different because they know they’re hurting people, and they enjoy it. I asked him why he thought he was different than other men, and he said, “because I’ve discovered the truth.”
Just like he had with the other girls in the room, Carl applied heavy makeup to my face, but I was still wearing the clothes I had left my house in, which I later assumed were pretty enough for him. He took pictures of me, showing me each one in turn, but I was disgusted by the terrible makeover, especially since I had become obsessed with trying to look beautiful to fit in at school. Then Carl set up the camera on his bed, recording a video of me, and standing over me with the knife. I was scared out of my mind and screamed as loud as I could. I was always told my scream could break glass, which was not true obviously, but it was still a pretty effective distraction.
However, Carl was distracted by a second scream from downstairs, and he seemed to panic, backing away from me as running footsteps came up the stairs. I watched as a woman, who I later found out was Anne, his mother, burst through the door. She saw the bodies, and then looked at me. Anne bravely wrestled the knife out of her son’s hands, and it fell next to me. My hands were tied behind my back, but I was able to sit up, grab it, and with difficulty, cut the rope around my wrists. Anne had Carl pinned to the floor as I cut the rope binding my ankles, and she screamed at me to run, so I did. Not wanting to stay in the house, I ran to the closest public store and told them to call the police, that people had been murdered.
The memories were even more vivid when the officer showed me the photos Carl had taken of me, as well as the video. I felt a little sick as I watched myself about to be murdered, and then escape, but the camera hadn’t been shut off as Anne fought with Carl. He managed to throw her off of him and grab the knife, and Anne backed out of the frame. He went after her, and everything was still for a couple of minutes. Then Carl fell to the floor in front of the camera, the knife falling out of his hands, the open wound on his throat bleeding profusely.
The officer turned the camera off, explaining to us that it continued to record Carl’s dead body for a good five minutes before the SD card finally ran out of space. It was concluded that he had killed himself. What I didn’t understand was, why didn’t I remember any of this?
They told me that, after the incident, I was put into therapy, but it wasn’t doing any good. I was losing sleep, and when I did sleep, I was plagued with nightmares, reliving the event. After a few weeks, I told the therapist that I just wanted to forget, so she decided to tell me about an experimental treatment that involved hypnotism. I didn’t believe in that stuff, but I was willing to try it. After being hypnotized, the therapist was able to wipe my memories of the experience, and even meeting Carl in the first place.
It wasn’t explained in the dream how I didn’t hear about my escape from people who read the newspaper or watched the news on TV, but I had heard about the other murders, and that someone got away alive. In reality, forgetting the event would be impossible, and there’s no way they wouldn’t have reported about the one survivor. I’m guessing that it’s possible (in the dream) that they kept my identity a secret, saying there was an anonymous survivor, so I’m going to assume that’s what happened.
The documentary switched back to me speaking with Anne, and she told me that, after I escaped, Carl had thrown her off. She backed away as he pointed the knife at her, but told him that she was sorry she couldn’t have saved him from the torture he endured, that no one deserved what happened to him. She was sure that Carl’s real parents were up in Heaven, looking down at their poor baby living in Hell, and that there was no way Anne was ever going to be up there with them after death, but she hopes they know how sorry she was. After hearing all of this, Carl had started crying, and then slit his own throat, killing himself.
The film ended with a scene of me before I had discovered the truth of my involvement, petting the old cat and smiling. The director’s voice over said, “some speculate that Carl did not kill himself, but that Anne had grabbed his hand holding the knife and forced him to cut his own throat. There’s no proof of this, but it’s this point that makes the story very mysterious. Did Carl actually commit suicide, or did Anne Dawson kill her adopted son? We may never know, and Anne certainly denies the allegation. Nearly a decade after the tragedy, Kara has remembered what she experienced, and it may take some time for her to really come to terms with it. The families of the victims give words of encouragement, hoping that she values the life that was almost taken from her. Carl Dawson’s story remains a dark stain on history, one that is impossible to forget, no matter how hard you try.”
After watching all three parts of the documentary, I sat away from my computer and sighed, wiping the tears that had come from my eyes. My dream self had known exactly what the film contained even before I watched it, having remembered everything during filming, but it was a massive shock to my conscious self. Other than the tears, my dream self didn’t seem to express how I felt about the situation, but left a comment under the third part. It said, “this turned out very good, I’m glad to have been a part of it.”
Then the dream changed to my male rat Sammy actually being a girl, and the reason she was so fat was because she was pregnant. Within twelve hours, she gave birth, the babies grew fur, opened their eyes, and were running around my apartment. I had to round them up and put them in a cage. It was as if the previous dream, so complex and detailed, never happened.
It’s not often that I remember a dream so clearly, and I’m surprised I was able to recall almost everything. This entire post is almost eight thousand words long, and I doubt anyone has read this whole thing. It doesn’t matter to me, I just needed to document it, but I wanted to share it just in case people are interested in reading the whole thing. I feel a little better after getting this out, but my throat feels tight when I remember what poor Carl had to go through, and even what Kyle went through until he started doing the same thing.
I’m not sure what this dream means. Maybe it’s telling me I will lose my life by being murdered someday, maybe it’s telling me I will escape from a murderer. Maybe it’s simply telling me to value my life while I can. Or maybe it was showing me some sick, subconscious fantasy combining my fear of people with my fear of experiencing a painful death. It’s no secret that, even though I don’t fear my life ending, I am afraid of being tortured or dying painfully. That’s why I am able to write “Muffins,” because I write about what I’m afraid of. It’s therapy in a sense.
Whatever it means, I’m glad it’s over.
Don’t get me wrong, the Deep Web is a dangerous place to be, and you need to be careful, but it’s actually not quite as bad as people say. When I heard about Human Experiments, I thought to myself, “well, wait… that seems pretty unrealistic.” Once again, I decided to dig deeper.
Reitanna Seishin 
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