Long Hard Road Out of Hell (37 page)

I believe in dreams. I believe that every night on the planet everything that is, was and can be is dreamt. I believe that what happens in dreams is no different and no less important than what happens in the waking world. I believe that dreams are the closest equivalent present-day mankind has to time travel. I believe you can visit your past, present and future in dreams. I believe I’ve dreamt half of my life that hasn’t happened yet.

I don’t believe in chance, accidents or coincidences. I believe in the Delusional Self, which is to say that I believe that the things I talk and think about change the world around me and result in events that appear to be coincidental. I believe that my life is so important that it affects the lives of everyone else. I believe I am God. I believe everyone is their own God. I dreamt I was the Antichrist, and I believe it.

I’ve thought about being the Antichrist ever since the word was first taught to me at Christian school. In the Bible, the word
antichrist
is only used as a description of people who don’t believe in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. He is not described as one satanic entity—as the beast of Revelation which many people believe—but as a person, any person, who deviates from the Christian orthodoxy. But through years of myth-making and fear-sowing, Christianity metamorphosed antichrists into a single Antichrist, an apocalyptic villain and Christian bogeyman used to scare people much as Santa Claus is used to regulate children’s behavior. After years of studying the concept, I began to realize that the Antichrist is a character—a metaphor—who exists in nearly all religions under different names, and maybe there is some truth in it, a need for such a person. But from another perspective, this person could be seen not as a villain but a final hero to save people from their own ignorance. The apocalypse doesn’t have to be fire and brimstone. It could happen on a personal level. If you believe you’re the center of your own universe and you want to see the universe destroyed, it only takes one bullet.

When my dreams about the Antichrist began occurring more frequently later in life, I knew I was that figure. When I dreamt as a child I’d be performing in front of thousands of people, it seemed just as improbable at the time. Now I doubt nothing. After all, the beasts and dragons of the apocalypse were all born in a dream, a dream of John the Apostle’s now known as Revelation and taught as fact. In one of my own revelations—we all have them—it was the last day of the world, Judgment Day, and there was a giant tickertape parade in New York. Except instead of paper, people were throwing vegetables and rotten meat. I was on a giant crucifix strapped to a huge float made from human and animal skin. We were nearing Times Square, the sky was a deep black streaked with jagged stripes of orange, yellow, red and purple, and everyone was celebrating. They were happy that they were finally going to die.

Another took place in the future in Florida. Most of the human race had been turned into zombies for the entertainment of a small elite. There was a strip club where they had reanimated female corpses and made them dance naked in cages made of thick metal bars. Their flesh was covered in boils and gnarled veins, and their hair was falling out in clumps. Their jaws had been wired shut so that they wouldn’t bite off the dicks of the guys around them masturbating. The world had degenerated to such a Sodom and Gomorrah state of sin that it seemed clear that the appearance of the Antichrist and the Second Coming were imminent.

I dreamt of little girls strip-dancing as little boys (or dwarves) hit them with rubber snakes, Tonka trucks and lollipops instead of throwing money. And I dreamt of taking my own hair and teeth, saved from when I was a small child, and very ritualistically creating an artificial companion out of them. And all these things became the album
Antichrist Superstar
. Now I can’t tell which is more real: my dreams or my music.

I will leave you with one more dream, from last night. It was with the slashers, the fans who slice the band’s name into their chests. In my nightmare, I’m in bed with Jeanette, the cherubic looking one. She has
Marilyn
cut into her, and each letter is dripping like wet paint over her breasts, staining her white tank top. I’m fucking her and we’re both laughing because it seems like something that we shouldn’t be doing. Her friend, Alison, is sitting next to her, with the word
Manson
bleeding on her chest. One of her eyebrows is bleached white, her lip rings are clattering against each other, and she’s wearing a black dress, thigh-high hose, and black boots to the knees. She seems mad at me because I shouldn’t be doing this with her friend and she’s upset at her friend because she’s laughing about it.

When we finish, they want to take me to eat. We walk downstairs to a damp, stone-walled, cavernous place, like a dungeon. It could be my parents’ old basement, but it’s also a restaurant. Water is dripping off the ceiling although there’s a hole over our heads with sunlight streaming in. The waiter is a tall, skinny, Aryan-looking gay guy. He brings us big black metal bowls and each one has a live bird in it. They look like crows, but they’re not. They’re just black birds covered with a shiny film of grease. Another blond guy comes to the table and takes a pair of giant clippers, like the kind used to cut bike locks, and snips their heads off and peels the skin back so all that’s left is meat on a skeleton. The birds, though, are still alive. The guy takes one of the bird heads and drinks the blood, then he tells me to take a bite of the skin. I don’t want to because I’m scared of getting some kind of weird disease, but I do it anyway. I drink all the blood out of the bird. When I’m finished, I feel a pain in the back of my neck. I turn around, and the waiter is trying to use the clippers on me for a table of customers sitting on high chairs above me. Except they don’t look like clippers anymore. They’re like a cross between a bird’s beak and a crocodile’s jaws. I try to protest, and then I realize that it’s useless, because I am watching everything upside down as one of them puts my open neck to his mouth and drinks my blood.

I’ve seen my own death in dreams like this and it’s helped me appreciate life more. I’ve also seen my own life in dreams and it’s helped me appreciate death more.

antichrist superstar

I
N MY OPINION THE APOCALYPSE … MUST BE PRIMARILY AN INTERNAL, SPIRITUAL EVENT, AND ONLY IN A SECONDARY WAY AN EXTERNAL CATASTROPHE.
T
HE GATES OF THE
W
ATCHTOWERS … ARE MENTAL CONSTRUCTIONS.
W
HEN THEY ARE OPENED, THEY WILL ADMIT
[S
ATAN] NOT INTO THE PHYSICAL WORLD BUT INTO OUR SUBCONSCIOUS MINDS....
T
HE APOCALYPSE IS A MENTAL TRANSFORMATION THAT WILL OCCUR, OR IS PRESENTLY OCCURRING, WITHIN THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS OF THE HUMAN RACE.

—Donald Tyson, “The Enochian Apocalypse”

“T
HIS
man is deceased.”

A male voice was speaking somewhere above my body. His words were the first sounds I had heard for hours, maybe days. I didn’t know how long I’d been lying there. I didn’t even know where I was, or if I was alive. I struggled to move, but I couldn’t. My left arm tingled. Everything else was numb and impotent, like wooden limbs hanging from the severed strings of a discarded marionette. I tried to open my eyes, to command them to raise, but they wouldn’t respond. I needed to wake up, to tell them I wasn’t dead. I was still alive. It wasn’t my time to die. I had too much left to accomplish.

My eyelids fluttered open, leaving behind a greasy, blurry film obstructing my vision. All I could make out was a blinding white light shining on me, penetrating my being, or what was left of it. It wasn’t my time to die. I knew it.

The back of a hand, bony and varicose, rubbed my forehead. I wondered if it had been there all along. A hideous shadow, ancient, corpulent and redolent of sour cheese and wet wood, blocked the light. It spoke: “God still loves you.” The speaker was a woman, who coughed phlegm into her palm and shook her crumpled nun’s habit then continued stroking my forehead with the back of the hand she had just spit into.

I could feel my chest now. It was tight and constricted, crushing my heart. There was a small commotion nearby. An old, emaciated man, his body covered with sores either from the mattress, old age or the bones pushing against his skin, had died in the bed next to me.

A softer hand gripped my jaw and pulled it open. “This is going to give you a headache, but it will make your heart feel better.” She placed something under my tongue, which bubbled, fizzed and tickled, then switched off the bright lights over my bed. My body sank deeper into the bed, and a warm, enveloping wave of blood raced toward my head and rocked me back to sleep.

When I awoke again, it was dark and the room was empty. My temples throbbed against my skin and my left arm still felt numb, but my strength seemed to be returning. I was wearing just a green, open-backed hospital gown. My clothes sat in a neat black pile on the floor and on the bedside table slouched a tall, lemon-yellow kitchen garbage bag. I tried to remember what had brought me here.