Sorrow, borne of regret and sundry emotional pains I shall not specify, infects my soul like the cruelest poison that slowly seeps into the marrow and core of my body, destabilizing me to such an extent that walking, talking, and engaging in the other basic activities that social animals perform on a daily basis are monumental achievements for me. Would that I could function like most people seem to do. I find the Self, weighted with the blackest of bile and nowhere to turn for solace, a veritable prison cell. Dark secrets are locked inside and I must carry them in my heart every single day.
I had a dream that I was walking through a pond in the wee hours of the night. The water was murky, the air crisp, the surrounding trees menacing. The sludge underneath made it increasingly difficult to cross to the sidewalk on the other side. Initially, I sloshed through the slimy, viscous water with little effort, but soon thereafter, I was in the thick of it. I thought I'd get stuck there in the middle of wet darkness. It painfully occurred to me that wherever I was going, I was going alone. Wherever I'd end up, I'd end up there alone. I suppose this is not a new revelation to me, not even in waking hours, but for some reason this dark epiphany frightened me so.
This dream was one of those rare instances when I became aware in the course of the dream that it was in fact a dream. You'd think this mental awareness would have helped the situation, no? I mean, why did I continue to feel such fear and isolation if I knew it was merely a dream? When I was kid and had one of these self-cognizant dreams, I'd just close my eyes and wake up. It usually happened during a nightmare, and I had plenty of those as a kid. For instance, I'd be walking down a dark hallway expecting something to leap out at me at any second, and just as it did so I’d close my eyes and wake up in my bed. I didn't avail myself of this escape route, however. I just stood there in the water. The eerie mise-en-scène, like something from a Poe story or a Tim Burton movie, was surrounding me, closing in on me. Before I eventually awoke, I felt alone and afraid in an unbearable sea of black.
