The Terror of Night

a study in nightmares.

I don’t sleep particularly well.

Not for lack of trying, it just isn’t a skill I’ve mastered. It’s either too much or too little. A full coma accompanied with severe grogginess upon waking. Waking up every hour, on the hour, until my body can’t stand lying down anymore. I don’t believe, for a second, I am alone in this. I just wanted to ask, however, how do you wake up?

In reality, nightmares are many things. Anxieties, phobias, odd neural firings, snippets from the day, and perhaps…premonitions, if you are so inclined to believe.

If it is, in fact, true that dreams are “nearly random.” That our brains, at night, while doing an update and back-up of features and systems, are sorting through the muck. The day, the evening until you laid down, the week before, perhaps the week coming up, and even the years well before. What happens when that fog becomes lucid, real, and terrible?

Why do we dream of our own destruction and hold the weight of it’s guilt well after we have let it go? Or thought to have.

I’ll save you from the “progress isn’t linear” but raise you this:

With progress, I’ve found, comes a distinct pull backward. A regression. The habit of coping badly, again, forms in the mind’s eye. So distinct, familiar, and logical without having the decency of possessing logic. It is what you have done for as long as you have known what to do.

Pick your poison. It comes in many forms of self-sabotage. Listing them, however, isn’t as necessary. You get it.

The struggle isn’t what I see or experience within the nightmare, it is the existence of it within my waking life. That my day is started in earnest panic, in feeling horrible, in being cemented. That, throughout the day, I find bits of truth and confirm the bias. It is not real, but…it was at one time. So it must still be true?

No. This is not that time.

It is a reminder of a remaining debt to be paid. Realizing that you are the sole collector. You are the call, you are the aggressor. You are aggravating your own waking life by finding comfort in the muck that both suffocated and sustained you. It kept you alive, but you could not move. You can now move, but you are unsure if you are alive.

The separation of understanding why something is and accepting that it is not. To constantly reaffirm that reality takes time to set in, to believe…is the trick.

Real or not, believed or not, every day that I wake up is rebellion.

To sing it through panic. To be it and to seek it through the muck. Regarding it as it is, primordial and everlasting, foundational to be sure. But not the end of the design.

It’s just an update. It’ll take some time.