I believe in dreams.
The darkness, the hidden and yet evident malice, the vague uncertainty and sudden doom copy real life so exactly I must have no other recourse then to believe in this frail, fleeting thing humankind calls a dream. Nightmare, perhaps, is more applicable, and yet not so. Nightmare implies real fear, monsters and domination; dreams are shadowy things, although the violence is more real in nightmares, it is no less apparent in the sinister dreams I speak of. The shifting shapes, the shadowed forms never actually do anything to you, and yet their penetrating evil is present always, seeking to supplant you, to draw you into unknown obscurities.
Perhaps this is why I believe in dreams. The characters in the dreamed play perform much like real life. Often their very actions imitate something I have seen before, except there was no evil in it then. Now the malice is aforethought, spread through illness of malevolent crime. And yet on the surface all is well. In the dream I can see through the surface, down to the unseen depths of the soul. In normal life, it is not so, even for the most penetrating. Strange how this paradox of space and time could take place only in dreams.
The way the dreams reoccur to me is often the strangest part. A simple action, like opening a door or writing a word is enough to start off the chain of recollections; what did I dream last night? Sometimes mere snatches are all I can grasp at, little whispers of what might have been sometime late at night. The contradiction puzzles me immensely, for I know the dream is stored somewhere in my brain, but no matter how much I force it, it can never come out. Force is the wrong way to go about it entirely. I must wait, hardly thinking of anything at all, until the dream sneaks a little, only a little, out of its' hiding place. Then I can pounce, and perhaps drag it out of its' hole entirely. More often then not, it eludes my fingered thought, and slips back in, never to return again.
The dream was so simple, an everyday occurrence. I was cleaning my blade after battle, orc corpses piled around me like so many bundles of firewood. The twins were off on the other side of the glade, cleaning their blades as well. They showed no sign of mercy for the orcs, and neither had I. This lot had looted and burnt an Edain village a few days back. Somehow in my dream I knew which orc had killed which man, and I had personally slaughtered the ones who slaughtered my friends. The battle was over, and yet I knew all this in dreamy retrospect. But that is the nature of dreams.
My blade was nearly clean when I heard a strange sound. An orc, supposedly dead, began to laugh. Not a normal, everyday laugh—orcs have none of those—but a weird chuckle, imminently evil and supreme. He did not act as though he were lying on the ground waiting to die, but that I was the doomed one. In the dream I knew, with an awesome, compelling certainty, that this was the Dark Lord himself. Lifting my blade, I prepared to strike—but failed. I tried again, and failed yet again. The orc, the Dark Lord, continued his maniac chuckling. Slowly I writhed through the layers of sleep to the surface, gasping for air, for I had been breathing pure malice.
Dare I believe in dreams?