Here Be Mecha-Dragons
When I was ten years old, I saw a dragon. No, seriously: a dragon. It was such an intensely terrifying and baffling experience that the memory remains crystal clear to this day. Answers about the nature of this encounter eluded me for the majority of my life, but I have come to appreciate the indispensable value of my many years of wondering, searching, and imagining.
So there I was, ten years old, in bed, having just awakened at some dreadful wee hour of the morning. I wasn’t alone. There, on the railing to keep kids like me from tumbling out of the top bunk, sat a small creature. It was pink (hot pink, actually) and slightly luminous. Nose to tail, it was maybe two feet long. It’s eyes were human-like and intelligent, almost disturbingly so. Even more strangely, the creature seemed a mechanical construction. Gears, motors, and less-identifiable pieces were visible here and there under overlapping plates that comprised the creature’s “skin” or “scales”.
It was a freaking clockwork dragon. Sitting next to me on my bunk’s guard rail. I was frozen in awe and terror. Yes, I loved dragons, magic, and all manner of fantasy… but I couldn’t bring myself to be excited. There was something creepy — no, nightmarish — about this thing. Stuff like this wasn’t actually supposed to be real. It watched me, hungrily, opened its mouth… and breathed out a little gout of flame in my general direction.
I screamed. Or rather, I tried to scream. I was paralyzed. Literally. Not too scared to move; I was trying like hell to throw off the covers, jump off the bunk, and flee the room. My body was simply not responding to my brain. All I could move were my eyes, and I dared not avert my gaze from this amazing, frightening dragon at my bedside.
The paralysis, of course, brought my terror to a whole new level. What had this dragon thing done to me? What was it planning to do? It continued regarding me curiously, readjusting its perch. Through a Herculean effort, I managed to purse my lips (sort of) and emit a sound that even a mouse would have difficulty hearing. It seemed that this went on for eons, me struggling unsuccessfully to scream or move, and the dragon inspecting me, gears whirring, as if waiting for something. Yet my terror only grew. I expected it to pounce on me — or for more of them to appear — at any moment.
Finally, I realized I could control my breathing. I made myself breathe deeper and faster than I already had been, until I was practically hyperventilating. I don’t know why that’s what I did, it just seemed like the right thing to do. Suddenly I broke through some mental or neurological barrier and I could move again. I cried out, threw off the covers, leapt out of my bed and fled the room.
For a long time afterward I wondered what the whole experience had been. Was I going crazy? Did I accidentally ingest something that made me hallucinate? (Remember, I was ten; long before drug experimentation in college.) Were things like dragons actually, really, you know… real? My parents said I must have been dreaming, but I had been wide, WIDE awake. Of that I was absolutely sure. I was somewhat traumatized, but I had gotten out of the ordeal okay and my imagination was electrified. I had always been a creative child, but this redoubled my curiosity and enthusiasm for all things fantastic and supernatural.
Many years later, I learned of a phenomenon called sleep paralysis and realized this is what must have happened to me. Essentially, it’s a kind of waking dream state in which one becomes conscious but cannot move, and it is often accompanied by terrifying hallucinations.
Not a walk in the park, let me tell you.
This experience, however, and the pondering it stimulated, helped me grow as a creative person. My encounter with a small, hot-pink clockwork dragon was a truly profound childhood experience that opened my mind to new possibilities and set me on a decades-long search for the truth of what had happened. In the process, I discovered books, friends, communities, movies, comics, music, games, and other geekery that nourished my imagination and encouraged my creative spirit.
Others have used their experiences with sleep paralysis to fuel their work. Nicolas Bruno, for example. Check out his surreal, dread-inducing photography.
I had the map at the top of this post drawn — epic fantasy novel style — to describe the abstract geography of my interests. I am a writer (more on that in future posts), but in addition to my own original work I will periodically write here about other things. See the map for reference.
In the meantime, find your own inspiration; your own clockwork dragon.
