Welcome to my Nightmare--

  Welcome aboard and thank you for stopping by. "Dreams of Darkness, Dreams of Night" will take you on a decidedly 'dark ride', which is a culmination of many years worth of my own personal nightmares. While it is nearly impossible to accurately describe days and perhaps weeks of pain and loss in a few lines of poetry or even in a short story, I have tried to do the best I could, under the circumstances.

Nightmares do not only occur to us in our sleep, but frequently appear as a waking vision of horror, pain, helplessness, fear and death. For many, their waking lives are a more realistic nightmare than any dream could ever be--a screaming, eye gouging, hair pulling frenzy of pain and loss, fear and depression that can quite easily destroy a person, entirely. They feel as if something were eating away at them, at their very sanity, just as an unknown cancer slowly consumes healthy cells and leaves behind a riotous mixture of mutated madness.

It could be an unseen, dark, heavy pressure that weighs down your feelings, your thoughts, your very soul. A suffocating, all encompassing pain that sucks the very life force from you and leaves behind an empty shell, a fragile shadow of your former self, destined only for destruction. When an end to all things--Death--seems a more worthwhile solution then continuing to suffer through the unending pain of your life--that might just classify as a 'Nightmare'.

I have been there, before, and not overly long ago, at that. It is a terrifying experience, when nothing seems to matter and you feel nothing will make things better, ever again. Unlike some, I was fortunate enough to have an outlet for my pain and loss (eventually, although it took many, many months and the help of dedicated friends to achieve). I was able to write about my feelings, to put down on paper, to thus express the wrenching horror and total, debilitating depression I had been subjected to. "Dreams of Darkness, Dreams of Night" is my shouted answer to that which nearly destroyed me, but failed to do so. And even though I now battle another, even more insidious invader of my person, I was at least able to finally defeat this one monster and am now able to share with you some of the many battles I fought, and my eventual victory. Mayhap in another few months, I will be able to share with you yet another success story. We will have to wait and see. Until then, I trust you will obtain some small amount of pleasure or at the very least, a bit of insight into your own life, from the months and years of pain I have suffered through to bring all of you this vision--"Dreams of Darkness, Dreams of Night."

Terry D. Scheerer

July, 2005