Sunday Mini Challenge: How about the nightly visits?

“I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?”

John Lennon

A while ago one of the co-authors of our short-story collection challenged me to write a poem that describing the horrors of nightmares. How it affects you, how you feel unable to move or scream. The helplessness when it's no fence between you and yourself. So I came back with a poem…

I’m sure you can do a lot better, but …

I also needed illustrations and this led me to the fantastic work of Fancisco Goya (1746-1828). Just searching for disturbing paintings you will find Goya on the top of your search.  His imagination and dark fantasies might even been one of the reasons that he spend time in an asylum. Take care when dwelling in darkness.

Fore a comprehensive view  take a look at Los Caprichos,  a collection of 80 etchings, where each one is almost enough to make your dreams dark. Actually every painting can be a title of a poem.

He also painted horrors of war, he painted dark mythology, He painted blood and gore, he painted black, but even if you look closely on some of his portraits he did for the Spanish court, there is always something something sinister, something ugly or cruel.

So for today’s challenge I want you to take a careful look at Goya, and think about your own nightmares, maybe there is a consistent theme, or maybe it’s more the feeling of waking up entangled in suffocating bedsheets, or with a feeling that you are not alone. Maybe you have woken up and simply have to go and check that the door is locked.

You might even take a look at the world today and wonder if nightmares are all that different from reality. Something Goya also noticed in his Disasters of war. Maybe this is how Yeats see nightmares and reality becoming one:

The Second Coming

W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Link up a new fresh poem on nightmares, I know it will be fantastic, I know I will not read anything right before going to bed.

For those of you who prefer to be inspired by music, I find that “Moon over Bourbon Street” can inspire to some nightmare emotions. After all there are always those soft footfalls following you at night.

Remember to visit other contributions, and sleep well.