Daylight and Nightmare

Blind sight:
I was visiting a friend, but my friend was not home. I opened the door and went in, knowing my friend probably wouldn’t mind. When I walked into the house, I could feel that something was wrong; I knew it because I have an exacting sense of smell, and I could smell blood in the air. I began to search the house. It was when I went into a dark sitting room that I knew there was a problem. I sat on the couch, trying to determine what exactly was amiss, when I felt something poking underneath the cushions. Reaching my hand into the back crease of the cushion, I pulled out a bloody arm. I sighed deeply, irritated, pushing the arm back behind the cushion, thinking I should probably check the attic. Feeling some trepidation for the first time, I grabbed a candle from a table and approached the attic door as I lit the wick. It was one of those doors that is on the ceiling. If you pull the ring attached to the rope of the trap, it swings down, the ladder crashing to the floor. I pulled the ring and knew I was in for a shock. Apprehension filled my gut as I climbed up the ladder. I only climbed enough to stand with my head and upper body in the room. The scent of blood filled my head. I could see black pools on the floor around me, and I lifted up my candle to give me light. Alarm froze me as I looked at the gore that surrounded me. The floor was puddles of blood, and they were fresh. The walls were spattered with blood that looked as though it had been sprayed by a hose or splattered from a water balloon. I wondered, frustration filling me, how I could clean up the mess. I was about to leave the attic when the most obvious question I hadn’t found an answer to struck me: Where was the body? I woke up in a feverish sweat.
One Christmas week, my sister Amy left home without explanation, packing her bags and telling my parents goodbye. My mother was ill and barely responsive to anyone. Never shedding a tear, she worked her fingers to the bone as she tried to cope with Amy’s abrupt and unexplained departure. I stayed close to her side as she struggled, wishing I could lend her my strength. At one point, she looked at me, despair in her eyes, and said: “Don’t ever have children. They will break your heart.” I had been silent long enough. I sent Amy an angry text: “You’d better have a damn good reason for not being home, right now.” She told me that I couldn’t possibly understand what she was going through; I had no right to judge her. I wanted to strangle her for hurting our parents. I wanted her to feel ten times pain she had caused. I had never been so angry in my life. Watching my mother in the kitchen, barely able to remain focused in the sorrow that my sister had caused, stirred a fire in me that could not easily be put out. The selfishness of my sister made me feel almost murderous. I’m surprised I didn’t beat the crap out of her when she came home, the next week. She sat on the couch like nothing had happened. My parents were so relieved, Amy was never punished. She told me that she had left to deal with some emotional trauma. I told her then, and I still believe now, that dealing with your own pain should never involve injuring others.

Problem:
There are few things I hate more than wasting hours of time getting a good night’s sleep when I could spend hours doing things like homework, writing, and reading. To imagine the bliss of never needing to sleep makes me salivate. Thankfully, I have insomnia. When I do sleep, I often have vicious nightmares, and I remember them as vividly as I remember a good movie or book. It wasn’t until this past year that I ever had a dream that wasn’t a nightmare. To make my situation even worse, the tenor of my nightmares often seeps into my waking day. I am often dazed for hours, trying to convince myself that my nighttime visions were not reality; this is especially hard if my nightmares are visitations of harmful memories. As much as I might wish to dismiss them, they are there almost every time I close my eyes. Conditioning: don’t sleep.

Foresight:
It all started off innocently enough. I was with my extended family, on my father’s side, and we were walking through a big house – lots of windows. There were pictures and paintings covering almost every inch of the walls throughout the house. My aunt was give my parents and myself a tour while my nieces, nephews, and cousins were all running around, distracting me, until my father caught my attention and told me that it was time. I knew what he was talking about, but at the same time, my brain didn’t register what was happening. He took me to a small room where I crawled into a long box – a cheap form of a casket. It was then that my brain registered what I was doing. I would be buried alive. My father sat in a chair in the doorway so that I couldn’t escape, even though we both knew I wouldn’t try. In my lap, there was a sheet of plastic that I knew he would pull up over my head, to suffocate me, before he actually buried me. I panicked as I started to imagine what it would be like as I gasped for air and tried to force the top of the box open, which would be nailed down. My father tried to calm me, even though he was almost completely focused on a book he was reading. He was completely unruffled, his posture relaxed, legs crossed, unconcerned. He explained that this was the only way I could truly prove my faith in God - by dying this way. I needed to suffocate – to suffer and be filled with terror – to truly go to Heaven. I kept telling myself that it was the only way, as he had said, but I continued to grow more panicked. He started to stand up, and I knew it was time. I roused myself, gasping for air that I didn’t need.

My brother was coming home from Afghanistan. My dad, my two sisters and I all piled into the van to go pick him up. When we got to the Chicago airport, my dad pulled up to the loading curb, parked, and went inside to see which gate we should go to. He had just gone inside when a tow truck pulled up next to the van. The driver motioned to me that the van should be moved. I was too young to drive, and my sisters were both younger than me, so I shook my head at the driver. He motioned more furiously, frowning at me. I shook my head again. Obviously I was too young; there was nothing I could do. He pulled up in front of us, getting out of the side of his truck to yell at me: “Move the van, now!” “I can’t drive,” I yelled back at him, feeling both irritated and nervous about what he would do. “Get out of the van,” he ordered. I shook my head, frowning back at him. He got into his truck and started backing up towards the van. I could hear my sisters in the back begin to panic, the youngest dissolving into tears. Forced into being the strong one, I whipped around, yelling at her: “Shut up, right now.” I flinched at my own words even as I could hear the tow truck guy yelling at us again to get out. I folded my arms across my chest, leaning back against my seat. If he was going to tow the van, he was towing it with me inside; we were not in an illegal zone. The driver was about to hook up the van to his truck when I saw Dad come running out of the airport, frantically waving his arms and yelling at the driver, who quickly drove away without a word. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Hindsight:
We all have dreams we wish we could forget. My sister gave me a frozen candy bar. Sweet of her, right? I started awake trying to bite through my index finger.

Worksite:
I was sitting at the desk in my room, leaning over homework. I reached down to absently scratch my thigh but felt something odd – like wet sand and soggy pipe tobacco. Looking down, I could see a small mark. It was not bloody. It looked rather like a dime-size cigarette burn, and I rubbed it, trying to determine what it was. When my fingers rubbed against it, something like black dirt fell onto the floor. Curiously, I pressed down on the mark. It was a hole, and it expanded at my pressure. I pushed my index finger into the hole, curling it around the strange grainy substance. I realized that the dark matter really was dirt, and I frantically tried to pull it out of the hole before it could infect me; however, the more dirt I squeezed and pushed out with my fingers, the deeper into my leg I was able to reach. I could feel my heart skip a beat as my burrowing fingers met something other than dirt. I used my index fingers to pull at the skin around the hole, slitting it apart so that it was now the size of the rim of a glass. I pushed my right hand deep into the compost, pulling out a fistful of it along with shards of glass and pieces of moldy bark. I stood with a shout as I released the handful of debris onto my desk. With growing fear, I pulled handful after handful of dirt out of my thigh, dumping it onto a growing heap on my desk. No matter how much I removed from the cavity in my leg, I never seemed to get close to removing it all. My leg was soon empty. I felt no pain; only heavy and poured out. I awoke and screamed.
When I was sixteen, I received the book Redeeming Love, by Francine Rivers, from one of my sisters-in-law. The book was written from the perspective of a prostitute who was witnessed to by the love of a Christian man. After living through a childhood of sexual abuse, she had come to believe that she could not truly experience love. She was a cynic, hard, and made cold by the things in her past. I was shocked that my sister-in-law had given me the book, but found that I strongly identified with the prostitute. I had not gone through the extent of sexual abuse she had, but I had experienced the same loss of innocence and acquired the same sarcastic view of life. I remember reading about her transformation – how she escaped that mentality and became able to experience life with a new joy and happiness. I wanted that, but I wasn’t sure how to ask. I can remember taking showers when I didn’t need to simply for the excuse to rub my skin raw, trying to rid myself of the filth that I felt was crawling just beneath my skin. Somehow, I never could do it alone.

Solution:
I write down my nightmares, acknowledging the pain, and then forget. At least, that’s what I say I do. In reality, I live through nightmares again and again. I can almost always find some way to make them seem light if people ask. I am a good enough actress that my family cannot tell if I am struggling with a burden in the mornings. Who really cares if I wake up shocked that my mother is still alive, that a war hasn’t begun, that I haven’t relived the shames of my childhood. Is my insomnia some form of mercy? It has often been suggested that my dreams are a result of my holding so much in; I don’t discuss my problems unless they are forced from me. I find myself, even while willing to accept comfort, hesitant to burden other people with my difficulties. Everyone has problems. Maybe all that negative energy is so pent up, I can’t help but sleep in terror. That is what those who have studied dream interpretation say – that my body has to find some way to express what it’s feeling. Or perhaps these bloody visions are symbolic of attacks I can’t see when I’m awake – a spell to make the unseen seen.