My Worst Nightmare

Dear Wal,

As a child, one recurring dream haunted me. Not every night, but it was so vivid and so real that it staid with me long after I woke up. The fact that it has staid with me until now, when recurring nightmares are a thing of the past, and many of my childhood memories have faded into the mysterious fog of time. In fact, I would say that next to falling off a 17 hand (that's over six feet tall) draft horse and spraining my ankle, that dream was one of the scariest experiences of my life. I got over this fear long ago, but the dream itself still haunts me.

I'm in some sort of outpost, the last place you stop before you make the hundred mile drive to Grandma's house that night, the last toll before crossing the bridge. It's getting late. The sun is setting, the shadows have begun to creep past table legs and boots and still hands. The people in the outpost trickle away, becoming fewer and fewer as the day ages. They have no faces, and they ask me no questions. I leave them alone, because I know they won't speak to me. They leave me alone, because they already know what I'm going to do.
I'm going to cross the gap.
There's no other way to describe it. The gap: two huge slabs of stone, creeping slowly toward each other, and every day close the path between them by the moment the night fell utterly over the land, trapping the last rays of sun within their grip. The road between them is an easy one, if walked during the daylight. But evening is quickly ending, and I'm still sitting in the outpost watching the sun as the two slabs of stone slowly eat it alive. It's only when the cliffs start to kiss the edges of the sun, that I get up, leave the outpost, and place a foot on the road.
Everything after that happens too fast for me to believe. The cliffs accelerate from their steadfast creep and move impossibly fast, closing their crushing jaws around me. I'm crushed, assimilated into the fabric of the stone. From a third perspective, maybe it's death, maybe it's something more, I watch as I become not me anymore, but a red blur in the rock strata. Somehow, I know the cliffs are closed permanently.
Only then do I wake up, after the whole horror is over.

Freaky, right?

/endrant