The Dead

I walk into a barn. I am having a nightmare. Why am I shaking? Why do I feel a desperate need to pull out of reality, to some alternate world? These feelings begin faintly, almost unnoticeable at first. I cross the threshold. It is dimly lit in the barnhouse. The cow stalls are empty. Life has fled from the old place. Something draws me in, while yet something elsewhere beckons me away. The former something, though, is stronger, and I enter in full curiosity. Words are entering my head, eager to escape audibly into the stale air of the small barn. They are not English, nor are they any language I have ever heard before then. It was from beyond. The shaking increases, the need to pull away is shooting upward inside. I speak. I shout. The words I say are completely strange to me. This is when three, then four, then five or six men rush into the room. "Stop! Stop speaking!" The shuffling sound of the hay on the ground against their frantic feet, their screaming voices, are fading away. I see a haze settling and appearing all around the room. "It is the language of the dead!" Figures are forming in the haze, as darkness sets in as well. They are faint figures of old men and women, so very vague, a child or two as well scattered among them. The Dead. Their voices are also growing in volume, and they speak in unison, and in full synchronization to my own speech. They pull me hard as I feel now that there is nothing to be considered but simply getting the hell out of here. And that I did, or so I thought. With one strong final pull of the men on my body, forcing me out of the barn, I also pulled out from the dream. I had escaped. But this is often the hardest part, the scariest, the most frightening, and also always the very most curious. I had indeed escaped the dream, the images of that unreal dimension of the wood barn, the figures, the hay, the men, the windows, but sleep I had not. I was trapped, again, in that place where I can see some other form of reality or dimension, but had (usually) no ability to move. Always do I shake, so very much, from the inside out, frightened beyond measure, a feeling as if my soul were being stolen, and I am striving hard to not let it go. I can see the window in my room, it is, in all waking reality, here just a foot of distance from my hand. I want only to wake up. My eyes are open, but sleep has yet to be overcome. I can see images, such as a person of some form, whether human or otherwise I do not know, standing on my bed, leaning on the window. I must wake up! More shaking, attempting to move my body, never accomplishing.  My eyes will not stay steady; they are out of my control. Then I awake. My eyes already open. Seeing the very same view as that of seconds ago. The window. The blinds. The blankets over my body. But no person. No figures. I can no longer see the Dead.