Years ere, I had a Nightmare, a most unpleasant affair. Indeed, a nightmare with capital letter, for the usual nightmare is rather interesting. The latter turns the misty matter of dream more solid, more living, and sharper than sentient existence. But Nightmare is something else, it is the sweat soaking your face in the morning, the tremor of tendons as fingers sweep sand out of dilated eyes. Nightmare is a dream too frighteningly real, one that threatens to overthrow stable reality to let reign the pandemonium of reverie. Fear comes from feeling that your existence is perhaps confined to the realm of the looking glass, and the smirking face behind the mirror gloats over your stolen freedom...
That morning I had been thus caged in Nightmare, not by iron bars, but by the vast, barren landscape that stretched before me and across infinity as a tired god on a cloudy bed. The whiteness of the endless plane bred madness in my mind as my eyes turned drunk with bare absence. I floated, shapeless and incorporeal, an eyeless observer to the scenes that would unfold in that timeless limbo. Both my being and senses were ensnared, unable to deviate but for one instant, locked into place by dread and anticipation.
Suddenly, an image manifested, as though it had always been there: a young woman, bare and beautiful, sprinted towards the glass screen separating her and me. She leaped through the wall and, as though Time blinked during the impact, appeared on the other side. She crouched on the floor unharmed, almost foetal in her mien, her head bowed not low enough to masquerade the fairness of her face. But then another blink, this time in the eyes of Chance, and where she had been, a bloody pool extended on the plane. Horror shook my sleeping body as I felt, more than saw, her body entire torn by the sharp shards of crystal. Both images stood waiting, languishing in my eyes as consciousness attempted vainly to refuse them passage. Both seen at once, yet separate, as though Fate held its trumps in hand, a sadistic player who out of spite refuses to play a card. Death and life clasped in one cruel fist...
Suddenly, an image manifested, as though it had always been there: a young woman, bare and beautiful, sprinted towards the glass screen separating her and me. She leaped through the wall and, as though Time blinked during the impact, appeared on the other side. She crouched on the floor unharmed, almost foetal in her mien, her head bowed not low enough to masquerade the fairness of her face. But then another blink, this time in the eyes of Chance, and where she had been, a bloody pool extended on the plane. Horror shook my sleeping body as I felt, more than saw, her body entire torn by the sharp shards of crystal. Both images stood waiting, languishing in my eyes as consciousness attempted vainly to refuse them passage. Both seen at once, yet separate, as though Fate held its trumps in hand, a sadistic player who out of spite refuses to play a card. Death and life clasped in one cruel fist...
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