I awake, in the frozen dead night air, in a state of bliss-less paralysis. A stone temple pilot of my deepest nightmare. I am locked in the shape of a human Nazi swastika, and the stalking Night Terror has been and gone, and ransacked the sleeping garden of my mind.
He came…
He planted deadly Killer weeds in the fertile soils.
He dead headed the Ukrainian sunflowers.
He ceremonially dumped in the Spirit of Eden red and white rose bushes.
And he leaves me with a thousand-yard stare through the towering coal black shadows on the bedroom wall.
The Night Terror came in uninvited…
Picked the chubby brittle lock on the white front door.
Crept up the creaky boards on the beige carpeted stairs.
Quietly opened the splintered wooden bedroom door.
Then calmly slipped under the lumpy winter duvet, as I & I and the whole house slept on in deep snoring blissful ignorance.
He was there at the bidding of the Sandman. In the spirit of a tortured, twisted Grim fairy-tale, he was there purely to sow the black seeds of dark underworld sorcery in the wild hinterlands of my dreams. And, he was there to manhandle and drag my sleeping corpse into the darkest catacombs of his subconscious, where only the Hellish wild things go.
I wake from a manifest gripping seizure of the nightmare at the crucial plot twist where the Demon Dagon – Prince of the Depths – is trapped under a solid Arthurian oak table in the ceaseless, clawing, claustrophobic darkness.
The Demon Dagon is imprisoned in a caged black oblivion of his own making.
Armed only with a sharpened ocean blue fountain pen, I am violently stabbing at him, furiously, relentlessly, in the pitch black – to keep him at bay, to force him back into the prison cage, beneath the ancient wooden table hewn and crafted from the Tree of Life.
The Demon Dagon has a human face – of a perverted and sick individual – who still walks the face of this fragile world tilting precariously on its axis.
A human face.
A human physical body.
A human soul.
And, he has been buried for many years under the heavy six-foot-deep soils of the wild untamed garden of my subconscious, only to surface like a corpse of the living dead on nights like these. Stalking me, like a haunting horror flick celebrity from the shadow lands.
Raising myself from my death bed, I am picking a path down the flight of creaky staircases, in the moody half-light of streetlamps burning, beyond my dwellings on this pedestrian estate.
I am lighting a candle flame, a candle flame of hope, in the chill night breeze blowing through the lounge. A candle flame to banish the Demon Dagon for an eternity in Hell. And to extinguish the toxic memories quick pronto.
And, as if to cap off a traumatic but winning night at the office, I go in search of that tune from Talk Talk’s ‘Spirit of Eden’.
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