"And now, Lord, behold their threatenings: and grant unto thy servants, that with all boldness they may speak thy word, By stretching forth thine hand to heal; and that signs and wonders may be done by the name of thy holy child Jesus."

---- Acts 4:29-30 (KJV)

Among the things that would have been drawn in old nightmares, as they wandered around for a good number of years like they were some form of immortal. What I make of them are something of a complex thing to illustrate with the mind as it was back then knowing that there was a good number of years from the perspective that stood there before me. As morbid and lurid as they were, I can’t always say or define the details of the sick laden. The nightmares were there as I was trying to establish getting a doctor to come to the apartment. Of the being that of the question was if the doctor did come to someone’s home, or as the things within the slices of death come to mind here.
     It was when the dream began and the depths of them came to mind.
     The things of man and God were divided within the state of nightmares – or dreams. From a sick man’s laden it becomes the horror seen within the details of the waking and the spells of coughing and the horror within the nightmare state. “I am fucking sick.” I found myself moaning while in a wheezing fit.
     The things that I was imagining in my mind and it sometimes played out as I rested were the what ifs that came about from the years of smoking cigarettes, kept picturing blood in my lungs as they clotted or fluid filling in them. The things drawn from the imagination of a sick man becomes the shadows of the darkened imagination from those who are sick laden. Before God I stand though back then non-practicing it was a test to me with the nightmares that plagued me from being as sick as I was for as long as I was.
     The memories from being stuck in the infirmary on campus played in the back of my mind during this time frame because it was almost ten years to the day that I fell ill from this and it stirred in my health for years paying for the bad habits I took in. From the times I attempted to quit and was placed on Welbrutrin it was from them the nightmares became weirder and at times darker to define. It was if the sacred of my faith became humanized from the illness. The nightmares made it more humanized with having a plague of physical illness where it took me months to find a doctor, and it was searching but not finding in that department.
     “God give me a doctor if you are listening” I would scream in the nightmare.
     It played out within the depths of these nightmares seeing myself; as I was coughing up endless strains of blood and wandering in endless smoke as it was in the shadows of my vice. When one is sick the imagination would play havoc upon the dreams of the one who has the slices of death they loath – just as it was when it was late night I was up coughing and hacking up a lung, doped up on NyQuil and Theraflu. There were times I would pass out on the leather couch beneath the Gothic looking painting just to be in open space and quarantined. It was in them the dreams within the sick laden had played in my mind wandering and breathing as a demon sitting upon my chest. I kept asking myself why the hell did I need to take in that puff but it was a vice that was a man’s bad habit when it came to staring at a blank manuscript – I’d sit there waiting for the medicine to kick in and the nightmares were in the back of my mind of the blood being coughed up.
     It was in that apartment my imagination played havoc on me when I was confined to bed often and all that kept me company where the old horror films glowing on the television screen. There were times when I would play those films just to dose off, but in that state I had to think often about the nightmares that plagued me from my time in college being it was ten years to the day when I was confined to the infirmary. In the apartment it was while sick on the couch or confined to the floor without a bed the sick induced hell played itself out and I couldn’t put a finger on the reason why the lungs were acting the way they did – nor did I comprehend how my body was acting like it was on it’s death bed at times. It was in my mind as I seen the things played out – the years of being devote in faith become the thing of questions when sickness had laden me from the shadows of time, as it would been as the day before I left for New Orleans and the strange nightmare of being in the sleeper lounge full of vampires. The dark pictures in my mind of the unsound things that played within every imagination of a horror writer one may begin to conceive. As lurid as they were, detailed as sketchy as they are – I tried to recollect them for my present memory.
     “Whom would this be I watched as the shadows wandered?” I asked.
     “I am the angel of mercy,” the woman in black stated to me.
     “Christ – someone who came at the eyes of the sick laden,” I replied.
     “I appeared before the nightmares you had when you saw the vampires in the sleeper lounge,” she responded. Her appearance was that of a woman in her mid-30s. It was if she was the one knowing if when I fell ill and when – I didn’t understand why she was there, and how she dressed was like the woman in the painting at the apartment. The Gothic woman in the dream had an ageless appearance. Victorian in nature as said to be seen within the painting in the apartment; a dark version of a nurse – or very young version of my doctor I eventually got at the apartment. The things seen within the dream become the cycles of the sick laden, as I wandered within the night as I was discharged from the hospital would be almost nightmare-like in middle of the cold as it was.
     She was well spoken and intelligent almost if she knew the territories transcribed within my nightmares, as they were from the sick laden they became. It was if one had seen the blackened sights granted before God as they become among the Victorian Angel of Mercy – before the eyes of a man who had been sick laden, told from the shadows as what was seen or shown. Dark as it may seem, it was if I was being tested before the eyes of God when this illness plagued upon me from my vices that I had taken in form of the love of tobacco. I often felt the pressure upon my lungs and in the nightmares it was like there were two pound weights on each lung, and sometimes felt like my throat had been slashed ear to ear from the endless coughing fits.
     “Could you tell me why the hell you within this state of my lurid nightmares were?” I asked
     The woman in the period garments said nothing but she pointed to the sleeper lounge from the nightmares of years ago. The room full of vampires wandering within the shadows, lurking from depths of memory. The Victorian angel of mercy had pointed me to my sleeping state as I was in the sleeper lounge in the black bedding I traveled with when I went to New Orleans and noticed the H.P. Lovecraft book on the table that was near where I rested that year in 2002.
     “This sick laden state you have, this would be your own dream cycles,” stated the angel in mercy wearing the black Victorian dress. She was an observer of my nightmares as they played themselves out within a pattern of years, even when I stared years at blank pages glowing back at me as they stared as they were alive in my eyes. From looking on from there it was if I was wandering within the Shades of Hades as my dreams were more sick laden than most at the time, as I was there taking an IV drip – when the scares came to me with my health the nightmares became more intense in the detail. That within the dream would I see the creature that is the skeletal raven as it stared back at me.
     It played out within my sleep as I rested on the couch confined to bed rest as the room mate when she told me that I shouldn’t be up and about. I can’t begin to say where the Victorian angel of mercy first appeared or at the moment of the dream as it started – though it played out for awhile during the time at the apartment more so between the October and November just as the doctor started coming to the apartment. Just when I was ill like that, the things within my imagination were downright dismal and melancholy – it came to mind when the dreams played in the mind it was if I was being escorted though the Paris Catacombs but within my nightmares they were not in Paris but in the old steel mills as they remained constructed of the chapels inside the churches of bone.
     “You’re seeing the things which come of the sick laden,” the Victorian angel of mercy defined as she was giving the narrative of these things to me as if she was the observer of the dead children playing at the place they died in Bourbonnais, Illinois. It was if she was there during the dark accident back in the winter of 1999, and she saw the children playing in the sleeper lounge right near where my body slept years earlier. Slept in a black shroud with a hood exposing my face and doped up on warmed Theraflu. The weird dreams invoked by the cold medicine in the system and the combination of nicotine in my veins.
     I kept thinking about these things back then when I was at the apartment but none of the nightmares were able to materialize on the screen as my fingers rushed across the keyboard violently as the screen stared back at me in the darkness. The nights where I was exhausted from the coughing and the looming cases of pneumonia dwelled within my body. Before God I relate this, and it was in my mind as it wandered for years as this would be a testimony stating what was within my darkest and most grotesque of dreams – as they were there wandering in the eyes of the sick laden. From the dark nightmares and the narrative I relate from them from the year plagued me with the sickness it was a gruesome cargo for me to bare.
     It was if my dead memories were breathing and the Victorian angel of mercy was my guide within these nightmares. It was if she knew the state within a sick man’s sleeping state and the patterns seen within the slices of death. The kind of thing I’ve seen before God as I prayed for the nightmares to cease to some extent but part of me will always have them – knowing it was in the shades of darkness seen at different moments of the day as when I rested on the leather and wood sofa in the living room with three layers of bedding to warm my cold to touch skin. The kind of things this Victorian angel of mercy had shown me within the darker shades of my nightmares, it was if she knew what was being seen before my eyes. As I would stand there between the violent coughing fits and macabre images of my mind of coughing up bits of lung as well as dried blood stand within my mind.
     I couldn’t talk to the then room mates about these bizarre dark dreams that wandered in my mind because they would have stuck me in the nuthouse for sure if they knew that the lady in the painting was appearing my nightmare. She was the observer of the nightmares as they played out – from the sleeping lounge full of vampires to the dead children running all along the sleeping room waiting for the same train and same car where they died in.
     “It would be of the things of silence that stand before you, and the darkness wandering among your prayers and spoken of your tormented testimony infused from your health problems within the physical realm,” the angel of mercy recants. It was if the Victorian angel knew that it was within the nightmares wandering within my mind even when I was in the coughing spells and the screen glowing back at me the nightmares were there – just they didn’t want to make themselves manifest until now. The things that the Victorian angel of mercy had revealed the things before me that wandered within my nightmares while I was in a sleeping state during the periods the nightmares first came to me.
     “Christ – all these things, the gruesome cargo wandering within the horrors dwelling within the shadows of a dark lurid landscape,” I replied.
      It was if the woman from the painting was flesh and bone staring at me pointing these things out as they wander within my mind, as they remain within the sick laden. She revealed such things that one would describe or define as what would be among the grotesque realities within my most lucid of nightmares – as sick laden as I would be. As lurid as they were and detailed they would be – seeing as the sleeping lounge full of vampires stirred in the back of my mind as the sick laden nightmares remained within me as I slept in the quiet living room. The room was as quiet as a churchyard---after all, the churchyard was across the street.
     The Victorian angel of mercy sat down on the leather couch as I laid there covered up to my neck and on my back. She related the narrative about the nightmares I had back when I as twenty-five years of age and twenty-six years of age, during the sleep study some of them were of the museum with the skinned horse exposing just the muscle tissue. The dark things she was able to relate were the things that would horrify many, and even in the state I was in doped up with Theraflu and NyQuil at the time. The other room mates were still asleep and were not able to see this woman, as when I looked at the painting and stared right at her – the eyes she had had purple in them with white pupils.
     The hair of the Victorian angel of mercy was a raven black with a red streak in it, with a piercing on her lip and a white face. She was a Gothic version of the doctor who’d eventually had came to the apartment in November when I was thirty years of age. The kind of things that wander within the sick laden sleep of what nightmares may come. She continued to sit there – as if she would be the one watching me until the doctor arrived, as she would relate that it would be among the eyes of the flock who’d lay their hands upon the sick. Where it would stand among my sick laden dreams, I could remember the then room mates saying they’d be praying for recovery of me because how serious it became with the state of illness I was in.
     That I looked up to Him for the sick laden nightmares to fade, but they in the back of my mind years distanced from being that sick are like a movie that replays time and again. The Victorian angel of mercy who was in the nightmare when I woke up disappeared and went back into the painting above the couch where I slept. The thoughts of them wander within my mind from time to time, breathing as they are within the pages of my imagination – looming as they were in a lurid detail some might not be able realize within the prayers they pray to God to deliver them from such nightmares.
     When I was sick at the apartment I didn’t exactly have a full sized bed that could been kept out all the time so I had to basically use my backpacking gear for my bedding, and I was pretty much laid up left to the nightmares while the one worked. As I look back now with the glowing word processor staring back at me, the things drawn from the memory from the years of the sick laden – it comes to mind as it was a mixed blessing of having a memory that is quite much like a camera able to be photographic about everything. Through the eyes of one who believes in God above, the dark things within the nightmares had still remained for one reason or another – as they remain and one believes they should pray for the sick and of the doctor who came in November when I was thirty years of age it was an aging version of the Victorian angel of mercy from my dream.
     Before the testimony of man I relate the details of the dream of the eyes from the sick laden, as morbid as they seem of dead children playing where they died, vampires in the sleeper lounge or the gruesome cargo wandering within a museum with a history that would give either Edgar Allan Poe or H.P. Lovecraft unsettling nightmares. It would be the things that wander within my mind for years much as it was from when I was in my twenties and into my early thirties that these dreams were there – of the Victorian angel of mercy.
     It would be the thing that wandered within my dreams as there were nights I woke from fits of violent coughing and look outside from my old balcony thinking each violent coughing fit might end up being the last. Knowing I didn’t have to go too far when that happened. Of the horrors that be, and the nightmares that wander – as lurid as they remained it would be the thing breathing in the shadows among the thoughts in the mind as they were the weary and sick laden.