Destroy the Big Bad

I found myself wheeled down a hallway at a blinding speed, bare murmurs and misdirected jargon the only sounds surrounding me. Countless glaring lights burn at my corneas with an acrid, stinging pain, and the polished linoleum floors only serve to reflect the dizzying knives of stabbing lightning towards my receptors - the incessant grinding and squeaking of the gurney's rubber-tire wheels against the ground drills its maniacal, irregular rhythm into my worn head, my injured skull. Assembling enough motivation to distract this poor overwhelmed mind from the constant, unerring assault, I begrudgingly pulled open my eyes fully - with a conscious effort - to find already that whatever remained of that twisted noise and burning light was now departed, replaced by a calm but deadening darkness - night's silent caress. As I adapted to the utter pitch permeating all self, all thought, a surface began to bring itself forth from the blotched backdrop of those visual recesses. It was a semi-reflective board-like being, onyx, sapphire, obsidian - soundless as the lull of the dreamer's world. This meditation, however, was ethereal - at the same slithering pace that transient brooding-place of the mind surfaced out of the dark waters, the steadily climbing sun followed, harsh and burdened with the truths known and lies taken instead - immediately, all past thoughts of introspection and brooding were obliterated against this stunning, monstrous beast. Only then did I realize that all this patient observation had been in absolute absence of sound, and at this revelation the auditory senses strained for some morsel, equal to the beauty of the unborn year through which the ritual of rise and fall strenuously took place, and was met by the shrill note of birdsong. Some early avian fellow, I could only guess - red, speckled, lined with ruffled feathers as if dipped in ink and dried hastily overnight - was lightly hopping across an olive branch across the now visible glass panes, intently staring in a demonstration of scientific studiousness, ceaselessly sprinkling the background of nature with its own melodious composition, before, too, departing in search of some more receptive audience. Pleased with this personal orchestra of sight and sound, the brain retreated into its personal slumber as the internal day peeled away its rosy tints to the darker hues of night, passing again the rapid-flowing white-waters of narrow rock straits. But yet my eye noted a strange, blaring apparition contrasting rudely against the peacefully set curtain of darkness, interrupting the placidity of the illusion, hardening into place above the mask of drowsy consciousness, shattering and splintering the now-fading utopia, revealed as only delusion and falsehood... Was this spirit a fragment of a life past, lived partially, it was not known - only that its figure presented a most frustrating obstacle in the way of blissful rest - and moved its fingered appendage up - forward, in a gesture of greeting and voiced a foreign and repulsive tongue, to the sweet song of the birds.

Change 1.