Behemoth of the Deep

I nearly drowned as a child. Followed my father into a river, walked in a little too deep, and the current swept me away. Luckily, my dad got me out of there, but the damage was done. That day I felt like I was hit by a truck, my head pounded ceaselessly and I vaguely remember the whole thing. The memories of me being pulled out of the water and taken back home are nonexistent. I fell asleep, woke up, and fell back to sleep all because of the awful headache I endured.

There wasn’t any physical damage, but there was something that stuck with me to this day. A dream, a nightmare really. It used to reoccur all the time. Now it rarely happens. I remember it clearly, as if I had seen it just last night. I fell asleep that day, with everything slowly turning darker and quieter, the pain going away and my body not feeling heavy anymore.

It was dark for a few moments. I guess, completely dark, and then everything was gone.

Peace.

Quiet.

Nirvana.

Sometime later, I regain consciousness, and I’m in the water, and it’s the ocean. The ocean is violent. The icy waves bashed against my body. It feels all too real, and I try to stay afloat, but I can’t. I couldn’t swim at the time, thus realizing I must be dreaming somewhat made the whole situation less tense until I saw a massive wave coming towards me. Suddenly, I felt tense again, as if the whole thing was real. My entire body tensed up, the cold sensation of the seawater sliding away from my body and towards the ever-growing tidal wave. I could feel something pulsating throughout my body as the fear slowly crept up on my psyche.

Without a warning the massive wave came crashing on top of me, throwing me around like a rag doll. I felt as if an entire building fell on top of me. I couldn’t do anything as everything around me twisted and twirled in a watery tornado. My entire body ached, I tried screaming but instead, I got a mouthful of saltwater. The taste was way too real for a dream. I felt the oceanic current filling up my nostrils. Everything from my nose to my lungs caught on fire.

I felt myself sinking lower and lower, but the nightmare didn’t seem to end. I kept going deeper and deeper into the depths of the ocean. The water kept filling up my body, making me squirm and wiggle around in pain. That didn’t help much, I felt as if I was being crushed by the ocean. I couldn’t even move my body. The whole thing felt like an out-of-body experience. My breathing never ceased, however, because I kept feeling like I was getting heavier every few moments. A burning sensation crawled down my throat every now and again. As I descended lower into the depths, everything started turning darker and darker.

At some point, everything became virtually black, and eventually, I stopped sinking. I was suspended in what seemed to be a vast expanse of pure nothingness. Cold, dark, uncaring, empty space. Something crawled all over my skin, like ants, little pricks from pins and needles assaulted my body. Adding a unique sensation of soft pressure on top of the oceanic weight. I couldn’t breathe anymore. A knot formed in my throat and another one formed in my stomach. I wanted to scream, I wanted to do something… I was… I needed to wake up.

I was stuck.

Then the light came. A red, bright, burning, all-consuming light. It started small and pleasant but as time passed on it became bigger, closer, hotter. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t look away, I couldn’t close my eyes, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything. I can’t.

It just grew and grew and grew and grew and grew and grew.

Everything was red.

Red, unbearably bright.

Burning.

A sun in the depths of the ocean, a red giant swirling mercilessly across the vast cosmic darkness, devouring the endless void. It was flying towards me. I knew it was the end.

It wasn’t, the thing moved painfully close to me. My body was shoved aside violently by the force of something moving dangerously close to me. The light was burning my eyes, I was screaming internally. Then the light moved beside me and I saw the source; a massive head, I didn’t know there were heads this big. The head’s skin seemed leathery and wrinkled, I could make out the upper jawline. The size of that jaw made my stomach twist and turn, then I saw the thing’s eyes – Gigantic spheres the size of black holes with the color to match. Bulbous and bulging spheres of pure darkness. They didn’t even seem alive. Just gigantic obsidian spheres reflecting the red light.

The deep-sea behemoth kept moving past me, I think I caught a glimpse of claws on its front. That thing kept on stretching forever. The size of this thing boggled my mind to no end, as the creature’s light seemed to glow dimmer and dimmer by the moment, but the body wouldn’t end. I kept feeling its serpentine body moving near me. It kept going on and on and on, causing my body to dance on the waves it created nauseating me. I felt the contents of my stomach rise to my mouth, I could feel the stinging sensation of gastric acids scorching my tongue but nothing came out.

I was in the dark again, but only for a moment. The light returned from behind me, my back was on fire. I feel myself being sucked by the gravitational pull of a supermassive cosmic body. The last thing I saw before everything turned black again was the shape of teeth above me.

I screamed as hard as I could but no sound came, I felt myself falling at a steep angle and then I landed inside something liquid. A light came on, and everything around me seemed reddish and pulsated disgustingly. My body caught on fire, all of it burned. I was screaming and crying and begging and moaning and everything all together inside but no noise, no movement, nothing – nothing came.

I was being crushed by a sensation of swimming inside the fires of the sun as if they were a sickly shade of green. I could see the flesh of my torso slowly falling off.

If I had to describe the feeling of absolute despair, I’d say it’s comparable to seeing the wart-riddled head of a whale swimming in your direction with you having no ability to move away while your body is being boiled inside some acidic liquid.

That’s what I saw at that moment, and I felt as if my skin was being peeled off, my muscles were being torn out chunk by chunk and every inch of my bones was being broken and ground into dust while my internal organs were being stabbed and electrocuted simultaneously. The whale's head came to the distance of a fingertip away from me, and then I woke up.

My head pounding and my body shaking and wiggling beyond my control. The room spun, and I felt myself getting nauseated. I couldn’t even lift my head off the pillow. My eyes collapsed shut, and the cycle repeated itself. This nightmare plagued my entire childhood, over and over again. Saw a therapist about it who just assumed I was just traumatized by nearly drowning. I took up competitive swimming for a while until an injury killed my desire to pursue a career in the sport. The nightmare is far less frequent right now, but it still occurs every now and again. I have no idea what to do about it.

I am sharing this now because something strange just happened here this morning. The carcass of a Humpback whale washed up ashore. It was in a very strange condition. Everything was seemingly fresh, but it was missing a head… Seems like something tore off the head.

Surely, there’s nothing in nature that could’ve done that to a Humpback whale. They’re just too big, aren’t they? Unless there is some Leviathan in the depths, one so monstrous it could serve as nightmare fuel.