Two Dreams I Had in a Moonless Night in the Woods, the Night after the Aurora

We were in the woods.  I had two dreams.  The dream where I had magic powers was a nightmare.  The dream with creepy, horrible things was funny. This is how the dreams went.

In the first dream, I and a companion who wobbled between being my friend and being my wife.  We were on some kind of wilderness trip and had stumbled into a sort of remodeled home-decorated cave with a witch.
We were not in great danger. The Witch was mostly apathetic to our presence, but we were being careful to be polite and respectful, just in case.

Among other things, we had with us a device that you could use to grant wishes in a small way.  What the device did was it materialized a desire you had, but it used some other desire of yours as the fuel. We mainly used the device ourselves, in a low level way, as a utility tool.  That was why we had it with us on our trek into the wilderness where we had ended up in this cave. We were having trouble getting the water boiling, we would boil it with the device using my desire for cleaner socks.

At some point, the Witch realized that the device had other uses. She became vividly, furiously engaged in the conversation. She shrieked. And demanded that we use the device to make her more beautiful. We were reluctant. We tried to talk her out of it, but she became angry and disheveled and wild.
So we did.  Then she demanded we do it again. It was a minor device. The improvement was only slight, granted, she was homely in a bovine sort of way. So at her insistence, we kept using the device. We burned her desires. It was not a big one, but she had a small desire to dominate us and hurt us.  We burned that as fuel. We burned her other desires one by one. Finally, she was quite attractive in a pale, Gothic, black haired way, and the only desire she had left was to be beautiful.  Only  that one. I and my wife started packing our device to leave. We felt that this point, courtesy or no, we were best gone. But the witch who was reclining on a sort of couch and turning her head to look at herself in the mirrors she had around the walls of the cave suddenly started shrieking again, “make me even more beautiful!”
Partly from a bit of fear, and partly, perhaps from a bit of malice, my first instinct was to do it, but my wife bravely rebuked the witch a little.
“The only desire you have left is the desire to be beautiful. You will have to burn that and then you will not enjoy being beautiful.”

“I don’t care!” she shrieked, “make me even more beautiful.” She was enraged again, shrieking, out of the couch, making claws with her hands, her hair swinging wildly, and we did not dare defy her.
I unpacked the device again. We turned it on.

It took her last desire and made her even more beautiful, but it was an inhuman beauty without desire. She was in the uncanny valley, and was horrible to look upon.

Then the mirrors around the room, one by one, cracked and shattered and the light went out of her eyes. It was horrifying. It was a nightmare. G. K. Chesterton once said that the doctrine of the fall is the only doctrine of Christianity for which we have obvious empirical proof.  In fact, I believe he was wrong. I believe we have obvious empirical proof experience in our own lives and that of others, of the doctrines of heaven and hell.

We ourselves are… we see ourselves doing things that destroy the only desire we could be trying to achieve by doing them.

In my second dream, I was in a house that was like a ChatGPT-generated home if it had been trained on every home of mine and my relatives.  I was in a small bathroom off a narrow hall very much like the one my Grandma has in her trailer home.  And a detached hand came crawling out onto the counter.  It was gesturing like it was still attached, then it started feeling around the way someone would in the dark and–me being frozen with surprise–it found my arm and grabbed it.  Gross.  So I grabbed the thing and ripped it off, and there I was holding a wriggling hand.

So I went out into the hall holding the thing.  The bedroom next to me at the end of the hall had the door cracked open and I had a sort of an idea that there might be a corpse in there to which the hand belonged, but this was already gross enough, so instead I went the opposite way.  The hand was probably a woman’s hand by the look of it, probably in her 30s to 40s.  The hand resisted going down the hall but I pulled it along.

So at the end of the hall was a kitchen exactly like my mother’s kitchen and my wife and my youngest older daughter and a third person were in there washing up.  So I told them I had the hand and held it up.  At this point its wriggling around in an exaggerated way, almost performatively.  My daughter looked up and said, “wow, that’s very interesting, a decapitated hand, where did you find it?”  My wife didn’t look up at all.  Which is frustrating–I mean, rarely have I had such a tremendous announcement to make, and I can’t even get a glance–so I shake the hand  and say, “Wife, look, a decapitated hand”  [yes, irl I know decapitated doesn’t mean that].  She glances up and says, “hmm.  What are you going to do with it?”  Which throws me for a loop, I have no idea.  I say, dubiously, “I guess I can’t just put it in the trash,” and she says “why don’t you call the police, they do body parts.”  This strikes me as a great suggestions so I do.  The police dutifully arrive on the scene, I show them the hand, and they are, like, well, what do you want us to do with it?

The end.