Is Madness the True Reality?

I sit, my mind racing, not knowing where I am or what I am doing. I hear people walking around, even next to my bed yet, when I look, no one is there. Thoughts overrunning each other are keeping me from sanity. I know not what to write to help me gain control once again. Even my knowledge of how to use words has left me stranded on a barren plain of nothingness. I am lost.

Each day it seems as though I recede further from the human race. I care not to see anyone nor do anything that would include another soul. Even my children are distant and unfocused to my eyes. I force myself to converse with those that deign to enter into my world but only as much as is necessary and nothing more. I fear becoming the antagonist with even the most innocent of visitors. I have excluded those closest to me from as much as I can as I care not to be close to anyone at the present time.

There are those times that I cannot recall what has occurred as if time has spiraled forward without my knowledge or awareness. An hour may pass with it seeming to be minutes without me able to recount the events that had just unfolded. Did I write? There is nothing on the page. Did I read? The book is not even open. Did I talk? No one is there. Did I even move? I still sit where I was. Am I mad?

Many nights have passed that I rested not as if sleep had eluded me yet I awoke from a sound slumber. Dreams are forgotten as wakefulness overtakes that world of imagination and metaphor. Did I dream at all? Flashes of events that could not have occurred enter my consciousness as if taunting me with some false reality. People I do not recognize speak as if they are long-time friends. Friends are now enemies because of some wrong I do not recall. Family is gone, replaced by automatons waiting to end my sorrowful life, controlled by an unseen, unloving god bent on destruction.

As I sit, looking over the page, I catch glimpses of specters mocking my very existence. I hear the laughter of some maniacal entity just beyond the edge of reality. I am mad, I must be, to see and hear the things I do. Phantoms in the night are my bane yet I fear not these immaterial beings sent to haunt me. I fear nothing but being alone and alone I am, save for these demons and angels of torment. Has my life been so wicked that I deserve the torment they bring? Or were my trespasses from an earlier life forgotten in the mists of time and space?

I have been alive forever, since the dawn of time, and have made many mistakes. Through the many lives I have endured I have been both monster and savior, lover and enemy. Could the evil in my past be what is causing my insanity in this time and this place? Is it possible the past evils are being revisited instead of having been put to death long ago? Oh, the horror I am capable of. I have warned those closest to me that it would be possible for that evil to emerge and rear its ugly head. I feared that it would and I may only assume that it has, that the evil has escaped its prison deep in the bowels of my mind and ventured forth to wreak havoc upon my life. As Dr. Jekyll had Mr. Hyde I have my own Hyde, waiting in the shadows to come forth to pursue his own desires with abandonment.

Am I mad? Is reality only a dream and my dreams the true reality?