unheimlich

I fell asleep on the bus today. When I awoke, I found myself in a neighborhood where nothing looked familiar. The driver was not the same man, and even the bus seemed to have changed. I thanked him and got off as quickly as I could, and began to walk the streets.

It was nothing like home. The buildings were tall, dark, and ominous, blocking out the stars, their cold lights illuminating nothing. The people walked as though afraid that the world might close in on them or the buildings attack them--shoulders hunched, swift strides, heads down. As I wandered, I eventually noticed that the streets themselves were very similar in layout to the neighborhood in which I lived. I kept walking, down blind alleys and curved streets, and my suspicions were confirmed. Someone had built some twisted shadow of my neighborhood. I found that my steps were drawn to the place where my house should have been. It was there, dark, perverted, twisted. I knocked on the door.

A girl answered it--if she did not look so obviously evil she might have been beautiful. She leered at me and asked me what I was doing. I could take it no longer. I shrieked, drew the knife from my pocket, murdered her, and entered the darkness of my shadow home.

As I shut the door, I looked down at the body of the girl who had answered me and realised, to my horror, that this was not some evil woman, but the body of my love. I curled up in the corner and wept for a world that could make my home so unlike home.

lenore!

I had a dream tonight. I recall little of it, except for a feeling of intense nostalgia and a long corridor through which my voice echoed, as I called a name I've forgotten.

What I remember is the feeling when I awakened. It was not the typical feeling of awakening, as if suddenly the thing which once held my mind in thrall is now nothing more than a fleeting and fading image. I felt as if something was missing from the world--as if there were no more colour, or as if a white noise in the background shut off. I tried to form the name from my dream on my lips, but I could not form the words. If I heard the name I would know it, but I have forgotten it.

I feel that I have done more than merely forget something from a dream; I feel as if the person from my dream, for whom I am certain I was experiencing nostalgia, has ceased to exist, and indeed never began to exist. I have read through every journal entry I have. Some of them are nonsense. Some people that I know, I cannot recall how I met them, why I know them.

I am increasingly certain that if I could recall the name, everything would make sense, that perhaps this really is just a lapse in my memory, but it seems that when I ask about it, people just give me dull looks, as though they have no idea of what I am speaking. Worse, I fear the dream will escape me forever if I return to sleep.

So I am writing this down and committing it to memory, if I can. Nostaliga. A hallway. A name. An echo.