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Maddie mother speaks of ‘endless bad dream’

The mother of missing British girl Madeleine McCann described how she was haunted by harrowing visions of her daughter and was stuck in an “endless bad dream” in extracts from a new book printed Sunday.

Proceeds from Kate McCann’s account, “Madeleine”, will go towards boosting dwindling search funds.

“The truly awful manifestation of what I was feeling was a macabre slideshow of vivid pictures in my brain that taunted me relentlessly,” the 43-year-old admitted in the book, which is released this week.

“I was crying out that I could see Madeleine lying cold and mottled, on a big grey stone slab.

“The pictures I saw of our Madeleine no sane human being would want in her head, but they were in mine,” extracts from the book serialised in The Sun newspaper revealed.

“I simply couldn’t rid myself of these evil scenes in the early days and weeks.”

Kate and her husband Gerry, from Leicestershire in central England, last week marked the fourth anniversary of their daughter’s abduction from a holiday apartment in Portugal.

“The idea of a monster like this touching my daughter, stroking her, defiling her perfect little body, just killed me over and over again,” added McCann.

“Once we did begin to function within what felt like a endless bad dream, we started to comb through our memories searching for something significant.”

Gerry McCann warned in November that a search fund set up by the couple, which once stood at two million pounds (2.29 million euros, 3.2 million dollars), was due to run out at any time.

The McCanns hope details contained within the 384-page book will jog the memory of anyone who may have information about the disappearance.

Madeleine went missing in the Algarve resort of Praia da Luz on May 3, 2007, a few days before her fourth birthday, as her parents and their friends ate at a nearby restaurant.