The Five and a Half Minute Hallway

I still get nightmares. In fact I get them so often I should be used to them by now.
I'm not.
No one really get's used to nightmares.

I'm so tired. Sleep's been stalking me for too long to remember, innevitable I suppose.
Sadly, I'm not looking forward to the prospect. I say sadly, though, because there was a time when I actually enjoyed sleeping.
In fact, I slept all the time.
--

With a little luck, you'll believe all you've said, and then you'll put it aside (though even here, just that one word, "aside", makes me shudder, for what is ever really just put aside?) and you'll carry on, eat, drink, be merry and most of all you'll sleep well.
Then again there's a good chance you won't.

This much I'm certain of: it doesn't happen immediatly. You'll finish and that will be that, until a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe in a year, maybe in several years. You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. You'll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place.

Old shelters - televisions, magazines, movies - won't protect you anymore. You might try scribbling it in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of your keyboard. That's when you'll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the hallways you've walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadows at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much, much, deeper.

You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridiscent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trance constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch youself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then, for better or for worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
And then the nightmare will begin.