It is a bit ironic that I named this blog “Dreaming in Monochrome” because most of my dreams are in vivid, mind altering colors. Horrible, horrible colors.
Most of my dreams are nightmares.
I’ve had nightmares every single night, for as long as I can remember. Some nights aren’t as bad as others – I might only dream that there are spiders crawling on me, rather than dreaming that a giant spider is about to eat my head. Some nights are worse – I dream that there is a man waiting in my closet, waiting for me to fall asleep and be vulnerable, so he can come out and stab me in the throat.
I wake up screaming. I wake up crying. I wake up paralyzed.
Sometimes, I only half wake up, and can’t fully come to the surface, so the reality of where I am mixes with the horror of the dream and then suddenly the spiders are in my bathroom, the killer is a shadow at the foot of the bed.
I cry and whimper, and cower in my sleep. Sometimes, I get up and sleep walk, and cry, and cower, and try to get out.
My lovers learned to deal with it. Sometimes they would wake me up. Sometimes they would just hold me and rock me, and hope that somewhere, their actions were translating into my brain as safety. Sometimes, they just let me cry, and would roll over and try to get back to sleep.
I talked to doctors, who prescribed sleeping pills, sleep aids, and gave advice on how to relax before bed. The pills gave me even worse nightmares (that I couldn’t wake up from), the aids never worked, and relaxation helped me sleep sooner, but didn’t keep the nightmares away. I talked to my therapist, my psychiatrist, and they tried to get to the root of the problem. Was it my father? Was it some chemical imbalance? Nothing worked. I figured this was my life, and I was just going to have to deal with it for the rest of it, as I had for the beginning of it. This is not to say that I didn’t have other dreams too – vivid, beautiful dreams about things that happened before this life, dreams where I’m a rock star, a werewolf, a wolf. Dreams about my Gramma, my Mom, my sister, people I’ve loved. They weren’t all bad, but every night there was at least one bad one.
Sometimes I didn’t remember the bad ones, not completely. I would know I had them because the pillow was wet from my tears, because Murphy and Ernie were looking at me wide eyed and trying to comfort me, because my lover would tell me.
I always hoped, secretly, that eventually I would be with someone who would be able to stop it. That if I finally felt safe in her arms, the nightmares would have to stop. I mean, they would have to, right?
But they never did.
Until one day, this red haired girl became more than just my friend and we slept together. I curled up into her back, my arm around her, and fell asleep.
And I started to have a nightmare. At the time I was reading a book about an anthropologist in Rwanda after the genocide, so the nightmares had been about me excavating bodies and then I look up and there’s a soldier with a gun pointed at my head. I would look into his eyes and he would say something to me in a language I couldn’t understand. I would lift my arms in surrender, and he would shoot me in the face. Apparently I started to whimper in my sleep, and curled into a fetal position. She turned over and put her hand on my shoulder, and woke me up. We’d already discussed my sleeping quirks, because I don’t want anyone to have to experience the “Alicia wakes up screaming” without having some kind of idea that might happen.
I woke up, looked at her, and said, “Hey…what’s wrong? What is it?” She said, “You were having a nightmare.” We talked for a few minutes, then cuddled back up and went back to sleep.
And I dreamed.
Dreams, not nightmares.
I told her, the next morning, that I hadn’t had any more nightmares. She looked at me skeptically, and said something like, “Well you were probably exhausted.” We went about our day, and then went to bed the next night. We kissed, and she settled down into my arms. I put my head against her back, and fell asleep.
And dreamed.
No nightmares.
Again, we discussed the implications of this. She remained doubtful that she was the reason my brain had released me from the nightly prison, but she was open to the idea that something had changed. I talked to my therapist about it, and her only question was, “So when can you start living with her?” Dr. A believed that something in my psyche was calmed by this girl, something I hadn’t felt in a long time. She encouraged us to sleep in the same room more often, to see if it held, or if it was just a temporary thing because the relationship was new.
I talked to other friends. Some of them were very supportive, others cautioned me not to put so much stock into this new love. They needn’t have worried – I was concerned I was putting too much pressure on her. I mean, there really is no way to say to another person, “I have had nightmares for 34 years and now you sleep in the same bed with me and they’re gone and I think you might be saving me.”
That’s heavy for someone to hear, to believe about themselves.
The thing is? It’s holding. When she’s not here, the nightmares come back. In fact, the night after she leaves the nightmares come back worse, as if to say, “Oh we built up, asshole!!” So I call her, in the middle of the night, sometimes, just to hear her voice. I try not to do it often, because I don’t want to interrupt her life (even though she insists it’s okay). And it doesn’t matter what happens before we go to bed – whether we were playing video games, watching a movie, having a really heavy discussion – as soon as we settle in, I sleep. And I dream about beautiful things.
I imagine this is what it is like to be a normal person, with normal dreams.
I have no way of knowing if this will last, or if they will come back, or if I will start dreaming like a “normal” person and have an occasional bad dream. For now, I am enjoying it in the moment, to wake up in the morning and smile at her and when she says, “How did you sleep?” be happy that I can say,
“You know what? Good!”
And mean it.