Paranoia meets Nightmares

I use earplugs when I sleep though they are not very effective. I hear things anyway.

I think insulating myself from sound contributed to this morning's bad dreams. Dreams of suffocating darkness in the abandoned aggregate of the house I grew up in and my grandparents' house. All of it dimly lit in a faint green light emanating from buzzing street lights.

I would suddenly turn towards the windows every instant I felt the attention of being under surveillance. I found a flashlight to shine in their faces but I quickly found out that the batteries were fading.

I had a gun I could not find & all the light switches led to broken filaments. One switch roared with the growl of a sink garbage disposal that my insulated senses had trouble detecting. I realized then that my ears were clogged shut and I gouged at them in frustration, realizing the sound from the sink would arouse their curiosity. The sense that they were watching again was upon me and I slid with my back against the wall to the floor. I realized the floor was covered in rotting vegetables that were spilling out of an open refrigerator. I could hear as they fell now from the unlit shelves - a grimy green color on these deflated peppers and squash and celery as they succumbed, leaking their fluids and turning to rot & ash.

I had the sense now that the night was forever. There would be no end. I wanted to leave now.

I opened the front door and realized it was the whole neighborhood. It felt like it had all been abandoned but I could not be certain. The horrible buzzing streetlights illuminating all the seemingly empty houses and dead streets in the same decay of muted green light. It all seemed like it was buried under an ocean of stifling darkness.

Suddenly a dog appeared. It was a neighbor's dog and it came running up to me. I would take it back to its home but first I turned back to the front door. I would have to find the keys because I knew I had many doors to lock.