Can’t sleep, bad 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 things. Shapes of things looming. Eyes watching. Bad things. 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 that 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.

It’s not like this house has any juicy history. My parents built it 18 or so years ago and we’re the only family to have ever lived here. There are no Native American burial grounds below the foundation, as far as we know.

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, which used to be my great-grandmother’s. Maybe it’s the mattress. But I don’t think so. It’s new.

Is it significant that this is the room where I had my first lucid dream, and where I’ve had probably 75 percent of all my lucid dreams?

Is it worth mentioning that when I lived here I battled with sleep paralysis a lot, and had a lot of angsty nightmares (albeit while sleeping in the room my brother now claims)? I would wake up fighting demon babies trying to scratch my eyeballs out. My dad would regularly counsel me on how to invoke God to get Satan out of my dreams, and I’d roll my eyes like a good teenager.

I don’t like thinking about this stuff, because dreams are weird enough when they’re actually pleasant. The control freak in me really hates having to let go long enough to fall asleep when there’s a good chance that I’m going to get spooked into waking back up. My heart can’t take the surge of adrenaline that shoots through it every time I have to dredge my consciousness up out of the murky depths of another nightmare.

But it’s 4 in the morning and I would like to go to sleep. I’m just scared of what’s waiting for me on the other side.

I’m leaving a light on.

[crossposted at NA]