My Lucid Nightmares - False Awakenings

I just woke up. My bed is a mattress on the floor, in a bedroom that I share with my younger brother. He sleeps on a real bed a few feet away from me. I don't mind that he has the real bed and I have the floor mattress. I prefer it that way. There is something comforting about being that close to the ground, solid and reassuring, as if it weren't actually the exoskeleton of a dust speck planet hurtling and spinning through an endless void of infinite and meaningless space.

I'm twelve years old. To make my bedroom floor all the more comforting, I've made it the resting-place for my precious NIV study Bible. Besides serving as a talisman to ward off unseen evil, my Bible is certainly heavy and firm enough to serve as a blunt weapon against any intruders of a more material sort. Upon awakening, I reach over to feel for my Bible. I don't find it.

It is almost pitch black in my room, but I look over to the bed where my brother sleeps, and see him sitting up in bed. But it isn't really my brother. It's a humanoid figure, nothing more than a shadow, which I'm able to see despite (or rather because) of the fact that it is even darker than all the darkness in the bedroom. And in its black hole of a head: the brightest green eyes, like portals to a hell that perhaps only H.P Lovecraft could have dreamed up. If only my Bible were present and accounted for.

The shadow is on top of me in an instant, tearing me apart with razor-sharp teeth. I feel everything. Once, when I was a young child living in a "third world" country, I had to have one of my internal organs surgically removed without the aid of anesthetic. I felt everything. Even though American children aren't supposed to wind up overseas, far, far from home, feeling everything, I did. And even though children should never find themselves trapped in endless lucid nightmares where everything is real because pain is real no matter where or how it comes, my world has been pain for what feels like forever.

I can't go to sleep. I'm not twelve years old anymore, but approaching thirty, relatively speaking (isn't time always relative?). My bed is no longer a mattress on the ground, because now that I accept that the ground is hurtling and spinning through so much space, it isn't so comforting anymore. There is still a Bible beside my bed. But its supernatural powers have long departed, leaving me to pour through Greek word histories and all the best manuscript evidence, in search of where the holy prophets had it all wrong. And yet...

How I envy the ancients at times. Their ground was still ground.

This isn't a fiction. It is my life. I remember hearing once that the man who wrote that song, "Row, row, row your boat (gently down the stream)" proceeded to commit suicide just minutes after writing that song. That kind of puts a new spin on it, I think. Doesn't it?

I hope to bring us both through the furnace and out again, burned to the very core, but not broken.

Stay tuned

• Enter the furnace: click here.