The Waking Nightmare

Elysium

My days of youth were not as my peers, who passed the time with sleepless nights of wild debauchery and rested days in the harsh comedown of the high as their senses numbed to the mundanity of reality, recuperating as they slept for the night to return so they may escape normalcy in the wild frivolities and warped reality which drugs offered them. I was not of the same character, frail and weak, my days were spent bedridden with disease that tore at my body as it coursed through my protruding veins. When not wrought with the iron grip of illness, my days were spent prowling through the dusky depths of the ancient library of my family that lay in constant disarray and disuse by the rest of my kin. The books and tomes where I spent my days provided much escape from the troubles that plagued me, stories and tales of old replacing the depravities of which my fellow peers indulged heavily in, for only these could afford me with but a faint glimmer of the true escape that I sought so deeply; that which the light of day and the piercing beams of the sun could naught but shed foul light upon the darkness that grasped my mind with the icy grip of sorrow.

But for the night I always yearned, for the gentle embrace of slumber and the release of my being from mortal tethers to the world unseen. For in this dreamscape that I trod when night did at last rollback the sun, I found the true nepenthe I so dearly yearned. The dreams that I was so blessed with were not those of my peers who danced around in gay abandon, with no thought or control as they flitted meaninglessly through oneiric scenarios of surreal confusion, nor were they those of the 'gifted' few whom recognised the state they were in and molded that small realm in which they thought was the extent of the ethereal plane that was their dreams. For my desire to escape from this world we are shackled to, I learned to escape from even the phantasmagoric mimesis that was my subconcious fantasy to ascend to a place no man or woman or creature has ever set foot before. For the dreams that we hold so in ambiguity and mystery are nothing if not the mere secretions through deep sinkholes in the true land of wonder and awe- the secret well from which all dreams are born.

Words pale in comparison to the true beauty and bewildering complexities of this dreamscape. The radiant lakes and rivers flowed unbound by the constraints of grooves of the land, skirting up into the heavens above in dazzling magenta and saffron lustre, the skies into which they entered rippled gently to dislodge luminous galaxies which cascaded down with chromatic aberration to the ever shifting land below. The ground on which I trod so delicately did pulsate with every step, forming great structures of pure unimaginable size and structure, twisting and spiraling in non-euclidean creations that the mind cannot truly fathom.

It was here, in this Shangri-La I was ever truly happy.

Night after night I returned to this secret Elysium, losing myself in the depths of its iridescent transcendence. Until the night I learned the truth of my hidden heaven. As I wandered those celestial plains, a feeling I had never felt stirred in the depths of my body. A primordial vestige left behind from aeons unknown filling my thoughts entirely with the vice-grip of complete fear. A fear from the earliest of times, the fear that sparked us to light the darkness to escape the shadows, the fear that drove us from caves to the open where we might see our foes and to each other for the mutual protection from that which lurks in the night. A fear that now gripped me in my very own sanctuary. I was paralysed with this ferocious terror, unable to eschew the powerful horror that shrieked into through my skull. And as I stood there, a marble statue alone in my ornate temple, the dreamscape began to stir. The great rivers quivered in the growing unease that filled the very air like a fluid of its own as the ground began to tremble. The great structures that surrounded me crumbled away into the bewildering wind that coursed through the skies, tearing the great void apart as a dark tempest formed. And in this tempest...I saw it.

I remember it not, nor do I ever care to, my hands only just able to tremulously write as the thought of it sears across my mind. This paradise which I called my own was but a lie, my escape but a falsehood for that accursed dreamscape was not my own, nor was it the heavens I believed, but the dream itself of a forbidden horror, sleeping eternal in the darkest recesses of our minds.

But as I saw in the great maelstrom of that foul land, the dream was breaking, the sub-conscious falling behind to whatever dark mind lay before it.

It was stirring.

It was waking.

With this last act I have in this wretched world I warn all whom this may concern of the oncoming horror for which I know there is no escape. There was never any escape for any of us. And as I gaze from the pinnacle of my home towards the window I have cast open so that I may leave this world at last forever, I fear that even death may not be an escape at all.