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My mind sets a scream free when I sleep, reverberating off the interior walls of my skull, giving the visions that haunt the backs of my eyes, a vibration of near explosion…shadowed beings speak in lacerated tongues and hushed secrets, their footsteps giving more texture to the supposed dream, their touch like spider filament or a lost strand of hair, initiating a suffocating itch, that raises my hands and eyelids…staring into the dark of the ceiling, going further and further, getting lost into the eigengrau oblivion, I count the silences of cricket strings, knowing something, someone mutes their white noise, and I exhale my presence, rolling to my side…I’m aware the clock reads 3:03am, and as my eyelids begin to close, a singular tap from the mirror upon my closet door…a second tap and I know…a third tap, sends me to sleep, meeting him on the otherside of this reflection…

E.A. O'Connell