Dreaming

A dream has hitherto prosecuted, with indefatigable effect, the subliminal archives of abstemious ruminations and since my wake from its ethereal bounds, I cannot, by any means of will and currency, attain any business with the rendering of sleep. It is not such a dream, which is common envisagement from derived reminiscence, nor was it that phantasmagoric superstition of prospect, which must be subject to divination, but rather, I take it to be an unwholesome canker of the conscious. It has wriggled in my mind as of a maggot in the carrion, and fornicated with that steady impulse of notion; soon its victory shall find purpose and I shudder in the accession of my surmise, to congratulate its monopoly. Let me at least, while partnership with my mind is still sustained document, surmount this lancinating nyctalgia of the conscious, with a tale _not of the dream itself but rather the suspected provenance of its resource.

Early in the month, I had a leisurely perambulation, which was the usual order of my physician, (something psychosomatic had discipled symptoms of an illusive illness) and I found great profit in that abstemious confinement of occupation until at length, some conspicuous cast of image and shadow, iridescent yet not ultimately appealing, limned into that necromantic sphere of presence, that which not a singular aspect of cryptology can surrender tribute. Well it was a woman! Ah strange and yet endearing to reminisce on the serendipity of this acquaintance, yet it is this miscalculation of fate, that has become my terror. It was not that, her posture and tournure gave promise to some largely hideous effect, of the uncanny and ambiguously metaphysic, but rather it was the fascinating coincidence of our complimenting accost, mingled with that paradoxical symmetry of her estimated peculiarity, and simple quietude of composure _ here all the horrors crept and slept in the quiet. It is perhaps this singular tapestry of imagery which consumed the pen of Poe, in those haunting lines, through which The House Of Usher, in its fornicating simplicities, informed such a dreary and desolate picture, which no aggression of thought can surmount. But here was all the wonder which nature in our abstract comprehension, of the macabre; that composition of philosophy which entitled the Germanic superstitions, conformed into a vessel of being. She was tall in station with an arch to her posture. Her eyes where unusually large, and their adamant glassy stare had all the seemings of death. She had a countenance which benefited solely from its olive tone, for its lineaments oscillated by uncertain and weird degrees, from the superior corrugations of senecence and the embroidery of endearing youth. Her nose was acquiline and her crimson mouth in a rather neat curvature, spoke of Mephistophelean charms of humor. The hairs upon her head were a wealthy raven, slovenly and yet of a beautiful luster. Her cheeks were engorged with a life, which was not human, or at least in the commodity of human sustenance. They were passively possessive, yet with a stretch of a grin, her expression had the potential to startle a corpse from its coffin! I remember she wore a loose gown, which was of a fresh opalescence. I greeted her, and she shuddered as if, the reach of my eloquence were a hot iron, hissing for her skin. She then became more composed, and drawing nearer, as if having remembered me, from the vestige of evanescent embers of memory. Her portrait had now been demystified, by the locus of my circumspective lens, and all the tapestries of the labyrinthine and grotesque, had taken full form under my audacious scrutiny. A debauched coquetry ensued, in the gesture of a cold kiss on the lips as she confined my visage to her marble palms. As my eyes, found opportunity in the permit of spatiality, I found nothing to scavenge. I had some intelligence to speak with my physician, and my anecdotes failed to solicit some credence in his education. This had thus profited some discrepancy in our authorship, and so I resigned him from his profession, and forbade him from any intimacy with my strain. I found that I could not bear my portion of solitude, nor could I consider from it, any derivations of futurity. It was the woman! A lingering presence, dawning to the recess of my residence, bringing about an air of melancholia. The dreams had become more lucid, and more elongated, but what could be done! I was but alone, a denizen of solitary confinement, diseased by some nocturnal succubus, with only a prospering despair. It has been so since that strange noon, and now my dysphoric intuitions, as I pen these words, have festered by breast, and I fear that she is hear, under the bed, or perhaps in the wardrobe!