A Terrible Nightmare Dreamed in Liverpool.
I was part of a party crossing a high mountain pass.
The party was made up of friends, relatives, close family and casual acquaintances. The pass was clear of snow and we made the crossing easily, but the descent on the other side was difficult; the path was steep, hard to follow and sometimes disappeared altogether as it wound down over exposed tracts of rock and scree.
I was bringing up the rear and struggled to keep up with the others as they made their way over one of these patches of exposed rock s a solid outcrop scrambling downwards.
I jumped across a narrow cleft to what I thought was a solid outcrop, but as I landed it gave wayb eneath my feet and started to slide away.
Desperately I leapt back and in doing so set more lose rock moving, gaining momentum as it did so and turning into a full scale landslide, crashing down and sweeping away the climbers below. Above the slide I raced across the mountain,carried down with it but keeping above the mass of the scree, earth and falling stone, but losing more slides as I ran.
At last exhausted I had to stop running and clung on to a large boulder, but by then the landslide was exhausted too and I was left alone on the mountainside.
looking down I could see the path the slide had ripped into the mountan, down to the valley littered with rocks and debris. There was no possible chance of survivors.
Then came the guilt and I relived the tragedy in my nightmares. Screaming myself awake. Until in one of these nightmares within nightmares I screamed myself to death.
A sudden darkness. A complete nothing. Not empty.Containing nothing. Not black. Without colour. Not anything.
And in what seemed like both an eternity and the same instant I awoke.
I was part of a party crossing a high mountain pass.
The party was made up of friends, relatives, close family and casual acquaintances. The pass was clear of snow and we made the crossing easily, but the descent on the other side was difficult; the path was steep, hard to follow and sometimes disappeared altogether as it wound down over exposed tracts of rock and scree.
I was bringing up the rear and struggled to keep up with the others as they made their way over one of these patches of exposed rock s a solid outcrop scrambling downwards.
I jumped across a narrow cleft to what I thought was a solid outcrop, but as I landed it gave wayb eneath my feet and started to slide away.
Desperately I leapt back and in doing so set more lose rock moving, gaining momentum as it did so and turning into a full scale landslide, crashing down and sweeping away the climbers below. Above the slide I raced across the mountain,carried down with it but keeping above the mass of the scree, earth and falling stone, but losing more slides as I ran.
At last exhausted I had to stop running and clung on to a large boulder, but by then the landslide was exhausted too and I was left alone on the mountainside.
looking down I could see the path the slide had ripped into the mountan, down to the valley littered with rocks and debris. There was no possible chance of survivors.
Then came the guilt and I relived the tragedy in my nightmares. Screaming myself awake. Until in one of these nightmares within nightmares I screamed myself to death.
A sudden darkness. A complete nothing. Not empty.Containing nothing. Not black. Without colour. Not anything.
And in what seemed like both an eternity and the same instant I awoke.