The Arms Of Morpheus

"Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”—Edgar Allan Poe

Darkness is that the only thing I shall see, through its emerging shadow that pursues me, with a haunting passion? Shall I ever free myself of the manacles that bound me, in their morbific illustration of death? Is death only the prerequisite for madness or has it penetrated deeply into the realm of my embedded nightmares? Sleep is but an inevitable fear of mine, for it will bring me closer to my death. Perhaps, I am forsaken to the paranoia of the fate of the omen that shall befall upon me in its celerity. Wretched are the morphine and opium, for they have taken away only the pain of my debilitating body, not the demons in my mind. It is the grasping torment of the demons that I must escape. They are waiting for me to close my eyes and fall, into a lethean sleep that I shall not recover from its effects. Where is the elixir of my nepenthe? In sooth, why must I repent for my piacular sins, when I have only revealed the truth?

I have surmised that I am the irreversible product of a hallucinatory episode of a probable dementia praecox, and I cannot fully distinguish the features of reality. The inexplicable monsters that exist are those that dwell in the abyss of my mind. They appear and disappear, like the light of day and the darkness of the night. They hide surreptitiously within the deep recesses of my brain and manifest, when my fears are beyond my control. I can sense when they are present and when they are enraged with vehemence. I engage them in the battles of my inner conflict. The images of their torment are vivid and destructive. They seem to be invincible and implacable in their ruthlessness. They are the shadows that stalk me, with a turbulent madness. My screams are silenced by the roars of their voices, and it is the hellish ordeal I must tame wittingly. I can hear the distinctive barking of my buried dogs resound, as they scratch my doors trying to enter with a devilish ire.

Days and nights to me were nothing more than irrevocable time. The morphine had numbed me first, but it only served the purpose of physical relief. It was the opium that I had taken that had begun the hallucinatory episodes of dread that had manifested in my mind consistently. It was enough to drive me to the point of insanity. Fortunately, for me, I would escape its terrible clutch, but my mind had been yearning for it and was supplicating me to take it again and again. I do not know how I have managed to avoid its irresistible desire. It is a devil worse than that of the parchments of holy books, for it is the devil incarnated from within us. I was once normal and had a normal life with aspirations. That would all be altered suddenly by the introduction of my phantasmagorias awakened, by the verisimilitude of the drear and dull isolation of my solitude.

I do not see the necessity of revealing more about myself, except to disclose that I am an addict. I sit alone in the sturdy, four walls of my room, staring off into the murkened abyss of the uncertainty of life and the certainty of death. The year if you wonder is 1917. The world at the time was industrious in its evolution, and old luxuriance of royalty were replaced, with new regimes of terror. Wars were still prevalent throughout the world, and diseases were prescited from birth. The poor had grown poorer in their meagre slums, and the opulent became haughtier in their inherent status. I was not oblivious to the picturesque surroundings of my home, but trepidation of the unknown had terrorised me enough to not go, beyond the gruesome places that my mind feared had existed.

I was once a man with the superb mind of great adventures and experiences, but my advantages had no longer preponderated, over the apparent disadvantages that had oppressed me, with an oneiric torment that had many names, but one result. I had become a stranger, who had yearned to shun my Morphean shadow of caliginosity. These are the moments that are called the peripeteias of drama. Thus, we revert to our atavistic fears of our quondam nightmares. I was fascinated by death, yet its unavoidable nature had consumed me with a tangible reality. The fear of sleeping had progressed, into an insurmountable struggle of a quotidian adversary. The subject that I mention, is one that I have chronicled, every day and every night, since its inception. It cannot be ignored, or can it be assumed to be fanciful.

It had been an entire year, since I had lost my two black dogs who I adored. They were the genuine comfort to me after I had divorced. They had replaced my estranged wife. Nothing had prepared me for their deaths and her absence. My financial woes had led me to economic ruination that I would never recover. I had poorly invested my time in investments that had resulted in fraudulent transactions. I had entrusted my confidence in persons that were unscrupulous in their judgement and actions. The Great War was still affecting the vast continent of Europe. Manifold men had perished on the battlefields and would never return to their homelands. I had lost cousins and former friends to the barbaric and inhumane sins of that atrocious war. Wars are forever connected to death. Death does not discriminate, between friend or foe. It is the collector of souls that walks amongst us.

I am a singular case of a man that lives on borrow time, and whose desperation is the apparent sign of my gradual decline. I never knew what sadness was, until I had become sad. I never knew what pain was, until I had felt pain. I never knew what death was, until I had seen it in the loss of my dogs. Although I am a middle-aged man, I have not forgotten the faces of the tragedies of my life. To deny them would be to deny my own existence. If there was one thing that I could change, it would be the errors that I had committed foolishly. I can feel that I am, at times, in the middle of life and death. In a secret place, where time has no clocks and is suspended in animation. Perhaps, I shall be suspended in that animation soon to drift into the subconsciousness of death.

Is there such a place of absolute nothingness, like the vastness of what seems like empty space or are there blackholes, where our minds can never reach their understanding? Ergo, can a man in the analogous sense find himself trapped, in the blackhole of his darkness and sanity? It is the eeriness of that consideration that remains a mystery to me. A puzzling riddle that is a conundrum that evades all attempt of reasoning. How could I ever defeat or destroy something that has no definite limitation or defined boundaries? I could only make the firm supposition that with life, you can measure the years passed and recorded. My nothingness was called death. Nightmares are not intended to be understood in the analytical sense. They merely manifest to us in great horror. A horror that is the implacability of our deepest fears.

There are people whose Rhadamanthine beliefs make them refuse to believe, in the nihilism of nightmares. From my nascent thoughts, I was pertinacious in my belief that the soporific lassitude that was transparent in my weakness was the sole indication of a gnawing malison that I called death. Sleep was something I had dreaded, for its arrival would signal my demise. The drugs had truncated my anxiety disorder for a period of time, but they did not bring me the needed calm that was merely a transience. The intervals of my horripilation would appear, when I was at my weakest condition. My body had been afflicted, with the emergent symptoms of an unrelenting illness that had sucked the colour of my skin and reflected an abnormal paleness I abhorred. I had become a novaturient man, with an unusual behaviour.

The thoughts in my mind were fragmented, with dubiety and celeritous impatience. No man should ever bear the throes of his own burden. There are phenomena that are more pluralistic than the singularity of one phenomenon. There are things that have esoteric value of which we cannot imagine, through the complexity of our mind. The days, I had spent contemplating and the nights shivering in the coldness of my room and isolation. I would write in a noctuary with a throbbing passion that would unsettle me, and I would often feel the tingling sensation of my languor and the numbness of my legs and hands. All of this had paled in comparison to the imminent thoughts of my actual demise or absumption. Suicide had seemed to be rational, but it was not the answer to my irresistible problem that had continued unrestrainedly.

I had resisted with all my might and mental faculties, the faces of death. I could descry the cawing ravens outside, waiting for a morsel of my flesh. The wind howled with a raging birr that called out my name with eerie murmurs. The sounds of gargantuan rats gnawing at the wood and the scavenging roaches feeding on my leftover food were all audible to my ears. I could hear everything that was around me, and I was extremely conscious that they were waiting for my imminent death. The paranoia was what had prevented me from sleeping hours, but for how long would this continue in its pattern? I could not eat much and only ate what my stomach would allow me to eat. I drank enough liquids, yet my body was slowly waning into its last stage, before death.

I had lost count of the days that I had ached and the moments that were beclouded in the darkness of my soul. I had little electricity, and the light that I had was mostly from the lamplight or the shade of daylight that had accompanied me. The awakening of my mind was to be my ultimate challenge. I could feel the caprizant beating of my heart, with the ticking of the clock. Every minute was the suspense of my agonous dilemma. I was still young, but the illness had worn me down and aged me physically and considerably. The hallucinations had begun to deceive me with a frequent furore, for I was seeing shadows of unimaginative beings of terrestrial animation. Voices once dormant were beginning to creep into my head suddenly and constantly. Was it the semblance of my conscience or was it the madness of my tormentor who had revelled with my misery?

I had lost the grip of my volition, for it was then concealed within the soberness of my velleity. To beseech for my pity was all that I could request and insist. There was nothing left in my life that was demonstrative of my felicity. I had coped the best I could, with the demons that were taunting me and tormenting my restless spirit. Were they the reapers of my soul that were waiting for me to succumb to my eternal sleep? The dilation in my eyes had increased tenfold, and it was difficult to concentrate on anything rational. I had no familiar friends of whom I could relate the terrible nature of my torture, or could they comprehend the unbearable demons that had pursued me incessantly. Thus, was the predicament of my condemnation.

My muscles would stiffen into an intolerable pain. I had felt segnitude, within a vacuum of vapidity. The attenuation of my physical strength had afflicted me with malaise. The heightened hypochondriac hysteria and acrasia would conjure the immane force of demons, as I had avaled into the pit of no-return. There was nothing prescribed that could mitigate the miserable pain and the merciless convolution that had displayed the adventitious state of my fragility. I would engage in the realm of an explorative search for the stability of my mind, but I was worried about the decrease of my coherent thoughts and ratiocination. It was affecting my conspectuity and it was the pellucidity of an indefatigable reality I could not accept.

The thought that I was helpless to change the course of my life was the signal of my adamantine oppression and the abject despair of apathetic gloom. I was aware of my impending fate and its commonitive presage. I could no longer be ignorant. The quantum minutes were lost in my aprosexia. I could not adaunt the morbific fear that I was unable to resist its inextricable obsession. I was granted no meaningful respite nor just tarriance. The cruel nature of my ordeal was enough to know what had awaited me in death afterwards. My time battling the insoluble guise of my tormentor was consuming me, within the anaerectic tendency of the entanglement of my cataleptic rigidity.

I had an hourglass beside me, to remind me of the impending perils of time and its expiration. I could not predict the hour of my death, but I knew it was inconfutable. Death is invariable, as was the sovenance of my torment. It is usually the unknown that is transmundane in nature and what causes us to know so little about its purpose or function. Memories of my past were all that could comfort me, even in the abhorrent presence of my unravelling sanity. I had never confronted, such a leviathan of a monster that was death. Life was once an enjoyable thing that I had cherished daily. It had become the haunting nightmare that transformed me, into the unstable appearance of a paranoid man. A man that I would despise, until the last day of my life.

There was never a token of hope to believe in the end, although I had tried to fight with all my might, against the darkness of my illness. Who could even dare to say that they had escaped the manacles of insanity? I who was merely a mortal man had entered into the concealed realm, where no man should ever want to traverse its thick walls of detachment. Reading books was my escape and momentary distraction, but it had reached the point, where the pain in my fingers due to the lack of sleep had prevented me from writing for a longer duration in time. Still, I had managed to chronicle my unyielding affliction. Why I had asked myself did I reach this point in my life? Subsequently, what would my life have been, if I had only conquered my inner demons previously?

There were times that I would sleep for a short period of time that were more of minutes elapsed, but not hours. My desperation would not allow me to sleep, like normal people would in their normal surroundings. I suppose that this would convert me, into the nocturnal zombie of the detestable ones. Whatever it is called by name, I can attest to the horrific nature of its cruelty in person. There are few things in life that are worse than death. For some people to pass away in their sleep is the most desirable form to leave the Earth, but for me it would only be the embodiment of an inescapable horror that would doom my soul, without commiseration. I was destined to die a poor's man death, alone and forgotten by history.

My claudent muscles were aware of the pain and the medication I had taken for it had only compounded my addictions. My greatest regret was not being able to escape my terror, once I had realised its arrival. It came before me, like an infectious mist that would ultimately devour me consequentially. Verily, there would be no escape for me, and to imagine that ghastly scenario was sufficient to cast over me, a lingering shadow of hallucinations that would awaken my consternation. How could I not be compelled to errant hysteria, knowing that it was a matter of time, before I fell to the eternal sleep from whence, I would never awaken again? There were moments when I had attempted to convince myself that it was all a bad dream created, but to no avail.

Panic had begun to spread like a wildfire, as my mind seemed to confuse, at times, reality from surreality. The demonstrative shivers of my hands would reach my toes. It was a visible sign that I would have a possible convulsion. My body wanted to rest forever, but my mind was ever obstinate in its restraint. It would not permit me to sleep for as long as I had wanted. I would bathe in the cold water or pour it over my head to stay fully awake. My vision had begun to be blurry and deceptive. I would enter a terrible place that was the subconscious realm of my existence, as my breathing had been reduced with every breath taken. My lungs were infected and my pulse was waning gradually. Was I finally reaching the stage of the expiry that would induce my pallor mortis afterwards? The marked graves that lied beyond the house had haunted me.

I seem to recall the day when my horrible affliction first inflicted me, and the ominous hour when that realisation had penetrated into the core of my intuition. Who had invited it, that I do not know, except to say that it came to stay and linger in my mind unrelentingly. There is nothing that haunts the mind more than the enveloped shadow of obscurity. The demons in our head are the worse of our emergent foes, for they are the manifestation of the bitter side of our evil reflection. No one really knows, when they come and go. All that I can bear witness to, is the manner which they have persisted in my mind. There was a time in my past, when my intellect was unmatched, but I would lose its lucidity, in the most atrocious manner feasible.

How small is the world, when one is forsaken to its dreary corner of oblivion. There is such an unimaginative place that is existential and tangible in its congruity. It is not a mere illusion that I ascribe to in the principles of my ideas, instead, it is the palpable sensation of death that frightens me to believe in its succession. I was born into the womb of the industrious world that would ultimately condemn me to a foreseeable consequence and solitude. The unusual factor of time was always present, in my struggle day and night. The insufferable melancholy and depression had suffocated me to the point, where I was becoming indifferent to their expression. The dauntless voices of suicide were the troubling signs of my irrationality.

My body had continued to suffer and endure the harshness of my quandary. Until when? That was the question that had remained pending to be solved. I was running out of paper to use to write that I had begun to write, upon the scribable walls with white chalk, until I had paper. Tedium was never an issue with me, because I had occupied my mind with the most dreadful thoughts conceived or imagined. Thoughts that few people are bold enough to admit or seek. It is said that the human mind is the most fascinating part of the body. I do not differ from that statement, but to assert that transcending the threshold of consciousness, is not beyond a possibility, is not irrational. I am no expert of anything. I am but a mere mortal that has experienced enough of life to know the good and bad about its seductive nature.

How disturbing is the image of a man whose agony is the burden of his soul? Must he bear the ignominy of his failures? I am a prisoner of my own fears and inability to live amongst the mortals. I was cast off to the nether chasm of my chastisement. Abandoned to the destiny that would forsake me to the certainty of no deliverance. Of my path, some will dare to ask. It was nothing more than errant episodes of unfulfilled expectations that were never effectuated. If my birth was the absolute precursor to my fate, then in death, I would accomplish that of what I could not do in life. It is in the eyes of the sufferer that we see clearly, the distinction of sadness and happiness. What can be observed from them is more than what can be presumed they do not reveal.

I have witnessed the unusual effects of loneliness and the shade of its encumbrance. I dread that madness shall resound in my mind, like the thrum of a spectral orchestra playing my paean, as I wallow in the threnody of such hideous despair. Sleep, is but a wasted hope, for it shall accompany me to my death, yet it is the one need that my body craves the most. Of the circumstance of my demise, know that I was only an innocent pawn to a game that I could never win but lose by default. The rules to this macabre game were not chosen by me, they were only enforced by my tempestuous fate. Throughout the centuries that have transpired, the unmistakable countenance of death has racked every society, with an irrepressible urge. I was no exception.

The acquaintances that had once adored me had shunned me and cast me into the plunging obscurity of my addictions, where I would never be capable of escaping their puissant grasp. When I could, it was only for a transient moment that had made me feel liberated. I shall be bold enough to make the candid asseveration that I shall not see another day of freedom, until the day I die. I shall not see another day of happiness, until the morose nature of my predicament is finally effaced. I have no necessity for facts, because they are only accrued, for the purpose of denoting my instability and hysteria. I ponder what is the seeming of death and how will it welcome me, when I enter its domain. Will the demons that haunt me pursue me even then, with such a rage?

How I wish I could hear near the window, the dulcet tone in the chirping of a sparrow than the strepor of voices in my head. To be able to see the splashing sea anew, with its tidal waves embracing me. The face of the woman that once had professed to love me, with her malacophonous expressions. That was all then an implausible thing. No man can return to his past, or know of his future. He can only presume about his present. In the vague notion of what life is assumed to portray in the real world, there is nothing that could be the portrait of my tristful despair. Life they say is a blessing, but for me it would be more of a curse. No curse could be so disturbing than the one that would claim my life, with such a cruelty that no man should ever be forced to confront. I was not the fortunate one to eschew the parlous nature of my mental illness.

The terrible cold had begun to enter more my stiff body and the uncontrollable shivers—oh the shivers, they made me fret in fright. The anticipation of the never-ending cycle of one repetitive episode of a discomposing sanity, lost in the unravelling seams of time. Wherefore does the mind not cease to make us doubt and believe things that are not real at all in their veridicality? The horrific hallucinations had felt real to me, but in actuality, they were only the perverse manifestations of my paranoia. As for the darkness, it was the presence of my continual nightmares that never abated. The marked graves that I had mentioned were three; two were occupied with the remains of my dogs. The third was the prepared grave for me, when I would succumb to death. I had dug a profound hole after their deaths, knowing that I would be placed and buried alongside them, as I had planned.

I was never a firm believer of reincarnation, but if my soul one day was to walk upon this earth in a different life, then let it be the joyous face of my wandering spirit. I know that death is the ultimate cessation to life, and like the dust of the earth, my wearisome bones and ashes will be reduced to that finality. I shall not expatiate my senseless suffering any longer with verbigeration, abstruse meanings and voluminous notes. The moment has arrived for me to bid adieu to the pathetic guise that had witnessed the last days of my life. Perhaps laughter is the only thing that death cannot forsake. Even now as I fade into the sable clutch of death, I can dare to laugh at the face of my nemesis with cachinnation. Laugh until my mind has reached the climactic state of insanity. It is done—avaunt the demons in my head. Sleep, I shall have my eternal sleep. The fever of living has abated. I am free, at last, to drift forever into the arms of Morpheus.

Author Notes: In the arms of Morpheus
means to sleep into oblivion.

Recommend Write a ReviewReport