Monday, December 1st 2025. 11:03AM
I lay upon the bed and close my eyes.
There is a door.
Opening it, I find myself standing before a forest. It is day and bright, the grass and leaves are green. There is a path under my feet, leading away to the left, but it is not the way for me to travel.
I approach the forest.
Stepping below its canopy, the area dims. I continue walking forward, leaves crunching beneath my feet.
The forest is different.
Beneath an overcast sky, thin grey trunks stretch to leafless heights.
Scars in the wood pour forth a deep red sap, like fresh blood on recently fallen snow.
There is a white stone sarcophagus in a clearing.
Upon its lid, a statue of a knightly or even kingly figure. They are reclined, sword in hand stretched from chest to feet, with eyes closed. It reminds me of the 4 of Swords in the Tarot.
At it’s head, a partial inscription upon an upright stone. Only the left side seems to be carved, the right side smooth with age or never worked. A first name and the beginning of a date, though the numbers are not digits. They are something closer to Roman Numerals, however I cannot read them.
Pushing the lid to the side, a thin staircase of the same white stone leads into darkness.
A wave of fear washes over me. Intense, and real, it takes me some time before I can take another step forward.
I walk down the stairs.
Descending in pitch blackness, I can hear the echo of my footsteps dancing around the thin staircase. No rail or other offer of safety as comfort, moving deeper into the earth.
Another step forward, and no stair rises to meet my foot. I tumble forward into the darkness.
I am falling through some well-like cylindrical tunnel. Flashes of the walls, probably at least 50 feet away in every direction, show it to be of a rough, jagged stone.
I slam into the ground at the bottom so hard that I don’t even bounce.
I pick myself up from the stone and dirt floor, finding myself in a dim ring of pale light.
Before me on the ground is a single rose and stem.
I lift it and inhale the perfume of its flower, then look around for a way to proceed.
There is a flat, grey stone wall with a crack just big enough that I could squeeze through sideways. With a deep inhale, I work my way through.
I step into a small circular chamber.
I am standing upon a stone walkway surrounding a tiled round reflecting pool. The full moon is visible upon its surface, illuminating the chamber from a hole in the ceiling.
To my right, a small window-like alcove in which a single lit candle spills yellow-orange light into the room. Next to it, a circular staircase of white stone leading counter-clockwise upward.
Following these stairs, I exit a small mausoleum into a grass field.
The moon shining down from above, the grass seems to be a desaturated blue-green color and sways as though a breeze were crossing it, though I feel no wind.
Moving onward, a path through the field takes me to the edge of another forest, this time with a fallen log blocking the path.
[Here, I begin to feel energetics in my physical body, such that I can barely hold still. I have to roll to the side and trap my hands beneath me to keep from moving.]
The log is placed such that the density of the brush to either side prevents me from simply walking around it. Instead, I move to its right end and, finding it hollow, crawl inside.
Moving through a wood passage which seems much larger than the log itself, I find an exit on my right, and now stand on the opposite side of the log, the forest open to me.
Continuing on the path, I come to a clearing housing an immense, white, dead tree shining in the moonlight.
It seems to have no proper top, just ending unceremoniously amid thin branches as though it had been decapitated.
The branches reach down and lift me along the trunk, carrying me all the way to its apex, where I can see the tree itself is hollow. Inside this wood tube more branches, which have grown inward like a mouth of wooden teeth, slowly lower me through its length and onto the black soil within.
Here, I produce the rose. I smell it once more, then kneel to plant its stem in the soil. As I lower it to the ground small white roots wriggle outward from its base, reaching for the dirt.
It sets itself upright upon the ground here, the moon brightening this wooden cathedral from the hole at the top, and begins to grow. The stem reaches up and up and up, past the branches which retreat to give it space, and its flower expands to cover the hole.
An open red face to look upward at the pale moon in the blue sky shining down.
The roots begin to churn the dirt and I am pulled downward.
They race deeper alongside me, until I pass them and find myself falling.
I splash into a pool of dark water.
There is the sensation of floating, as though I were weightless.
A current carries me forward, and I can tell what seems to be the edge of this pool is a sheer drop.
Again, fear overwhelms me, and yet I make no motion to stop this momentum.
I and the water spill over the edge and fall. And fall. And fall.
The churning torrent at the bottom is so violent that it is hard to believe it is water falling into water. It seems more like air being forced upward through some viscous volatile substance, boiling at a high pressure, swirling belches from some unseen monster.
And yet, it also seems to be nothing at all.
I have the sense that my body falls into this maelstrom, yet my point of view does not follow it.
Partway down the falls, upon a small cliff, rests a cottage.
I step inside and there is a sense of waiting for some undetermined amount of time.
Exiting, I find a white horse pulling a small chariot waiting for me in the moonlight.
Stepping on board, it carries me across a landscape from which it is hard to pull any details.
We arrive at the entrance to an expansive stone castle which has a strange smoothness to it.
I dismount the chariot, and ascend the castle stairs.
She is wearing a pale white dress tinted slightly blue from the moonlight streaming in. This has the effect of making Her skin seem very dark.
A giant figure, She towers over me.
She is headless. The Full Moon in the window behind Her throne takes the place of both head and crown.
Outside below the Moon, rows of black, gnarled, dead trees reach their branches upward as if trying to escape the fog that hangs low and still upon the ground.
Something similar to electricity streams from Her fingertips as She lifts me with a single hand, placing me upon the seat to Her left.
She is Silence, She is Death, and She is Magic.
Nothing is spoken or acted in the uncounted time spent here. There is nothing to say of the experience.
With a gentle hand, She presses upon my head, pushing me down into the seat.
I find myself climbing down a ladder which spills me upon some sort of conveyor belt.
This belt winds around until I am moving through some sort of tunnel.
The end of the tunnel grows brighter and brighter.
I open my eyes.
It is 11:36 AM.
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