"For God may speak in one way, or in another, yet man does not perceive it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls upon men, while slumbering on their beds, then He opens the ears of men, and seals their instruction. In order to turn man from his deed, and conceal pride from man, He keeps back his soul from the Pit, and his life from perishing by the sword."

-- Job 33:14-18,

Perhaps this came from the endless nightmares that wandered within my mind during the time at the apartment. IT was something some can’t define with one or two words yet it was something that wandered in my mind for quite awhile. I don’t always know what to make of them at times when they are seen within my subliminal memories. The whole thing that comes to mind the night when I was out in Chicago about the car accident that happened so many years ago as a nineteen year old version of myself – the whole thing in the back of my mind when I was sitting in the back seat that night with a camera stirred around in the night air.
      My imagination was going insane that night from the endless night to the venue that I was going to that night – a chance with destiny right there perhaps, someone who was to read some of my nightmares in print form. The nightmares about the car accident were fresh in my mind about when I was hit and when I was in the city having the first brush with death. IT was the kind of thing that one can only imagine in their mind about the horrors that remain. Before the witness of God that I shall relate this within the pages of a narrative that it was the testimony how God spared me from death the first time.
      It became the things of my imagination as I kept thinking about standing in middle of Lake Shore Drive still shaken up by the accident. The whole damn thing that played out in my mind the worst when I was confined to bed from the flu or having something that was rather flu-like hit me like a ton of bricks. When I was laid up in the apartment is when the dreams played out in my mind of the accident that I nearly became the subject to as I was doped up on my medication – cheating death by not a few minutes of being hit by a bus.
      The time in the hospital back in 2007 was the time when the nightmares about the accident came to full dark detail.
      “Pray for them to pass.” A few would say.
      It is before God right now that I will give the testimony of living through the car accident. It was in the moments of the night out that become the memory that is so clear to me, the dialogs about the accident were not there because I kept to myself about the accident – I didn’t write about the accident until recently that it was the thing that I will say quoting Alice Cooper, welcome to my nightmare. It became the thing that comes to mind here as it was the movie playing out in my mind of the time t hat I was up in wing of the hospital over Christmas those years ago now there had been five years time between then.
      The memories became the things that were alive within my mind as they’re not wanted to be written. What remained there in the walls of the hospital was the nightmares about the night out that wasn’t typical for me – ending up in a car accident that was able to be walked away from. The kind of thing that all the medication in the world can’t get that dream out of my mind, the nightmare as it played out in my memory. Knowing that they were there and left with notebook paper it was drawing a blank for me at the moment. The moment where it was a question before the eyes of God as it was testing me that night.
      I thought about that night often when I was in the accident when I was laid up in Illinois Masonic Hospital in Chicago when I was down with a viral infection. The nightmares came when my health was at the worst and that can be documented as fact there – the weariness that I bore was the cross before God I bared. The horror that wanders within those years about the memory of the accident were a bit foggy to me because I tried not to remember such things – that was part of the reason I doped up on pain killers when I was living in Iowa because the memories were so frightening for me to recall.
      “Only if God listens,” I thought to myself as I laid up in the gurney. Exhausted from the sickness that was overran my body and the nightmares were wearing me down – the nightmares about being in a car accident replayed over and over in my mind, and that I welcome to my nightmares. The world seen within the nightmare echoes reality and unreality as it would be remaining within my mind as I was laid up in the apartment or the hospital bed. These nightmares I document sometimes are for me but I want people to see what horror goes into the mind when it wanders within those dark places.
      The places I take people here are where they don’t want to face in their own mortality – looking at my nightmares I was forced to stare at my own mortality and sometimes I pray to God thanking him for sparing me those many years ago.
      “Let God take the nightmares away,” I could see someone saying to me.
      “These nightmares I have them for a reason,” I would respond.
      “What reason is that?”
      “They remind me that I am still here on this world.” Welcome to my nightmare – did I mean to scare you as something Alice Cooper once said in one of his lyrics and that is part of the reason these nightmares are documented for the world to read. They keep me awake at night over the years especially on the anniversaries of when they first happened and first occurred. The nightmare as it played out would be the accident as it would have been much worst than it was. The different scenarios playing out in my head of the different and more horrifying outcomes from the accident, I would wake up in the hospital bed wide awake in the darkness from not knowing where I was because of how snowed I would been.
      The dark memory of what was there when I was wandering home from the apartment from the highway – the whole thing was a blur to me about that night, but when I was riding into the darkness with the two room mates the thoughts about the car accident were there as a beast stalking. The glowing spires were like a pair of devil horns glowing in that dark of night, and when I was at the winter party that was at the venue I kept thinking about the accident and the shock it had left me. This dream was something that didn’t want to be written or wanted to remain a blank page in that sense of the word.
      My nightmares are not anything childish but they all were triggered when I was 19 years of age when I was in that fucked up car accident with my best friend. Now the accident happened fifteen years ago to the day of writing this. Perhaps it is God lighting a fire under my ass reminding me of these nightmares saying to not take anything for granted. These nightmares are what bring me back to the day and hour when the accident happened.
      “Dreams are a way that God talks to mortals,” is what a nurse told me when I woke from a nightmare in the infirmary and the old nightmares appeared time and again when I was living at the apartment because it was around the very time ten years later when I became deathbed sick. The kind of sick that came throughout the year when I was at the apartment and the memories in my mind when I was left alone in the apartment to bed rest were of that fucking car accident. I couldn’t exactly talk about these nightmares in the open because they would ask me why do I dwindle on such horrific things, such horrific things are part of my testimony. God had spared me that day but the memories of the day still remain as a curse – the curse of a photographic memory. It’s dizzying to think that I have this kind of memory and able to recall such frightening things from my real life.
      The whole thing with the nightmares occurring came when I was active with the one church out in Bartlett, Illinois. The accident hasn’t happened yet but the premonition of the accident happening played out in my mind because I kept hearing the screeching tires in the back of my mind. The premonitions don’t exactly fade from the memory of someone who is either cursed or blessed with a photographic memory. The things that wander become the things that fade from memory or what people think had faded from memory.
      “Dreams are what used for God to speak to us.” I remember the nurse telling me when I was in the college infirmary.
      “I kept having these nightmares and they were elaborate in nature,” I would relate to the nurse back when I was 20 years old. After so many years the nightmares haven’t faded in the landscape. I sat back in the fellowships with these nightmares wandering within me, that within the perspective of living in a vacant apartment when sick in bed would play in the mind again when the old nightmares had reappeared.
      “Welcome to my nightmare,-- did I mean to scare you” Alice would recite. The dream had been placed in writing now for the world to read and this is something I knew had to be said about the accident as it was wrecking havoc on my memories.
      “These nightmares they don’t want to fade,” I found myself saying when I would lay in the hospital bed back in 2006-2007. I couldn’t talk about these to the room mate because they’d think I was crazy and wish I spoke to God more about them. They would have told me to give these nightmares to God but even then they still remained the horror of the slamming the door into me a little harder than it did was the thing that played out in my mind and the horror of this played out when I stared in the darkness of night. The vivid thing for me was the nightmares and they were more surreal as I got older.
      Just that surviving that night in 1996 was surreal enough as it was when it came to cruising down Lake Shore Drive and it was ten years to the day of that accident that these nightmares made themselves manifest. That these nightmares I take down are a testimony to me to saying what doesn’t kill makes me stronger.
      “Dreams are the messages from God directly” are what I was told when I was in the college infirmary and when I was in the hospital I was living out a nightmare in itself by not being able to have control of my body because it felt so weak. The hell I felt when I was wandering the street in Chicago during that period was exhaustion and it was almost dream-like when I was wandering out of the one hospital to the next one. The nightmares about the car wreck were fresh upon my mind when I was trying to get something to eat with the two dollars I had in my wallet from earlier that night.
      I kept thinking about the nurse and what she said about dreams and nightmares because I kept thinking about that damned nightmare that wandered in my mind – that it is part of my testimony now of why I am still around. There were times I kept thinking that I was in someone else’s fucked up dream and couldn’t wake up from it – it was like that when I was in the hospital for three weeks with the danger of homelessness hanging over my head. Another nightmare looming as it was the very real horror of poverty and being a pauper not knowing where the next bed was going to be at or where I would lay my head – the infinite nightmares that played into my mind were from the time in Iowa where there was no one I could really trust or a very small handful who took me in and allowed me to sleep. I kept thinking about the car accident back there too being that it was two years from the day that it was playing out in the back of my mind.
      It was no place in sight that something like that to fade away but things like that don’t exactly fade because they’re part of a man’s testimony. Surviving a car accident doesn’t seem real to me for some reason and in some ways I am still dreaming about that night.