Fever Dreams

I was ill the day the strange incident happened. From what I was told, my temprature had been one hundred and two degrees Farenheit when my husband, Jarad, made me go get some bed rest. He had been an EMT so I supposed I should listen.

For the first ten minutes all I could do was lay in our bed staring at the ceiling fan as it blew chilled air on my face. I must've drifted into a deep sleep, because the next thing I knew, I was standing in my bedroom but something was off.

The bed, nightstand and all of our other furniture was where it was when I had lain down. Yet somehow the colors and styles were wrong. The lamp was a tall, brass floor lamp I didn't recognize. Our arm chair was now upholstered in leather instead of off white polyester. Most shocking was the walls; instead of their normal calming turqoise, they were a shade between salmon and wine red. In the dim light, the walls seemed to be covered in strange patterns in an angular scrawl, smears of some dark red substance and what can only be described as claw marks. I moved closer to the wall to examine it, the markings were in a black smudgy substance; they kind of reminded me of things I'd seen in movies about witch craft or maybe aliens; it was hard to figure out which.

Shortly after this, I noticed a strange sound like chanting and a smell like burning rubber. I determined that it was coming from outside the room I was in. Curious and slightly alarmed, I decided to investigate.

Opening the door, I found myself in what should've been the hallway to my home. Instead, it was a tunnel with walls of some dark stone I couldn't identify. The only light seemed to come from some erratic source like a fire. I proceeded down the length of this carved path and came to a larger room.

It was a huge chamber made of limestone bricks covered in goldleafed patterns after the manner that I had seen earlier. The entire scene was lit by torches in braisers on the walls. In the center, was about ten beings that could only losely be described as humaniod. These danced around a large bonfire chanting and gesturing to some idolatrous statue.

The statue itself was carved of jade and bloodstone. It measured about ten feet tall and looked like a cross between a crustacean and a chubby man wearing nothing but a loin cloth and some sort of jewelry on its head which was a maddening sight. The idol's head was somewhat like a man's but the upper half was covered in eyes with a sideways slit. There must have been a hundred eyes. The nose and mouth had merged into something between an ant's jaws and a wolf's snout.

I listened in terrified silence to the voices of the worshipers but could not understand them. They somehow buzzed and ululated at the same time. Their chant began to crescendo and build momentum before culminating in a shout of a word "Jezzurïa!"

That was when I finally screamed and the creatures noticed me. As one, their clawed hands lowered the hoods of their robes and revealed horrid faces nearly identical to their god's! At once, I fled back the way I came and hoped the beings were not persuing me.

As soon as I was in the room which resembled mine, I shut the door fast behind me! With great haste, I went and hid in the closet not daring to make a sound.

For a moment, there was only silence and darkness. Then I heard a single set of footsteps. The closet door rattled and opened. As I cowered, a familiar voice asked "Dear, what are you doing in there?" I tried to slow my breathing and looked up. My husband stood above me.

"Oh Jared!" I cried. "I've just had the worst experience!" I told him all that I had seen and heard. He gently stroked my arm "It's ok honey, you just had a fever dream;" he said. "Your safe now."

Eventually, I recovered from my illness and life went on as normal. Until one day I found a mythology book in the local library. In that tome I found a picture that brought everthing from my supposed dream back. It was an illustration of the anchient Chaldean god of the stars, Jezzurïa. The illustration looked exactly like the statue from my nightmare!

The Chaldeans, who worshiped Jezzurïa, had formed a cult that spaned from the fifthteenth century BCE until the second century BCE. As a god of the stars, this entity had been worshiped on the night of the new moon closest to the fall and spring equinoxes. This involved blood sacrifices usually of a goat but sometimes, it was rumored, young men and women went missing from towns and villages near shrines dedicated to Jezzurïa.

According to the book, the cult believed that this entity had appeared to their first high priest. Jezzurïa had claimed to have come from an invisible world near the star we know as Betlegeuse, in the constellation Orion. He had traveled to our world to usher in a new age and establish communication between their people and the Chaldeans so that their peoples might merge. Jezzurïa, similar to other gods in that region, communicated to his followers via his priests. Followers were slavishly devoted or were killed for unbelief. Eventually, local rulers came to fear the cult and led a campaign to erradicate all the followers of Jezzurïa. Little more is said in the book except surviving artifacts of this religion are very rare.

It was chilling. Almost impossible to believe. I shut the book and left the library pleading with the universe not to revive this horrible orginization if it were real.

In my mind, it seemed abundantly clear my dream had somhow actually been a way of visiting this entity's native planet. Those creatures worshiping at the base of that idol were beings of Jezzurïa's kind. Who knows what their intentions for our planet were or are? Jarred had said I was having a bad dream because I was sick.

If what I had seen was only a product of REM sleep; then why was the exact thing I had witnessed so accurately described in this book?