I dreamed last night, mad impossible dreams. I was alone in a vast plain, a cracked wilderness of red earth and filthy air. It was the end of the world. Suddenly, without warning, the sky tumbled down like a waterfall, and I was plunged firstly into a darkness of uncontrollable power, and then into an eerie blue light the description or comparison of which escapes me. I was afraid. Slowly, as my eyes became adjusted to the light, I began to see these - the closest my feeble mind could come to classifying them - delicate spectral phantasms, velveteen splinters of midnight, floating around in the air, shimmering and dancing in the half-night, moving with neither haste nor purpose. At first there were but a few, then thousands, then millions. A desperate voice somewhere at the back of my humbled mind told me somehow that the apparitions were souls; the remaining figments of everyone who had ever sat up in the middle of the night and seen the stars. The feeling came that if one gazed too intently upon them that they may disintegrate in a hazy shell of azure mist, and one would be left wondering whether the world had ever really existed at all. A dim humming noise crept up stealthily to my ears, and slowly I realised that each one of the seraph-shadows were chattering madly to themselves. To themselves, and to themselves only. I strained my ears to catch the sound, frantic to make out what each one was saying, but I could not. There were too many voices, so many indeed. They noise agitated me, vexed me, infuriated me, until a note of understanding struck me, pierced me to the heart; they could not see me, they could not see each other. I began to shout at the shades; I ran around, waved my arms in the air, jumped up and down on the spot like a madman, yelled, yelled until I felt the blood rise up damply in my own throat, all to no avail. There was no reception of me.At that moment, a feeling of such crippling intensity washed over me that I thought I would fall down and scream into the oblivion. It was........it was something like despair, only greater, infinitely greater. It was as if the loneliness of man were a strange and ever-present affliction, perhaps the one true constant companion on every journey, and the solitary signpost on the lost highway. The in visible barrier between each centered being is so unbreakable as to render all attempts at communication utterly impotent, and I felt heartsick with resentment at the final ridiculousness of life. I let out a scream, a horrible, pinched scream at the state of all things, the irony of essence, and I felt lost and alone in the cruel ballet of life, swallowed greedily, like soft glances in hard faces.
