To White - To Terror

I was walking through a marshy forest; much like you might see in Canada where moose semi-submerge themselves in one of many amidst a network of lakes. Suddenly I came upon what seemed like snowy tundra, as if a distinct line were drawn; as on a painting with only a stroke converging two worlds - one painted, one white (unpainted). Here, all color ended. All sound. All wind. All smell. All texture. All things. All distinctly different objects. There were only vague variegations of white. White - nearly imperceptibly pulsating and changing too subtly in slow waves, indistinct and blending one variation into the other like wastelands do, as if the white of snow, ice, clouds, fogs, mists, contained a light reflecting amongst them but without any definite source. They all blended in a depthless, ‘distinctless’ white, yet with a touch of variegation, giving this dream an aspect of silhouettes of white on white. (I also, at a different time, dreaming my demon, saw silhouettes of black on black...perhaps for another time.)

I walked slowly, ploddingly, for what seemed like merely fifty feet. Although, time and distance, being imperceptible, that is rather arbitrarily guessed at. Imperceptible and increasingly distorted, even unexisting or - unnervingly - unwinding existence the further I walked - and I had only just begun to trod into this treacherous nothing. As I had said, there seemed no light source. It was similar to a very thick morning fog - the sun filters through bleakly and seems to be everywhere dimly but nowhere especially. It might be best to describe it by saying: The white seemed to be its own light source.

I felt gently but powerfully pulled, by something that was at the same time internal and external. The farther I walked, the loss of a sense of time as we know it began to overwhelm. Past was erased, shortened, obscured...devoured. Anticipation and imagination of the future and its possibilities - and my place in it - disappeared. I became unable to anticipate - unable to imagine. This past and future blended obliquely with the present that was also ceasing to exist; because, without a past and future to contrast it - the present neither can exist. Without a past to remember myself and future to imagine myself; and without time to exist and time to exist IN, I began to cease to exist. With only white; or...nothing...to see, no objects to compare, to give names to; and with no objects to remember because I had no memory because I had no past, I ceased also to have a language. There was no frame of reference as to time or objects. The lack of any frame of reference, any dimension, made me feel my identity leave me. This white vacuum inhaled the aspects of ‘me’. As they left me, my ability to ‘perceive’ by contrasting ‘things’ ‘in time’, my sense of self also left me. My identity. My identity...flew. As my identity left me, I felt that this lack of self-awareness - of consciousness (of self and others and things and time and language) was...insanity. But before I lost all senses entirely, as if by still breathing but near my last, I fled this tundra of insanity by awakening from the dream.

So powerful was this dream, and I believe this literally (and I am not a man of superstition or witchcraft or voodoo or dogma-religion or sorcery or ghosts etc.)...so powerful was this dream that I believe if I had not awoken at that moment, I would have gone senseless (quite literally, “sense” “less”) and been forever after insane. If the sever had been completed - if I had lost the tether to time, I would never (how?!) have been able to trace my way back to myself. I would have severed myself from myself. I would have awoken insane. I would not have been aware of my own existence.

The dreamscape was like a painting. An unfinished painting of my mind, my life, my soul, my perception, with a large portion of white. I had wandered into this no-man’s land without a tether.