I’ve always had a rather combative relationship with sleep.
For most of my life, I simply couldn’t. The combination of a neurological condition causing the underproduction of the hormone that paralyzes the body for sleep and an extremely disruptive domestic scene made sleep elusive and occasionally unsafe.
I rarely dreamed, since I was nearly incapable of getting deeply asleep enough to enter REM. When I did, my dreams were often bizarre and vivid, though I was always readily able to identify they were not my waking reality. I found them amusing; never troubling.
When I was diagnosed and treated for my condition, one of the first things I experienced was a full night’s rest. It was a revelation. Seeing the world through eyes that hadn’t spend half the night pointed at the ceiling was stunning, and literally changed my life. I was not so profoundly restless, thought processes were less convoluted, coping mechanisms more effective.
And then the dreams began.
The medication I take makes me sleep. I don’t just mean it allows me to sleep, I mean it makes clinging to wakefulness impossible. It sends me down into an abyss I have never before known. And while I linger there, I dream.
From rarely doing so at all that I remember, I now dream virtually every night. They are compelling, all encompassing, and occasionally exhausting. I often find myself confronted with the mundane cast in absurd proportions, or visiting scenes from the past that have long since faded in my conscious memory – only to become vivid enough to cling to me all through my daytime hours.
Then, for long months now, there are nights where I am engulfed. Swept over by fear, vulnerability, and despair. I am slow-moving and subject to unspeakable cruelty; unable to rise to my own defense. Replaying moments of heartbreak, helplessness, and hurt in such powerful terms that I awaken as though these deeds were fresh; unhealed anew.
It is enough to make me wonder if the solace I had found in sleep might not be a fickle thing; not meant for me, after all. How, perhaps it would be better to go back to the sharp and weary way of staring at the shadows as they play on the wall overhead.
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