I don’t sleep in the dark anymore. I don’t mean I have a night-light or anything like that. I mean the main light in the center of my ceiling, always on, all night long. I refuse to sleep in the dark, ever, and this is my explanation. Please understand I am screaming my innermost thoughts, but I do not expect many to find them believable, so I am placing this one under “fiction”…
I woke in immense, consuming terror. The dream, it was so real. I was so sure, but even then the details were falling away. A man has just died. A slow painful, tortuous death…what was his name? I groped through my mind for the word. Robert, maybe? Nevertheless, his face was unfamiliar. Middle aged…forty maybe, with graying hair and a balding head. Yes, there was no way I knew this man. This knowledge, of course, did not ease my dread in the least. I have seen a man murdered, and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. Even as I had lain there, watching him suffer, I could not save him. Since I’m telling you the dream, I might as well tell you how this man died. He was tortured with knives and fire. I saw the non-lethal cuts all over his body as I watched him burn to death. The stench of burning flesh lingers in my mind. I can smell it even now.
Then a new, obscenely irrational, fear takes over. I am alone. There is not even the slightest hint of sound. No comforting presence to bring me back to calm reality. Struggling to regain my sanity, I inch out of bed, silent as a black cat. I slowly turn the knob on my bedroom door. The creaking noise it makes is deafening in the deathly silence. I creep downstairs through the dense darkness, and into the kitchen, to get a glass of water-a childhood habit, which tends to rid me of fear. I grabbed a glass and got some water from the sink. Sitting on the floor, against faux-wood cabinets, my nerves begin to return to me. Then, I’m falling into a bottomless pit, I’m being stabbed a million times, I’m being beaten black and blue, I’m being burned alive, all while sitting motionless on that kitchen floor. I’m confused, hot tears running down my face. What is happening to me? Then I can see them, just barely, as if they are simply shadows, dim reflections of their real selves. Dark creatures, torturing me there, it feels like dying. This is what oppression feels like. As I fall, fighting to survive, I see a light, there in the darkness. Hope, a feeble hope, as the light grows and overcomes these demons they are gone and only light is there. These bright creatures, are still barely there though, as if in another, phantom world. They fill me with hope. I will live to fight this fight another day.

"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."