7.28.2008

Can't sleep, bad dreams will eat me

can't sleep, scary dreams will eat me

I can't sleep in my childhood bedroom anymore.

This has been a problem for a while now. Every time my head hits the pillow and my eyes flutter shut in the darkness, I see shit in the dark. Shapes of things looming. Eyes watching. When I finally get ahold of myself and drift off to sleep, this absurd cycle of anxiety-ridden dreams and nightmares gets started.

Just now I had entered that delicious limbo phase when the conscious mind starts powering down and starts churning out all those nonsensical phrases and imagery than turn into dreams, and I went through no less than three bad dreams that I forced myself to wake up from. The last one is the only one I can really remember. I am leaving a building — work, presumably, because I look down and see my badge on a lanyard — and walking briskly in a parking lot. It's dark out. The breeze kicks up and takes me with it — straight up, like I'm on an invisible elevator. I realize I'm dreaming and decide to just go with it and will myself ever higher (what's the worst that could happen?) and my eye level gets nearly flush with the top of the building, which is old and made of bricks, and I see something that I can't quite make out. It's moving, and it's menacing.

I woke myself up when I cried out.

That's fucked up.

But dreams like that ALWAYS happen to me in this room. I've documented some of them. I hate sleeping here. Hate it. The whole night is fraught with pointless peril and I have no idea why.

The thing is, there is no reason for me to have issues with this room. I don't recall anything bad ever happening to me in this room. (Or anywhere else, really. I had a good childhood.) Nothing bad has happened to anybody else in this room, as far as I know. I have made a lot of really good memories in this room. Granted, they've painted the walls and redecorated completely, so it doesn't look anything like the Pepto Bismol-pink monstrosity I adored as a kid, but it's still the same damn room. What gives?

Perhaps it's all this violent Civil War art all over the walls. Or the weird dissonance between that and the unicorn collection on the dresser. Maybe it's the furniture. Maybe it's the mattress.

I don't know. But it's 4 in the morning and I would like to go to sleep. But I'm scared of what's waiting for me on the other side.

1 comment:

sarah saint said...

Maybe it's just a (metaphorically) subterranean conflict between old and new Lindseys.

Or could be those unicorns. You once told me a scary story about one of them.