Limbic Phantom Syndrome

"The lizard brain is not merely a concept. It's real, and it's living on the top of your spine, fighting for your survival. But, of course, survival and success are not the same thing."

- Seth Godin

 

Transcript

You wanted a pet, but you knew it had to be something small, your apartment was on the third floor, so anything loud was out of the question. You’d had fish growing up, and you liked being able to look into their little sanctuary, you liked being able to keep an eye on them. But you also wanted something new. You settled on an axolotl.

 They were solitary, so you’d only have one little buddy to worry about, and they were cute. You knew you didn’t want to worry about breeding at all so you decided to look for rescues, little buddies who might not have anywhere else to go. You pick one up on Facebook marketplace, and his name is Noodle, and you love him right away.

 You make him the cutest little tank, with fun but sterile and carefully curated stimuli, and you soon earn his trust enough that he comes out and swims up to touch you anytime you’re doing anything in the tank. You love that you can be in charge of every aspect of his little home, that you can make it the best place that it can be. But after just a few weeks, Noodle gets sick.

His gills shrink, and he stops eating. His skin starts shedding, not like a lizard sheds, but sloughing off. It’s scary, and you assume it can only mean he’s dying. But your vet tells you he’s simply transforming into something else. Your vet tells you that he’s morphing, something axolotls aren’t supposed to do, but yours decided to do it anyway. Many of them don’t survive the process, but you do everything you can. 

You slowly turn your axolotl home into a salamander home with substrate and land, and fake plants. Your little guy decided to change species on you, but that’s okay. He also became kind of ugly, but that’s okay too. Against all odds he survives the transformation, and you spend your time making his new home the best place it can be. Then one day he decided to surprise you again. You catch your little guy making a cocoon. 

This one is not a question the vet can answer, and he thinks you're pranking him in the phone call. The internet is useless and you realize that Noodle is even more of an anomaly than you thought. Over the next several weeks, you watch the cocoon swell in size, and at night you hear strange sounds coming from it. You don’t know how to prepare his house aside from getting a much, much bigger enclosure. The cocoon is warm to the touch, but you don’t know if you should make his glass house hotter or cooler.

 Eventually he pulls through, and you hear the sounds of his cocoon tearing open. You rush over to your room and find that your little Noodle has transformed into: The Podcast Inside Your House. 

Houses are not safe places, but I think it’s a basic human instinct to long for the elements of a home. I think that’s why I often find myself comparing my safe space to a house. There are no real walls in my safe space, walls are no good. Sure they can keep things out, but they can also trap you inside. My sanctuary was surrounded only on three sides by flaking rocky cliffs, a shallow layered rock full of fossils that collapsed if you so much as looked at it wrong. But that also meant that it was so full of moss and ferns that there were always more than enough handholds to climb in and out. 

The only ceiling present was the sky, framed by a few sporadic tree branches. It was exposed to the elements; the rain and the sun and the cold, but staring up at clouds and stars made it more than worth it. The bathtub, when needed, was the shallow pool of overflow from a nearby river on the fourth side. The snaking ravine walls blocked the view from the actual river though, giving it privacy.

My sanctuary wasn’t as isolated as I would have liked, but few of us are lucky enough to have a home in the middle of nowhere. The sounds of the nearby park substituted the sounds one would normally pick up through their windows in a neighborhood. The river on the other side occasionally brought kayak conversations drifting over, but the inlet leading to my ravine was full of dead trees and those traveling the river paddled to easier landings. 

No one ever came to my sanctuary, not even animals. But tonight was different. Tonight, for the first time, there was not only something new, but something dead. On the rocky shore of the water's edge there was a fish carcass. It was fresh, blood was still seeping into the sand from tiny teeth marks on the belly.  

I stared at it for a while, trying to find out what it meant. Then I looked around at the gloomy fall leaves around me, the cloudy sky above, and decided that maybe I needed a change of scenery. 

I had to get a glass of water anyway, so I went to the shallowest side of the rocky cliffs, and picked myself up and out of safety. I lifted myself back into my bed, back to the real world. 

I always found it easiest to re-set the scene if I left for a bit. I didn’t like changing the space while I was in it, I worried that might erode my memories of the ravine. With the real one long since bulldozed and turned into a parking lot, it wasn’t like I could make any new memories, so the ones I had were precious. 

I got a glass of water, and tried not to look at any clocks. I knew it was late, but I didn’t want to know how late, it was already hard enough to sleep. 

When I got settled back into bed I focused all my energy on remembering the ravine in spring. The moss was a darker green and covered in little white flowers, and the trees were just beginning to bud. It was cool and calm, the water just warm enough to wade in. 

When I felt like I was fully immersed once again I walked up to the rocky shore, and immediately felt uneasy. The fish was still there, but it had been picked clean, and was beginning to decay. 

I was sure that meant something but I didn’t know what. No matter how miserable my mental health had been, I’d always been able to control the sanctuary in my mind flawlessly. That was the whole point of having it after all. 

I tried to will the fish away, but it didn’t budge. I waded into the water, hoping to shock myself out of whatever message my brain was trying to send to me. The water felt especially realistic, almost uncomfortably cold, which was strange. I focused on the birdsong and the sun beating down on my face. I felt almost at peace enough to finally drift off to sleep. 

My trance was disturbed by splashing that I hadn’t meant to conjure. A squirrel was lapping at the water's edge. I watched it, and marveled at how real it seemed. Though I could picture my sanctuary perfectly, it was still all in my head and things appeared only as I decided to look at them. But this squirrel was almost more like a vision in a dream, something that I hadn’t brought there. 

Something splashed up out of the water, and my heart kickstarted. People talk about fight or flight but I’ve always defaulted to freeze or fawn. I stood perfectly still when I realized I wasn’t alone, as if that would save me. 

The squirrel was in the jaws of some kind of monstrous creature. It was a fleshy peach color, and completely smooth, the little of it that I could see resembled a crocodile. It had a narrow, triangle-shaped head and rows and rows of teeth munching on the poor creature in its maw. What I could make out of its body looked incredibly naked. It was like someone had taken a man’s skin and stretched it over the shape of an alligator. It turned its head to face me, blood dripping through the gaps in its wide mouth, and I saw it had blue eyes, the whites large and human.

Seeing those eyes sprung me into action, but I didn’t move out of the water, I just decided to come back to the real world. I always liked to climb out when I could, but it wasn’t like I couldn’t just open my eyes and leave that way too. Except tonight that didn’t work. Something had changed. 

I was trapped. 

I willed myself to wake up, realizing then that I must have slipped into a nightmare, but that didn’t work either. Only when the beast started swimming towards me was I able to pry myself out of my frozen state, and sprint for shore. 

I went straight for the rocks, certain that climbing out would wake me up. That was always where the vision ended, but when I reached the top of the shallow cliffs I was horrified to find myself back in the park. It looked how it had years ago when I was growing up, the forest still stretching all the way to the road. Behind me I heard rocks falling and heavy, wet breathing coming up from the edge of my ravine.

I ran the opposite direction of home, but that didn’t work. Maybe it’s because the walk to the park from my house was what I remembered most vividly after all these years. Maybe it’s because this was a fucking nightmare and that was the worst place I could end up. Either way, running south took me north.

I didn’t want to look back, but when I heard footsteps gaining on me I couldn’t help it. The beast behind me had transformed into something more bear-like. It had long legs with heavy shining claws at the end, and its wide triangle mouth had been shrunk into a snout, but the teeth looked no less sharp. It growled at me then, making strange sounds reminiscent of a cat in heat or raccoons fighting; shrill and high and almost human. 

I sprinted faster. I’d accepted where I was going to end up, so when I reached my childhood home I opened the door, and ran straight upstairs to my old room. I slammed the door shut, but didn’t bother with the lock, it didn’t work. My old room was decorated the same as it had been until the day I moved out; surprisingly bare but also filthy. 

I remembered this place even more vividly than my sanctuary. 

Heavy footsteps were coming up the stairs, but not ones I knew well, which was almost a relief. I collapsed into the bed then, just ready for this nightmare to be over. In dreams you always wake up before the worst part anyway. 

From downstairs I soon heard my mother's voice calling my name; “Charlie!” followed by two faint echoes. She was in the kitchen. I could always tell where she was because the laundry chute from my room made her voice echo differently depending on what part of the house she was in. The kitchen gave two echoes, the living room just one, and coming up the stairs or closer, the echo would be gone and her approach would be inevitable, inescapable. 

I heard claws struggling against my door, then the scraping lessened and the knob started to turn silently. What stepped into the room looked like a child's drawing of a naked man. Everything was almost in the right spot, but his eyes were too big, his nostrils misshapen, and his hair hung down in wet thick clumps.

From downstairs I heard “Charlie!” this time followed by only one more echo. She was getting closer. 

The thing on the threshold rushed over to me, glancing behind its back, it looked almost scared. It jumped onto the bed with me and I waited for it to gouge out my eyes or snap my neck, whatever it is that nightmare ghouls do. But it just said “Can you hide me? Please?”

“What?” I asked.

“Can you hide me?” It echoed, its voice surprisingly frail. “It’s going to get me.”

I once again heard “Charlie!” but this time louder, and this time said only once. Then I heard the familiar footsteps coming up the stairs. That sound filled me with more dread than this beast ever could. 

“Okay,” I said, and grabbed the things cold, clammy hand. “Follow me.” 

There was a special technique to jumping out of windows that I was well acquainted with. You had to lower yourself down as far as you could, then be kind of limp when you fell. I helped the creature out first, then jumped just as my door opened, barely making it out in time. 

I led the way as we sprinted back to the park together. I was amazed at how out of breath I could get in a dream, but I didn’t let us slow down until we got to the ravine. When we made it to safety and finally caught our breath, the creature spoke once again. “Can I hide out here, just for a little while?” 

“Sure,” I said, “of course.” Then I asked, “How do I get out of this? How do I wake up?”

“You’re not dreaming,” it told me. “You need to be careful coming to places like this. There are much bigger things than me in here.” It paused and looked around. “There are much scarier things even, than that monster back at your house. I can help you get out though.” 

The beast took my hand this time and led me to the water. “Trust me.” It said. Then it held my back and started tipping me down. I went limp, and the thing lowered me into the water with its lumpy arms. I closed my eyes, and as soon as I felt the ice-cold water hit them, I was back in my bed. 

I laid there for a while. I didn’t know how to fall asleep in my house. I didn’t know how to feel safe there. But I suppose it’s time finally time to try and figure it out because I can’t go back to my safe space, at least not tonight. Tonight someone else needs it much more than I do. 

Until Next Time; take some time to cherish your pets this week, whether they’re cats, dogs, amphibians, or nightmare crocodilians made of human flesh.