Dark Rock
Maybe it was the coffee, or the joint, could have been the insomnia. I got two hours of sleep last night. The only trouble is when I close my eyes and dream, it’s not dream scapes I wander through. It’s just one nightmarish hell after another. It’s a good night that I don’t remember anything I dreamt.
I long for the dreams of others, to have my teeth fall out or show up in public naked. If I loose teeth in a dream it’s normally because someone has hit me and they are knocked loose somehow, one time they were shot out. I’ve been naked several times, though no one has ever taken notice. I wont even begin to explain that one.
Nothing I dreamt before prepared me for this.
I was sipping coffee, after having an after dinner toke. I was playing some game or the other on a social networking site. Just some random addiction to fill an otherwise boring uneventful evening. A painting I had bought at a starving artist exhibit hung on my wall. A hill stood in the foreground, lush and green with sparse sprinklings of white wild flowers. In the foreground was a grassy pasture. A large willow stood to the left, twenty five percent of it was somewhere off the canvas. On the right was a medium sized dark rock, framed perfectly on two sides with tall grass.
I thought I saw a shadow of a rabbit run from behind the rock to behind the tree. I wasn’t doing anything important. I got up to look closer at the painting. I reached over to touch the canvas.
As my fingers touched the rough texture of the painting I felt a shock go through me. For an instant the world was dark, then I stood alone on a pasture.
The wind whipped against me furiously, I noticed my garments were from a different time frame. And it was a good thing too, the fabric was so thick the wind did little to harm me. It would have otherwise cut through me like a knife. A full moon lit the landscape, but there was hardly any stars in the sky. My hand still feeling a rough texture was on the back of a tree. I glanced up and turned around quickly to notice I was in my painting.
I turned in the direction the shadow had run to and began to walk.
After hours of walking, I could now hear the wind carrying more than autumn screams. A violin or maybe a fiddle, was there a difference? There was life out there. I walked faster toward the music. Slowly smells of burning wood filled the air, the music was louder as if beckoning me closer. At last I saw a lone cabin. Smoke poured from the chimney, and the lights blazed inside invitingly. Music could be heard playing merrily yet, there was no barn, no garage, no cars, not even a mule.
I walked closer and glanced in the windows of an obviously abandoned house. A fire blazed in the fireplace, but there stood beside it no fireplace log holder or wood to feed the flame. Music filled the atmosphere, but the house was empty of any kind of furniture. There was light emitting from the ceiling, but looking at it scorched the eyes. As soon as the black dot was gone from the center of my eye, I reached for the door handle.
I clicked the latch handle and began to walk across the threshold. I noticed out of the corner of my eye, a dark shadow figure peer out of the window at me. As I stepped inside I glanced over but there was nothing. An inspection of the entire cabin showed it to be completely empty. It was clean, there was no dust or cobwebs. The house smelled of pine as you walked room from room.
I glanced out of the windows into the forest. What was I going to do when I got hungry? Wake up? If I’m asleep then when does the nightmare part start. I walked to the fire watching the flames dance to and fro playfully. It was all so warm and comforting.