by Nathaniel Nathaniel Hawthorne
First published 2018
You open your eyes suddenly in the darkness and catch your dream characters still gathered around your bed. They hover for one startling moment before dissolving back into shadow. You find yourself suspended between sleep and waking, still half present in that strange realm where your mind just wandered. The dream world feels more real now than it did while you were dreaming. Its ghostly residents and impossible landscapes seem clearer in this brief instant of consciousness. A church bell tolls somewhere in the distance, carried on the night wind. You wonder if that sound drifted from a tower that existed only in your dream, or if it belongs to the waking world you have just rejoined. This moment stretches between two realities, neither fully asleep nor completely awake.
Genres: 20th-century, horror, ghost-stories, dark-fantasy, 19th-century, gothic
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: liminal-spaces, unreliable-narrator
Period: 19th-Century, 20th-Century
24 pages · Paperback · Independently published