I don't do much stream of consciousness stuff. But I love surreal writing. Here's a poem I did after a few nights of nightmares:
The Nine Foals of the Night Mare
Of a night I went to sleep and did not wake:
A night as dark and deep as any sea,
In which I drowned a thousand times or more.
With fear my lungs were risen to the brim.
My bed-sheets; cold as winter ice they were,
And seeped into my skin, their talons latched.
My tears did freeze upon my darkened cheeks,
Though cry them I did not know I had done.
My mind was soaked and heavy with lament,
As like a dampened rag hung in the cold
And shaken in the hardened northern gust.
My heart cried forth in agony and pain,
And as its scream ran rampant through my veins
My muscles tensed and withered like the rose
That cannot stand against the cold and dry:
My soul is battered, crippled by my curse!
The moonlight does not shine for me;
My night is black as black can be.
My death was shown to me as visions rose
Before my mind’s eye, like a dreamer’s trance
Induced by some hallucinogenic drug;
Some opiate ingested unawares.
My thigh was struck by some rapacious teeth,
As though it was being eaten from within;
It fires my nerves and leaves them numb and vexed;
I claw upon my flesh with nervous nails.
The harpies fall upon me like a plague,
The weight of Charybdis presses on my frame,
The sirens beckon me with tainted grace,
As sail I do through dreamscape oceans vast
That roll through ages of the human race
And fall upon the shores of ruined lands,
Where slaughtered dreamers roam in somnolent bands
And sing a dirge both haunting yet unheard.
Their dreams fall short on shores of Lethe,
Which flows to seas of drought, and death.
Nine black foals I imagined came before
Mine eyes and pulled behind them my demise;
A terror great but indescribable.
Now where have all my words of terror gone?
I’m speechless as a babe without a tongue,
Incapable of any expression at all,
Except for what my eyes reflect. The storm
Now gathers up before my weakening soul,
And all resolve floods forth from out my limbs
Like air that seeps from out a pierced balloon,
And limp go all my passions and desires.
I’m stranded on a barren rocky isle.
I’m left behind on cliffs with broken wings,
And stranded on a bark without a sail;
There’s no escape for me now from this fate,
There’s no salvation granted from the gale.
I cower in defeated pose,
And flounder in repeated prose.
The nine foals of the night mare carry me
Into a world that’s all bereft of time;
A world where tortured beings damn their gods
To raise their hopes from out a hopeless vale.
My heartbeat slowly weakens in the wake
Of all this; my eternal curse of sleep.
The light of day shall never greet my eyes
Again, nor part the curtains of my room.
Oh gods of night, where hence has fled my sun?
Oh gods of sleep, where hence has fled my morn?
I’m stranded within my eternal plight
Of madness, and of sickness, and remorse.
Oh Father, why hast thou forsaken me;
Damned me to rot in this forgotten hall?
And so resign to sleep; I sign my peace
And hurl all hope into the limitless sea.
If a ship may come my tale to keep,
Let it find me in a dreamless sleep.