Mind Whispers Louder at Night

Spiderwebbed rusty hinges on a bedroom door shrieked in the dead of night. Disrupting the abstruse arachnoidal telecommunication hotlines, and disentangling the gossamery figment of the bewitching hour.

A pair of unwelcomed hands in black gloves nudged the door just a crack from behind. Suddenly, a dream-like profile of a man appeared. For a fleeting moment, in spectral silence, he stood as still as a cold stone. Like an unknown soldier seeking his tomb in the catacombs of his own mind; the one bearing the scar of an epitaphic misnomer of a real man cut in boldface lie on a tightlipped marble slab. Even so, he stood at attention in his fuliginous funerary shrouds of mourning-black that night.

What he did next was eye-popping and unreal. You can say that again -- unreal: He expelled all the necromantic air he could spare out of his lungs to reduce his rotund waistline. And now, with deflated girth, he slanted his body askew and sidestepped fittingly right through the opening that he'd just cracked ajar.

Soon thereafter, others with penguoid footsteps followed. Some entered sideways, while others straight up, in accordance with their sizes, measured in breadths -- not lengths. In their wake, the alary shadows flung high and low on ceilings and walls and began to fitfully flap and flutter in corvine clapperclawing avigation. Just like ominous black ravens -- false phoenixes of hope -- from under each shuffling shoe they birthed and flew. Only to bounce off the sleeper's walls and fall.

Everyone's head hurt a little. Everyone's!

Somnus, our sleeper, with his head buried deep in a feather pillow, felt a sudden unease in the noosphere of his woolgathering bed. His orthodoxy challenged and sangfroid in self-doubt, he raised his groggy head off the pillow a whisper to survey the subjective surroundings through the sticky eyelashes of his mind. Soon enough, he directed his gaze towards the uninvited whisperers -- it's no longer a dream -- and what he saw were nine, repeat, nine, eyeballs staring at him all at once in full force.

The one-eyed fellow raised his two eyebrows and didn't even blink once. He was visually impaired all right, but efficient enough with what God had given him -- one of, or taken.

The other four intruders were less dumbfound, understandably, for each had twice as many optical orbs as the other fellow before, but not for long. Until that is, all six -- dreamers, susurrous sleepers, and somnambulant seekers -- all jumped as one.

A~H~A! What a moment!

Just then, out of nowhere, a single eye with pineal glare, not belonging to any one single person per se -- saw it in toto! as it flashed and dazzled them all. Whilst streaking down like a shooting star, and with one epiphanic bang, it awakened all but ONE.

Which? ... Which one "is" the lone dreamer now?

This was as true as a dream could get, yet not unreal -- this was not Somnus' dream, nor the dreamer was he or she. It was not the writer's dream dreamt up in a syllabary bed in deep sleep. Neither were those the other five wanderers' imaginings ... Who's left?

Let's leave things at sixes and sevens, shall we?

It seemed like this selfsame six,VI, 6, were once again hexed as one; as though nary a sleeper was left.

As further, and farther wander I, I wonder! too who the real whisperers of the mind are ... is?