Excerpt Written by ALWarren
The story I am about to relay to you is one of an experience I have had the great misfortune to live through many times throughout my life. Since a child I have had an extremely disturbing nightmare, and a nightmare it truly is. The kind that scars your soul forever.
You see, this is a very dark, recurring and horrifying dream and it is always the same. Whenever I go through this harrowing experience I am left for days with a feeling of seeping lingering unease with its cuttingly cold fingers gripped around my soul, waiting to take me and see me plunge into the abyss of fully conscious insanity.
I sometimes know when I am to have this dream. It is a foreboding blanket of dread that falls upon me even before I drift to the sleep realms. It’s as if the Black Rabbit of Inle itself calls my name, laying claim to me even before I approach anywhere near my tragic demise. I can relate to those desperate rabbits in Richard Adams’ book Watership Down. Fearing the call by name as they were; a bid to follow death itself. The terror in their eyes when those that defiantly stayed behind in their warren, only for their homes within the earth to be filled with dirt leaving them trapped, terrified and suffocating. The names called of those that were about to perish, their last breaths taken in nothing but fear of letting go and following the Black Rabbits lead to whatever terrible realm lay on the other side of life.
Why am I referring to a book about rabbits to describe the dread and sheer panic I experience when I am stuck within this nightmare? I can find no other way to explain to you the feeling I have before and after this dream, other than using the darkest moments in that story as a very vague analogy. It is the closest I can get in any way to even an incline of how this nightmare effects me, especially when, as a child I saw the film for the first time and it inflicted upon me the deepest of horrors that have never left me. It was the first soul scar I had suffered. Later on in life when I first read the book, the horror was only reinforced, and amplified a hundred fold. The deep wound inflicted upon me at age 3 reopened and left gaping, as a reminder that pure catatonic fear, the kind that a tiny child feels for the very first time, it never goes away. Even when the tough callous of adulthood sees one reinforced against childish fears, if you are unlucky enough to bare an old and deep wound that is reinflicted upon you in your dreams so that the memory bares forth a blinding reminder of your initiation into terror, then you are cursed until you are granted a release from the sentence laid upon you.
If you have read the book or seen the film then you may understand those terrifying moments that leave you with the same dreaded fears that they give me, but if you have not read the book or seen the film, then I suggest you do both, and if you are so inclined as to get some small inclination of the horror I experience whenever I enter that realm of pure unconscious evil and concentrated hatred, then we can share the terrible fear together.
Now please, I beg you, bare some of my burden as I come to recount this most heinous dream which often begins with me being a passenger in a car that is driving over steep misty mountains and down through narrow dark valleys.
Sometimes there is only one unknown and faceless person who is driving the car and at other times there are other passengers with me, all equally as unknown to me. I do not ever get to see their faces and there is never any conversation between us.
The land around us is foreign to me but it is also very familiar, I think because it is a dream scape I have visitesd so many times before. Nevertheless it feels as if I am in a different country to the one I currently live in.
There is always an early morning pink and orange haze that lingers in the air, it is soft and warm, much as a morning in late spring with the positive promise of summer just around the corner.
