I find myself a character in the nightmarish landscapes I pen. In the place which my illness and of the faith I was taught to believe. The struggle coming to terms with my sickness doesn’t have a cure, and the nightmares force me to look into the shadow of the unknown. In this, I find the words I’ve written in the back of my mind. From the place I describe as the inferno of eternal darkness, and in a journal kept in a period of years. Among the place within the dream I find myself in a hallway of a hospital – one similar to the wing known as Five East. The dream that I proceed to write plays out from a duration of years. Where I find myself in times describing how my nightmares could pass for something that Rod Serling had written. Yet what I write from here had dwelled in the mind in the duration of the time when I was released from Five East to the day that I took off to go down to New Orleans.

Places of one’s words as they become a written passage that cannot be described – as seconds tick like a clock of an eternity of infinite nightmares. Telling of them drawn in a sober shadow, in places becoming from the memories of dust. A dream written in a passage of a solitude when darkness holds the strongest dominion – as it becomes within an illness that isn’t seen. The question of the mind becoming from the echo of a faith in God, leading into the depths of a mental illness. Writing from sleep as the pages paint themselves into existence; as I drift from one phase of sleep into the next. I felt the nurse in the room as she was watching the glow of the television. In a hospital setting – the glow of the television had an eerie feel. They kept the wing colder than a morgue, and how my mind worked, made it seem as it was not of the living. The waking becomes the echo of unreality that revolves around the cool air. It’d was from this I find myself a character of a written world–as a illustration or painting of sorts. The dream in itself would create this bizarre landscape that resembles something that would be either written by Dante or Milton – that everything around me would be a glowing eerie shade of green.

Time ticked slowly within the walls of Five East, but it would follow into the surface. A surface when the body would go under; as it plays out in the mind years later within a sleeping car lounge where I dosed off from the cold medicine in my system. The dream played itself out in a duration of years, from the day when I signed myself into the hospital to the day that I took the Amtrak down to New Orleans, from Chicago. It would be from the observation of these dreams – one of them had elements of the one I had when I was under a doctor’s care in Iowa. The dream –– wrote itself into the pages, that it would become from a darkness that holds the strongest of dominions.

As from the mind which becomes the personal Twilight Zone, yet resembles the characters that are penned. I wasn’t quite sure of how long the dream lasted – one as I describe foreshadows the other nightmares to come. One of them –– was the one set in the Metropolitan Lounge, while the others was in the mental health unit. And from those, become the shadows which echo the dreams from the years past – and in them stir within pages as they are kept in the present time, within the years as they were penned and the dreams become of them are written from the fragments as they are within the mind. In the mentioning where I felt as I became a character of my own nightmares, as they were written in the back of the mind.

Factors I will expand on the hospital dream as the details would remain of a graphic nature. The hospital wing in the dream resembled that of an old torture chamber. An iron maiden was in two of the rooms, and another item resembles a cage (similar in size to a coffin.) A place of crying, screaming and the gnashing of one’s teeth – close description to the place of Hades. Gathered within them among a set of pages, I write from a dream that was there back in May of 1999. The it becomes from the sketchy details that sat in the mind – as I waited for the train in March of 2002, where the dream came about once again. Though it would be among the rooms that blood would remain on the floors – to if they drained the blood from someone while they were still alive.

Of where I saw myself asleep on one of the couches in the Metropolitan Lounge, and place that stir in the varied cycles. It drawn from them as I record them on these pages; so many years later. While my body slept, I found myself wandering around in the old Gothic structures similar to those of Ancient Italy –- as it would be before the ancient city of Pompeii was destroyed by the volcano. The structures of the present as they’re similar to the times long died, it would follow into a shadow that resembles the Shades of into a dream that described as a passage in the Twilight Zone, and a darkness written from a cycle of years.

“Who are you walking around?” I asked them.

They were clothed in gray robes, beings similar to the ones greeting the philosopher, Socrates – as the people made him drink the poison that made him take his life. It was in the detail as the dream I had while I was up in Five East. Either of the places – Five East or the Metropolitan Lounge became a setting where the dream had a shadow of the obscure as they’re recorded into a written journal while a darkness held its strongest dominion. In silence it stared back, not a single whisper was uttered. While I was asleep, the dream had continued to play itself out. As it proceeded to play out, I describe how the Shades of Hades would look back at me. Perhaps it would be the cold medicine induced sleep, but I felt them looking back at my sleeping body. Where they’ve lived during the times of Socrates–after he was executed with a cup of poison.

As I slept within the mental health unit in the May of 1999, then again the cold Spring morning on March 2002 – it would be where I felt the echo of that dream within the hospital walls. In the pages where the dream is recorded, it would be the dream I find myself staring at the Shades of Hades. As a character in some of my horror fiction, that it would be the words to describe this. In the pages, where the dark holds its strongest dominion – within the factors of the human imagination. Of the questions that haunt me as I try to find the explanation of my unseen illness, when the answer would draw from none. In the years which were spent in hospital beds, the sleep that would follow me from them would follow to the day when I fell sick in the Metropolitan Lounge within Union Station. Where they were looking back – looking back as I laid there, dreaming, where I felt myself falling hard into my body.

A faith that was taught would try explaining away all the reasons, yet the shadow of them would leave an echo of foreboding silence. Five years of a faith in God would never come to terms with a nightmare as I place the details into a narrative. It’d descend into the echoes of death and hell, and the dream plays out as a sermon. Where the pages as they’re written while the physical body remains numb to the touch, dead to the world. Gathers in the places as I bare the witness to the horror in the clay, and from them the dream was the echo of the details festering from past years. Where it draws from the etchings in the clay – the places I find myself, an echo where the nightmares are drawn to a page.

“What we are, the shadow of what you see when you fall asleep. The dreams of what stirs while one who is sick, and while the sick are asleep–we walk among them. We were there when Socrates was put to death, and while Christ was buried. We carry the keys to death and hell,” answered the Shades of Hades, “we were the ones who see you, torments as a shadow remained – watching you descend from the from the abyss of nightmares while you sleep within the Metropolitan Lounge. A shadow of what still remains – we were there as Socrates dies and the darkness becomes the echo of your sleep. We were there when they crucified Christ.”

In the awakening, the sheer nervousness I pen of the testimony – a shadow after the dream played itself out within the early morning. It begins in places as they appear in fragments, from fragments they are drawn – among pages where I record into the stages of my sleep cycles. In places that follow from the stages of the unknown, in places I find myself in the dream described as a life on display. Of where I find myself wandering around in an infinite darkness – this while the body sleeps. In the darkness which crawls on its stomach, from shadows looking on. In the pages staring back like they have eyes of their own, the dream in parts are written upon their pages – of the silence which becomes written in the light of the waxing moon. Either in the walls of the mental health unit or the open space of the Metropolitan Lounge, rest in places my body fell numb to the living world. That it would be of the places I see myself asleep – among the ones who could not see or hear the Shades of Hades walking on. The place where I was staring at myself, with the cold medicine in one of those small coffee cups and various horror books in an arm’s reach.

In them, congregated among shadows, It would follow from the clocks as they tick. I find myself standing in the place known as Stygian. Within the sight of the Shades of Hades as one hears the screaming in the walls. It would stand as I see myself dreaming, looking on in the places as one observes the shadow out of time. Within the screaming walls one as myself describes from a rational sense, but a dark echo – it’d become from the echoing whispers forming to the horror etched out from the clay. From a sickness and medicine induced sleep, the dream becomes in a stirring cycle as one sees the personal Twilight Zone play itself out. In the early morning darkness, the dreams become the silence of winter. Years later, before a glow of the word processor the dream is burned into the mind. That dream sat in my mind for those many years, and they are what become the etchings on the glow of a computer screen.

That it would have been two years to the day that I took the Amtrak to New Orleans, and five years since I was in Five East –– the factor where I learned of my illness as it was of the unseen, while the nightmares were written before me. In them which it remained, the years when they were kept in silence – the silence that is seen among shadows, yet in the darkness roaming free. While in the sleep I heard a loud toll of the bell, and that bell tolled for thee. In the sound of the bell tolls, the sleeping patterns slipped within the nightmares as they would remain – as the howl of the wind strikes the bells. In the toll of the bell, one would see the Stygian shadows. In the places where they follow, they become the guests in the fog. Yet they stir within a passage of sleep cycles.