2) Catharsis

She is such a wreck
Grins framed upon the walls are not her face anymore
Child's become a mess
Twelve months or seven years, there's no difference

The demons in her eyes
Their laughs are no surprise
She's known them for so long
They're trapped inside

Recollections of
Dreams dreamt within these walls
They won't stop screaming
They pierce right through her hands, infect her arms, crumble her spine
Sprawled across her floor, she stares right past him

The demons in her eyes
Their laughs are no surprise
She's known them for so long
They're trapped inside
Her vision's bloodred glare
Crime scenes and wild hair
Punctured fingers trace lines down her cheeks
Their shrieks are laughter now

Warm, safe, laid in her crib,
She rolls, as with a smile
Devils grip their blades
She's in danger, too; with a knock on the door
Mother starts to sing

"Wake up dear, stir now please
Wipe the sweat from your brow
Your dreams are so dark,
I must not let you know
This violent world or its cruel, deadly kiss"

The demons in her eyes
Each night is her demise
She's struggled for so long, and can't escape
The walls all make her stay
Closed doors keep hurt away
With arms open, steady grasp,
The stranger's hand reached in to set her free

__________________________________________________

She is such a wreck
Grins framed upon the walls are not her face anymore
Child's become a mess
Twelve months or seven years, there's no difference

It is seven years later and the little girl has grown up. The twelve-year-old version of the same child is substantially changed. In fact, she has changed to such an extent that the pictures of the child in frames on their walls are no longer an accurate representation of her. In the past year, she has disintegrated into a psychological mess, and the time that has passed since has felt to her as though it were an eternity; as long, at least, as the seven years since she got lost in the forest. This establishes an important connection between her getting lost in the woods and an event in which she lost herself a year ago.


The demons in her eyes
Their laughs are no surprise
She's known them for so long
They're trapped inside

The girl is plagued by visions of "demons" that she simply cannot rid herself of - or, perhaps, they simply can't get out. They have been with her for "so long" - the eternity that has been the past year, or, indeed, the past seven years.


Recollections of
Dreams dreamt within these walls
They won't stop screaming
They pierce right through her hands, infect her arms, crumble her spine
Sprawled across her floor, she stares right past him

Here it is revealed that the images she's been seeing have been in dreams, and that there have been many. The pronoun "they" is left undefined to stand for either the demons in her dreams (subject in the chorus, and which are already known to have been laughing) or the dreams as a whole. Regardless, the fiasco has been violently destroying her from the inside out, wiping her out on her bedroom floor. There is clearly another figure present, but she does not notice him; she cannot, in the state she is in.


The demons in her eyes
Their laughs are no surprise
She's known them for so long
They're trapped inside
Her vision's bloodred glare
Crime scenes and wild hair
Punctured fingers trace lines down her cheeks
Their shrieks are laughter now

The content of the girl's haunting dreams is introduced as it is explained how these images of "crime scenes and wild hair" have destroyed her. Her vision has turned red, meaning that she sees this chaos everywhere and in everything; but more literally, it creates the association between the color red and her eyes themselves - her eyes are bloodshot as a reflection of her despair. Solidifying this image, the image of the demons' "punctured fingers" - bloody fingers, then - have traced lines (like tears) down her cheeks. She's not crying of her own free will, she is having this torture forced upon her by the demons, the dreams, the visions she is plagued with. The last line confirms the terror of her situation: she is utterly at their mercy, as these howling demons laugh at her sadistically.


Warm, safe, laid in her crib,
She rolls, as with a smile
Devils grip their blades
She's in danger, too; with a knock on the door
Mother starts to sing

The music has changed moods at this point to softly rolling chords. Narration has escaped the girl's mind and now stands outside of her horrifying dreams in her bedroom, watching her as she sleeps. Despite the internal turmoil, she seems to be in deep sleep. The sleep renders her comatose, helpless, lost, in terrible danger at the hands of a host of demons - but one would never have suspected such danger in a child's sweet slumber. Clearly the danger is internal, but the thought is introduced that perhaps it is external as well (as the phrase "she's in danger too" may apply to either the internal or external descriptions in the stanza). Her mother knocks on the door of her 'peacefully' sleeping daughter, coming in to wake her up at the start of a new day.


"Wake up dear, stir now please
Wipe the sweat from your brow
Your dreams are so dark,
I must not let you know
This violent world or its cruel, deadly kiss"

The mother tries to wake her child as she notices with a twinge of protective worry that the girl has probably been having bad dreams again. She is aware, to an extent, that her daughter has been troubled by nightmares over the past year, though she knows nothing of the contents of those dreams since the girl is unable to speak of them. It is also evident that she knows why her daughter must be having these dreams, but she is afraid that if she shares anything, that it will aggravate the state of her daughter's damaged mind, just as the knowledge has already damaged her own. Just like her daughter is hidden away within the confines of her skull, her mother hides the truth about "this violent world and it's cruel, deadly kiss" from her daughter - the "cruel, deadly kiss" signifies that the "violent world" her mother refuses to let her daughter know has caused a death. The details of this death are the mother's secret and the source of both the mother and daughter's pain, although it is to be noted with disgusted irony that the mechanism of the girl's mother's protection - the attempt to prevent her from knowing "violence" and "cruelty" and "death" - is the act of allowing the girl to stay in the bloody, inescapable hell-hole that is her nightmares.


The demons in her eyes
Each night is her demise
She's struggled for so long, and can't escape
The walls all make her stay
Closed doors keep hurt away
With arms open, steady grasp,
The stranger's hand reached in to set her free

Every night, every night, she is subjected to this torture; every night, she is subjected to this bloody struggle. Every night, she struggles to get out, but she is confined by the boundaries within her own head and she can't get out. More than that, she's also cooped up by her mother, driven into isolation: once again, the irony of this reality is brought out with the note that the "closed doors" - her mother's unwillingness to let her daughter into the world - has supposedly "kept hurt away," where it has really only succeeded in driving the poor girl insane. In a startling contrast to the rest of the song, the last line provides a strange release: although literally, the mother has become a stranger to the daughter because of the distance between them (the daughter's inability to communicate because of her nightly trauma, the mother's unwillingness to give her daughter the full story about the death that has occurred), and has just woken her up and "set her free" from her dreams, there is a meta-narrative taking place. That the old man is a "stranger" is the only further description he's given in Prologue; this scene acts as a flashback to Prologue when he took her hand and lead her away from her fear and into security, but it also foreshadows the resolution of her pain.