I had a lucid and unsettling dream last night. The dream began with a
dark shape-shifting cloud-form, occluding the last, distant, rays of dusk.
In my mind's eye I saw an aggregate mass grow perspectively immense, until it was immediately overhead. In a fool's moment of relief I presumed what I saw was natural phenomena - avian murmuration. But, just as I thought I'd phenomenally settled the anomaly, it began to condense into darker empyrean matter and then rend into four distinct figures.
The now independent, but materially allied, figures coalesced into the shape of four black horses - furiously running horses of monumental proportion. With deep revulsion I recognized the pack of morbidly riderless black steeds as multiple manifestation of the black horse of famine - the horse of famine, from the infamous Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The black horse of famine ... times four. My dreaming observer was gripped with fascination and fear.
In an instant the four began to atomize into inharmoniously clotted, scatter-shot flocks, and then ungainly, individual, birds. Crows, ravens, carrion-birds - flying raggedly away from each other as if magnetically repelled from some unseen compass point ... out, out, onto the world's four directions.
