Blind Prophecy

I had one hell of a nasty night.

My old mistress insomnia is back. But this time she brought her dominatrix-bitch plaything with her… night terrors. All night long they treated me like the $50 hookers they are, making me scream out, throwing me around my apartment and riding me to utter exhaustion.

It’s times like this I wish I had a roommate or boyfriend. Someone who can look after me at 5 am when my subconscious mind is going crazy.

See, the think about night terrors is that you usually don’t remember it happening the next morning, but last night I had lucid dreams (the ones where you are aware of the fact that you’re dreaming) and have very clear memories of waking 6-7 times easily with a sudden jerk toward the window where I was sure that someone was trying to get in. I even remember waking enough to find myself in the living room, pointing out the window and telling “it” to go away.

How long has this been going on? I know when the insomnia hits me because I’m still wide awake at 4 am knowing I have to be up for work very soon (like last night), but how long have the terrors been happening again? It would explain my irritability at work lately and the general exhaustion I’ve been feeling.

There are times when I honestly wish I didn’t have to sleep because I’m worried I’m going to hurt myself one of these days. So far the worst evidence of night terrors has been finding objects moved around the apartment, but it’s only a matter of time before I find a knife or something dangerous.

It’s hard to explain how this differs from regular nightmares. A regular nightmare is movie-like, usually easy to remember, and for me I can always go back to sleep and have less frightening dreams after I wake from a nightmare. Night terrors are ongoing (I’ll have several of them in a row), usually very vivid but difficult to remember, it’s like my thoughts slowly float up from somewhere deep inside when the abject fear takes hold and I can’t shake my rational brain into action. I tell myself to wake up, but the reaction is too slow.

The most frightening thing about my terrors is the “other voice” – this is common to all the episodes I remember. There’s a masculine fast talking voice like something you’d hear on television, I can’t identify its source and I can only understand brief bits of what it’s saying. Like the act of listening to it directly turns it into gibberish. Sometimes there’s minor chord quality to the resonance of the voice, but more often it just fires away it’s monologue without breathe or pause. The best way I’ve ever seen this described was in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series when the character of Ken has angry computer-like words in his dream.

Although I’ve had night terrors since being a little child, it seems that one of my “cures” is just to have someone present. I’ve only had episodes on rare occasions when living with my family or roommates. The episodes also tend to be milder (unless I’m under a lot of stress) when other people are around. When I lived up in Alaska for a summer, I didn’t much like my roommate (we were assigned together) and I actually made myself sick with fear that I’d have an episode and he’d see it. I started dosing myself with really heavy medication and trying to sleep when he was at work (he had day shift and I had nights so it wasn’t that hard).

If someone actually wakes me during one of these episodes, I spend several minutes paralyzed with fear and covered in sweat. I know I’m awake, but I’m unable to speak or move or respond in any way.

I know I should see a doctor about this problem, between the insomnia and the night terrors, I can sometimes go months without a good night’s sleep. Still, I suffer from that fear that I’ll be patronized and told it’s “just” stress and nightmares. It’s not even something I talk about easily with close friends – and my family still thinks it’s just a case of bad nightmares.

Filed under: livejournal by Jere Keys