The flame erratically flared within its glass container, swirling the mighty darkness into a cascade of swooshing shadows. The fire showed me my way, though it could not have told me where it led me. In the midnight bleakness, when the ghouls of eccentric life and fiendish attributes stalked the plane of man was when I rushed only in my nightgown into the vortex, I was running, but I had not an actual realization of why, but a continuously fleeting, though never absent, feeling of dread; that some unseen assailant was indeed hunting me. The shrub which I charged through, orange from the flickering light of my lantern and breathing from the winds which moaned and cried out to me, seemed to mock the imprisoned flame which I held, that my chase was within a nightmarish hellscape and my perpetrator be a demon from the devil's zealots. I could not hear the footfalls, which were apparent to my subconscious though I did not risk a moment to listen. Time seemed absent, I had lost how long I had run, yet the scenery seemed never changing, always a steady encapsulation of black and the maniacal laughter of the wind. And for as long as I ran, the chaser still was present within my mind, and I was pushed by fear to continue though I was still ignorant about what was chasing me.

I found myself crying out for unrecognized names to save me, to help me from this nightmare, but I had not realized why I called out to strangers. My subconscious had seemingly called out to my conscious mind in that instant, and I now knew that I was dreaming and that these unrecognized names were that of my real-life mother and father. But I had still yet to wake, running from a monster I had not seen but felt like it was right beyond the wall of blackness. My pleas were met with omnipotent laughter that rode the deriding gales of the dream plane. The blackness felt like it was growing stronger, was my only source of safety expiring? And though I could not see this monster, I felt its breath on my back as I continued to run the humid fetor reminded me of death and decay. Something told me to look down at myself, and I saw that I was decaying, flesh wrinkled and wizened off my bones, which they too began to brittle and atrophy. My light now was extinct, and though I never saw the monster chasing me for so long, I could feel its cold fingers dig into my withering chest and pull out my heart, which had finally stopped beating.