Haken – Visions

I’d recommend reading this along with listening to the album, following it song by song. Bear in mind this is simply my interpretation.

We carry on Haken month with their second album, Visions. I’d like to begin by saying that I love this album. The perfect word to describe it, in my opinion, is beautiful. To go with it is a wild sci-fi story that bends time itself. Let’s get started!

Premonition

An overture to the story, running through themes heard in the following tracks. This serves as a taste of the journey to come…

Nocturnal Conspiracy

Our protagonist, a young boy around age 10, lays in bed. He falls asleep, and starts dreaming. It soon becomes apparent that this dream is a nightmare, and becomes darker and darker. In this nightmare, the boy sees himself being murdered. He sees this from the perspective of an onlooker, but feels as though he can recall the entire life of the murderer.

The boy wakes up in a cold sweat, terrified. He stares into a mirror, and can’t shake the feeling that he has been sentenced to die by a higher power. He’s paranoid and scared. Is he not as innocent as he believed? Why does he recognise the killer from his dream?

The boy feels as though there is a conspiracy against him, and sets out to find the man who will kill him in the future. He dedicates himself to this.

Insomnia

The obsession with his death has consumed him. He can’t sleep, and all he can think about it the night he will be murdered. He runs through the vision in his head and tries to think of ways he could escape, but none of them seem to work. He grows more and more paranoid and delusional day by day. All he wants is to sleep again but he can’t, not after he’s seen the end.

The Mind’s Eye/Portals/Shapeshifter

Years have passed, and the young boy is now a man. He’s been driven insane by his premonition, and still searches for ways to save himself. One such idea is to search other people’s dreams in order to know what they think of him, and therefore find who the murderer might be. He knows this could be dangerous, drifting through minds, but it’s the only thing he can think of that might work.

Our protagonist puts his delusional plan into action. He searches the minds of his friends and family, and doesn’t know what he will find. It feels never-ending, and the protagonist’s mind drifts further and further away from sanity.

Inside these dreams people’s faces are blurred and distorted, and the emotions he feels are vague and hard to understand. He begins to learn secrets about his family. His sister has abilities similar to his own, able to search people’s mind during their sleep.

He sees vampires, demons, angels and other creatures circling and fading in and out of his vision. Throughout this experience he feels blood-lust and a want for revenge surrounding him – not his own emotion, but that of the people he is searching. Ultimately, although he found secrets and emotions he never knew these people felt, he failed to find his killer.

Deathless

The man escapes the portals he was searching and collapses in exhaustion. He realises he’s spent his entire life searching for his killer, and has wasted it. What’s the point in living now? Our protagonist is suicidal, and so tries to kill himself. This, however, doesn’t work because his end has already been predetermined. He will be killed. He falls into an even deeper suicidal depression.

Visions

Our protagonist is just waiting for the time his murderer will hunt him down. He takes a gun and stalks the streets, searching for the image he recognises from his premonition. He’s out for blood – he wants to murder his killer.

Our protagonist starts to recognise his surroundings, and realises the time is upon him. This is what he saw in his dream all those years ago. All of a sudden he sees a shadowy figure looking at him. This is his killer. The protagonist points his gun at the figure and pulls the trigger. However, upon further inspection, he realises that in his paranoia he’s killed an innocent child. His mind slips away from reality.

The boy that our protagonist has killed isn’t just any boy. It was him as a child, the boy that had the premonition. This is the reason he could never find the man who would murder him – it was himself the whole time.

Our protagonist cries out, but through the tears realises that the boy will wake up in bed as a young boy, and begin this journey all over again. He won’t remember any of this – the lifetime of delusional searching.

All of a sudden he feels himself being killed, and leaving this world.

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Mind-bending sci-fi is fun. I love this album so much, and I hope you enjoy it even more now you’ve read this story. Next week is Haken’s third album The Mountain, so keep an eye out for it!

– Kane