The Dark Staircase
Haunted dreams have led me here. Down a dark staircase, in a house that is on the edge of a flooded river. Deep into the basement I crawl down, down, down.
Some nights it is there, and others it is not. I have walked into the cold water before to look around, as if I am searching out someone or something that is lost or in danger. Whatever it is that I am looking for never seems to be found.
There are nights when the dense oak grove to the south is filled with wild animals. Lions, hunting after me and mine. I have been here many times before, and again return, over and over. I chase them away with guns, knives, sticks, and then only my hands are left to defend. Slowly they break me down, and my defenses are torn asunder until I am left with nothing at all. My eyes are awake as they attack and finally get the better of me.
It never hurts, it just ends.
What is it about this place that has no wind or noise in it? Why is there no air to breathe here?
Only time is allowed to come into my lungs down here. Dulled images loom in my mind as I write the pathways to these cold memories. They are faint and dim, and I cannot totally understand them.
A dark shadow is always looming in the sky above, but it somehow provides warmth in its ability to cover the vail of whatever else is lurking out here.
Out here in the world there are signs of that strange place down there.
There is a feeling that maybe this is not a dream. Is this some other dimension of reality, where my sub-atomic particles are in two places at once, not here nor there, but instead both; me, dangerously ensnared in a transcendent moment? There is no control here. It is like the thrashing of forests and woods, in an endless rage of a storm.
It seems anterior and posterior at the same time, and I lay between these places supine and lethargic. Nothing I do in this place matters at all. There is no consequence of conscience. Anything is possible, and anything can happen. I die some nights here in this place, and I live on to wake in others. Still when I wake these dreams live on to haunt the day. They scare me in their potentiality, not in their content. They have something far too in common with what is real when I wake. Perhaps this is me preparing for my simulated reality, the one that comes after we leave, and the one that was here before we came.
The staircase never looks back up. It never comes up. Always I look down into the waters of this flooded house, deep into the bowels of the lower floors. There is some sort of window or door that lets in a small bit of shaded light; a shred of optimistic hope sneaking into this difficult fantasy.
The water is always moving in soft and rapid circles. The river is part of this house, and the staircase is my way into this world. Can the grim reaper taunt you before your time, or is this me practicing for when my time comes?
In my mind the words echo, “don’t go down too far unless you are ready to stay down in the depths below”. The light switches down here don’t work. The air is stale. The staircase is dark.
But this isn’t real, this is only a dream…………………………………………………………………………..
