Wonderland Syndrome

Ahh how this moment brings me back, oddly enough, to a recurring dream, dreamt in odd concession at the exact time of two o'clock in the morning on the exact date of the second Tuesday of every month of my life since before I can remember. The events of this dream take place in front of what I first assume to be a church, but I gradually realize that there is no religion represented whatsoever, and it is not only clearly abandoned but now in complete and utter ruin, it's walls decay while the paint peels off of the crumbling and ominous towers that loom like dead mountains against the sky. The door of this strange building lies open, and has been crushed into pieces which hang from the door hinges. Beyond it, inside the building,, I see nothing but endless, pitch black, darkness that fills the strange building like unmoving, un-rippled oil. 

This goes on for an unknown amount of time, while time may be meaningless in most dreams, the hands of whatever non-existent clock would govern the time here crawl by like crippled worms swinging on their predetermined axis of time. During this false eternity I sit and etch into my mind every detail of this place, every crack, every broken brick, every shattered window (now as black as the devil's soul, as a more devout man would say.) All of it is remembered in sickly detail, in such a way that neither my waking nor sleeping minds could ever forget even so much as the must-filled, earthly, smell of it.

After what feels like mine and a thousand other's lifetimes, I am approached from behind by a decrepit, ragged, sick looking, dog. This mangy canine then inexplicably, and in as perfect English as you or I can speak, it utters this single phrase. "Embrace insanity, never emptiness" and then, the dream ends and I awake in a oddly calm state of panic. But always at the same time, on the same day, on the same portion of the month. It has always happened, since long before I could form long standing memories, like a surreal, unending clockwork system embedded in my skull that ordains my dreams.

This moment now however, doesn't quite compare to the abstraction of my constant recurrence of a dream, but does somehow remind me of it nonetheless. I am sitting atop an outcropping of rocks and random patches of grass, all jutting out above a highway stretching through the night some fifty feet below. I remain un-moving, listening to the loud whirring hum of the cars engines as they zip by below me. Recently, in only the last few days, I've started to have a strange feeling, like my senses are rippling around in my skin, and my vision seems like I am looking into a mirror that doesn't have myself reflected in it, just staring at a background that doesn't exist but that seems like it should hold something. It all seems so, empty, like something that should exist to fill this moment is absent and all of reality suffers for it.

This feeling has elevated and spiked until it reached it's apparent peak tonight, here, in these rocks as I watch the highway below. I was in fact driven here by this feeling, it made me uncomfortable in my own skin to the point I was forced to leave my home and wander till I found this spot, unable to stay still. The solace I found in the view of mechanically carried lights whizzing through the night like artificial fire flies, well it was wonderful, but fleeting.

But suddenly, my mind churns in my head and lights up the night in its own strange way. For just a single moment, this exact moment in fact, a ray of clarity seems to open; it is the same feeling that I've always felt while in my constant dream. As if in response to my moment of clear sight, the courthouse clock chimes out from the center of the town miles away, breaking the air-condition-like false silence produced by the highway, marking two o'clock in the morning. 

"Hmm." I huff out under my breath as I realize two things, the first; today is the second Tuesday of the month. The second; this is the first that time I have been awake at the time that I should be dreaming that strangest of dreams. How strange, how I can go my entire life without once being awake when it comes to two in the morning on the second Tuesday in a month. The feeling has now reached its apex, a zen like zenith that it seems to be have been building to for as long as this feeling has been felt. I realize now that I am unable to move, my eyes lock forward in an unrelenting stare that I have no control over, at first I'm staring off into the blackness of the night, looking at nothing but unable to tear my eyes away. Soon I realize that the moon is out, there should be stars and the pale forms of moonlit clouds where I'm staring, however there is only blackness. Blackness which I come to realize is not everything in my vision, but rather inhabits a square, or more accurately a door shaped patch of pure blackness, which I can't help but think is exactly like the one in my dream, the kicked in door that reveals only darkness.

The feeling only grows, its like water with a building pressure that means to crush me from every possible angle imaginable, my vision blurs at the edges but the black outline of the door only becomes more clear. 

"Embrace insanity, never emptiness." The words ring out, as if spoken inside my head, "whatever you find in your life to be empty, whatever you can't fill with anything else, full it with insanity. When all the emptiness is gone, when its all been filled, maybe then you'll know the beauty of the strange."