I was under the weather for three days, almost in a state of delerium, sleeping, going in and out of awareness, in and out of consciousness, in and out of dreams.

Mornings were lucid and I wrote in my diaries but by 11 AM I was back on the couch and from noon on I could barely keep my eyes open. Nights were odd as I was often wide awake at 2:30 or 3, then caught a bit more sleep at 5 or so. Even after the nausea and fatigue left me, i was still in this same sleep-wake pattern.

I saw one cabinet in a recurring dream. It had the usual glass upper doors, but was modern, maybe a Bauhaus design, severe, functional. Crowned with a set of anelope antlers. In my dream there was a group of lights inside on the top shelf. Warm vertical lines of light that shimmered as I watched them. My Klimt lights. Vienna. they were only about 4-6 inches high each, and they were aligned together, suspended inside the cabinet a third from the top, taking up the main third or perhaps the third quarter. I must be precise. Six lights, then the doors, then six more lights. Dim, like warm gold LED lights. A modern chandelier in miniature, held within the cabinet, seen through glass doors. The tree outside reflected on the glass doors moves in the wind. The lights shine and dim and shine again.

Night after night this cabinet of small lights appeared in my dreams. Sometimes open, mostly closed. When the doors opened my dream went blank. But closed doors meant delights, intrigue, objects inferred or imagined, light playing and reflecting, refracting out to the eye, calling involvement, seductively calling me to open the doors. Some dreams I am looking for a key. Some I can’t find the door handle. Some I am frustrated and want to smash the windows, or another dream character comes in to talk me into doing something else. Or a dream character takes me to a replica, opens it, shows me its contents one by one.

“But these are only replicas,” I cry, “I want the real thing.”

He looks at me with pity, tuts and shakes his head. “Poor fool,” he is thinking.

The doors of the cabinet remain always firmly closed, except for a few dreams that opened them. In one, the door is slightly ajar. I’m surprised to see a very different reflection on the glass, the reflection of a large interior room with comfortable couches and a fire burning heartily in the fireplace. There were no tree reflections, only the flicker of the fire.

A red light in the lower corner flashed from time to time, and a white monolith blocked the view of the lower half of the cabinet. Inside the cabinet, through the glass, I could make out technical equipment stacked on lower shelves, with patch cords connecting boxes of electronics. In a far corner the upper left held two black figures in abstract form, standing before a golden cloth that covered another room. The doors were open just a little and I gently approached the cabinet.

Standing in front with my heart beating in my chest I took a chance, my chance. I opened both doors, just opened them like wings. I’d been prepared for wind, or an orchestral sound, or something grand to match my grand gesture. But nothing came. Literally nothing. The room went black, darkened as if there were a solar eclipse. Cold as if it were total. All objects in the room shimmered, their molecules chilled, as life withdrew. I stood shaking, fearing what I’d done. For I saw then in that dream, the interior of the cabinet that had looked so delightful, whose intrigue had cast a spell upon me, that lovely twinkling cabinet, almost winking, calling me to come and admire it.

Inside it was a blackness, a smoky unknown darkness – cold, palpable mist began to fill the room. I swooned and fell to the floor. The air boomed. The doors closed. I woke in my bed. Tears on my face, my hands shaking. A poem was turning in its gestational sphere. “My voice, my voice,” I wrote, but no more came. Whose voice? mine or the voice of the darkness in the cabinet? I had been warned.

It was only a dream but I got a lot of information from my dreams. They were a valid research technique. The dreams of this cabinet weren’t part of my sanctioned mission, they were naturally occurring so I didn’t apply any lucid dream techniques or other overlays to decode them. I needed help to be able to manage their influence. And just as I thought that, I knew I could ask the archivist. Penny Dalgene.

She was expecting me to call and remarked on how pale I was looking. I told her all about it, the HQ, everything. Something in her atmosphere had loosened my tongue. She took notes as I spoke, but they were pictorial, not in words. The words were recorded. She drew rooms, maps, pathways, glyphs, very rapidly as I talked. By the time I’d come to the dark cloud inside the cabinet she was ready, and her image of it was exactly what I’d seen – with one difference. The cloud she drew looked like it had a face. And I swear that face looked a lot like the Mexican terracotta figurine.