I was researching sleep disorders for some project or another. My research had led me to an abandoned mental hospital that, a hundred years ago, had been the treatment center for a massive epidemic of nightmares in the surrounding region-- nightmares so bad that the sufferers had all gone insane eventually. They had apparently been treating it as some sort of disease, uncertain what else could break out and spread the way this madness had.
In the hospital, there was a large sort of typewriter/type-setting machine that had been used to write down the interviewed statements of the various people as they described what they were going through each night. It had a sort of manual typewriter keyboard, except that they keys were laid out in two very long horizontal rows that were sort of up, you had to push them into the wall instead of press down on them. And then there were hundreds and hundreds of these, like, pull tabs, little labels on hanging strings, each with a character on it, and you pulled those down to set type. It looked like a slow, laborious machine to use
Next to the machine were many, many shallow drawers, each with hundreds of white 6"x8" envelopes. Each envelope contained one former patient's recorded nightmares, typically one half-page for each night's dreams, in sequential order from the time the patient was checked in with symptoms until they eventually went completely insane and became incapable of coherent speech. I started plling out the drawers, picking faded envelopes at random, lifting out the stained pages within, and reading these logs of encroaching madness. Most of them started out sounding like my lariam nightmare-- waking in a state of paralysis, aware of someone or something in the room with them, an alien-ness about the whole thing, etc. But then, over time, they'd progress-- the paralysis became remote-control, instead of being frozen in their bed they were compelled, their limbs under someone else's authority, to go places and do things. They were made to walk down into the basement and witness strange and horrible rites, they walked with the dead who had somehow risen again, they were made to participate in cannibalistic activities, etc. Each victim seemed to have gone through this process, being made to go further and further each time until... well, nobody seemed to have ever managed to describe what it was that they finally were compelled to do, the thing that drove them over the brink.
I sat down for a while to try out the type-setting machine. It was like playing a very sedate organ, except that I found that I couldn't type anything but horrific descriptions of nightmares, of night terrors, of awful scenes experienced while sleepwalking, and the like. While using this machine, I couldn't really come up with anything else to type about. I began to suspect that this machine was actually part of the problem...