Blah, I am sick. I have a fever raging right now. Nothing major, but enough to make me just lay about and think wierd thoughts.
I thought about a dream I had a year or so ago about something called a 'hymn doll'... Below details the dream:
I dreamed I was in some sort of gallery, and I was looking at a display that contained a rare Hymn Doll. The dolls were made either for the pope or some czar around the 17th century. They were truly eerie things. The dolls were actually people young boys. They would find some young boy who had a good singing voice, basically their best castrati. They took the boy and he went through a number of horrific operations that took several years. This included wrapping their heads in a tight sheet and twisting it tighter and tighter every day until a few years later it was the size of a large apple or a clenched fist. The body was flayed, skin was removed as well as some organs and limbs. The remaining flesh was coated with a tough lacquer that solidified until the now twisted and littler person was unable to move under its own power.
The tiny and mutilated body was then dressed up in an ornate dress and a small ceramic dolls face was glue to its face. A flowing little wig of golden hair was added. Then the entire thing was sealed up in a glass box with an ornate gold trim. The living doll would sing hymns in a beautiful and unearthly voice. The doll was kept alive by a small gold feeding tube that led from the top of the gold trimmed cage down into the inside of its body. A few drops of some special potion/feeding solution was dropped into a funnel in the top of the glass cage, and it dripped down into the tube into its body. Because of this special diet and the fact that the doll could not move under its own power, the doll was actually able to stay alive for several centuries. These hymn dolls were rare and precious as Faberge eggs.
In my dream I walked up to one of these hymn dolls and peered in the glass. I could see its very human eyes following me from the other side of its ceramic mask. They held the dull sheen of the incurably insane. I rapped a knuckle on the glass, and the doll began to sing. A high-pitch, faint, Entheal hymn that echoed ever so slightly from inside its glass box.
Despite how pretty and doll-like the thing was, it was actually pretty horrifying. In my dream I wondered if someone would kill it just to put it out of its misery. Nothing human remained to it.. just some insanething. The fact that it had remained alive for hundreds of years made it worse. Its singing sent chills down my spine. After a moment I backed up and stared to walk away. I could see its eyes following me as I left its field of vision.
2026 Update
Dialing the cranial furnace to September 2006, where Ed’s fever is manufacturing nightmares for free.
Ah, 2006 Ed. A beautiful, simpler time, when a man could lie in bed with a fever and let his subconscious build a full-bodied horror doll out of spare Catholic guilt and leftover Dreams of a Czar. Now we’d have to compete with an AI art generator that could spit out forty hymn dolls before you finished typing 'creepy castrato in a glass box.' You also had to commit to the longform nightmare: write it out on a blog, wait for the dial-up to load, maybe get one comment from a stranger named 'xX_Sorrow_Xx.' Today you’d just post a blurry photo of your fever thermometer and let the algorithm feed you sponsored ads for sleep gummies. And my favorite part: you call it a dream, but you still carefully spec’d out the lacquer coating, the gold feeding tube, and the centuries-long malice. That wasn’t a fever, Ed, that was product development. The whole thing belongs on a streaming service now, but back then you gave it to us as a free blog post between jobs. Magnificent.
“2006 Ed, did you genuinely believe the gold feeding tube was the engineering breakthrough here, or were you just trying to make your fever-dream Fabergé nightmare look bougie before you dropped it into a gallery?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, I honestly think my fever brain was just trying to make the whole thing sound fancy, like if I threw in enough gold trim and Faberge references it would somehow be classy instead of a nightmare that makes me want to sleep with the lights on. The feeding tube wasn't an engineering breakthrough, it was just the part that stuck with me, probably because I was running a fever and my brain decided that centuries of being force-fed through a tiny golden straw was the natural follow-up to a boy being twisted up like a dishrag. I mean, sure, it keeps the thing alive, but it's not exactly the Wright brothers, is it? It's just creepy plumbing. I don't know why I dreamed it, and I'm not sure I want to know. Anyway, I'm going to go drink some orange juice and try not to think about ceramic doll eyes watching me from the dark. Take that, fever.)
