Submitted by Ray Stone on Wednesday 13 February 2013
©Nightmares are dark scary visions of unbelievable torment that invade the comfort of our minds, stirring up collections of best forgotten guilty secrets and embarrassing incidents; all moulded into a terrifying montage of threatening distorted figures pushing us further and further into a black void and the inevitable free-fall into a deep chasm.
My bad dreams are unusual. The rest of humanity normally has nightmares during sleep. Mine are daymares and haunt me while I am awake; a kaleidoscope of past and present snapshots from every dark corner of my life that on bad days cause moments of blind panic. I first experienced this unusual condition as a teenager and have since learned to work through the movie in my mind that seems real and three dimensional around me, fading it enough to concentrate on what is happening in the actual world around me; two combined experiences – one physical and the other psychic.
At the age of forty I have become accustomed to dealing with this phenomenon by accepting it for what it is when it appears; a bad dream, and am no longer frightened. As a young man I hid from those around me, often shaking with fright, unable to talk or perform my everyday duties at work or at home until the voices and apparitions that overlapped my everyday surroundings faded away. In fact, I have become so blasé to this way of life that I sometimes talk to the figures that invade my mind – in private of course. That was until a few weeks before my forty-first birthday.
Imagine my horror when I experienced something so terrifying; a new daymare experience that shocked me into shutting myself in my room for almost a week. It had such an effect on me that I became too weak to move no further than from bed to bathroom. Sleep evaded me and a fever took hold of my body so badly I thought I was going to die. In fact, if it had not been for my good friend, Roger Bagley, I probably would have.
On the day he called on me, I was standing by my bed, shivering, as a dark mist enveloped the room for the thousandth time. I screwed my eyes shut and opened my mouth wide in a breathless silent scream, longing for this terrible ordeal that had continually plagued me for days to stop.
As the mist cleared an entourage of black cloaked demonic figures manifested themselves, slowly drifting toward me until they surrounded me. With deliberate slow movement, the tallest figure came closer and closer until its eyes shone with menace from within the shroud that covered it. So frightening was it that the hairs raised up on the back of my neck. A hand appeared above me and moved until long bony fingers rested on top of my head.
Although I felt nothing, I could not move. The figures began moving around me, gathering speed until they were a blur. Then the pain hit me; a terrible pain that racked every part of me until the blur faded. I lay exhausted on the bed knowing the awful dream would return in minutes. No matter how many times this evil scene played out, I felt the same dread and pain each time.
Fortunately, it was during this lull of my torture that Bagley chose to knock on my door and shout through the letter box to enquire after my health.©