To be entirely honest, I’m not sure when the nightmares started, according to my family they have been around sense I was an infant: that my parents would run into the nursery to me screaming my lungs out only to find me swatting at nothing, teacher would constantly be calling my parents in because my drawings were overtly scaring my classmates, I wouldn’t settle down during naptime or when I told stories they were extremely off-putting, it got bad enough to the extent that my parents were investigated because they couldn’t fathom why a kid would have been able to describe the things I was. My imaginary friends lasted far longer than those of my classmates because well…mine would actually talk back; teachers would find me sitting facing a corner, talking to someone as if they were responding and carrying conversation and they’d always ask things about what my homelife was like when for all intent and purpose, my homelife was charmed…just that sleep was apparently my body and mind’s worst enemy. Only sense I was a preteen or so, could I start distinctly recalling them. It was also when they started happening when I wasn’t asleep. Not like the imaginary friends I had when I was younger, but moments where I would lose consciousness for a split moment, but mentally I’d go through hours of imagery…the voices bled into when I was awake, I’d see them out of the corners of my eyes, and they only got more and more vivid as I grew older.

            I don’t know how many doctors I was seen by, how many sleep studies I’ve done, MRI machines I’ve been fed into or institutes I’ve spent some time in…it’s been far too many, that’s at least I could tell you…for someone my age at least. Yet every doctor or study I went through couldn’t find anything beyond what was obvious signs of an extended lack of sleep; there were no signs of some sort of brain damage or birth defect, my bloodwork would be immaculate as were all the other levels…they found nothing. Even the multiple psy-evals couldn’t find the root cause of the nightmares, I even tried hypnotism to try to help sleep and it did nothing but annoy me. As the nightmares forced themselves into my awake mind, they started heavily hitting me and making other issues; I was hearing and seeing things, at first they were just at the edges of my vision, nothing more than a strange looking eye-floater or something, but then they started appearing more along the lines of hands reaching past my shoulders or around my body, a dim whisper shifted to direct voices pointed in my direction…like someone wrapping their hands over my eyes from behind me, or whispering to me from right behind my ear or screaming right in my face to the extent I could nearly feel their breath on my skin. Some doctors believed I had some strange form of psychosis because I was obviously far too young to be showing signs of being schizophrenic, but they had never seen someone have such detailed or extended hallucinations at my age without some sort of external force like drug exposure before birth, extreme head trauma or something along those lines which I had none of. According to my own medical records, the first time I was observed for these visions was when I was only a year or two old and they have never gotten better, only worse, only more detailed, more vivid, and more and more intense.

            I can’t tell you how many hours of sleep I’ve been swindled out of across my life, most people spend a third of their life asleep, I’ll probably die only spending a fifth of my life asleep I get so little. Even with the strongest prescription sleep-aids…or the illegal kind, I can only get four-five hours a night. I’ve tried herbal and pharmaceutical ways to stay asleep or keep the visions at bay, but nothing could keep them at bay. I’ve tried everything from barbiturates to meditation, shit, I’ve even contemplated getting exorcised…but that involved a lot of paperwork with the Vatican and not something I wanted to be bothered with.

            Every dream is different, but I am always in them as myself, observing and seeing how things around me played out. One night it may be myself standing on the side of the road when there’d be a horrific car accident…then the next I’ll find myself standing on the deck of a sinking ship…one night recently, I awoke to find myself…in a coffin, trapped and unable to move, but the distinct feeling of being alive still deep in my chest. Every dream involved me observing someone…sometimes even multiple people dying: the people I’d see around me and the world around me were almost monochrome, not in grays, but shades of dark blue…like deep underwater, the people covered in this haze of bright white light, but a heavy metal collar around their throat with a thick chain leading to the sky like one’s leash of mortality, they had no features or small details, just humanoid figures of pure, flat white light. When something would happen, I’d see someone ripped upwards by said leash or out of view as if suddenly being ripped backwards by a rip-cord or pulled underwater by some sort of metallic kraken with their chain being the tentacle. Every night, when someone was ripped away, I’d wake up screaming, covered in a cold sweat and unable to go back to sleep out of fear of the dream going on or a new one taking its place. The quickest one happened was after half an hour or sleep, the longest was three hours after I fell asleep.

            I took to journaling in my late teens, hence why I’m able to tell you my tales now; it was an idea one of my doctors and I came up with, I’d keep a journal on my nightstand so that the moment I woke up from my dream, I could grab it and write down exactly what I saw for them to review at the next visit. Despite the fact I hadn’t seen that doctor sense I was seventeen, I still took to journaling, a large shelf in my apartment was no covered in a multiple thick stacks of the notebooks sense I had them laid flat atop each other and not lined up like proper books. One of the notebooks only lasted me about three months depending on how many pages were in it, the standard compositional notebooks only lasted me about three whereas others like spiral bound or other forms could last me a few more months. I don’t know why I took to keeping them though, there was no doctor or anyone to observe or read them and I doubt someone would want to casually peruse my nightmares out of fear that just reading them would pass them onto themselves. I just felt the weird urge to keep them around, that they may at some point become useful or that they may become relevant to something happening around me, so I kept them. Just adding more and more to the shelf as time progressed and the nightmares kept coming. I never knew there were so many ways a body could be disjointed or that my own mind could so easily fill in the blanks of what could be missing like the wet coppery scent of fresh blood or the crispy fatty scent of cooked human flesh or the gurgling, bubbling of someone drowning or the crushing feeling of slowly being suffocated.

            Doctors tried putting me on every possible medication to keep the visions and dreams at bay, but nothing worked: anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications did nothing, but calm my OCPD to an extent, sleeping medicine did nothing more than make those few hours of sleep I get render me nothing more than a slightly active corpse, along with all the other medications I had been put on. Eventually they took me off everything because it was obvious that nothing was really doing anything for me. Around that time was when I had been able to move out of my family’s home just outside of Portland and moved to Seattle to take part of a sleep study at some prestigious medical institute in the city, but alas even they found nothing, but I liked the city; I liked the rain and the city, the overcast sky and constant rain kept the sunlight away. As one could expect, due to how little sleep I get and how I am, I don’t go outside a lot and I am extremely sensitive to sunlight almost an allergy to it according to that study, that and I had a habit of sleep-walking but would always go back into bed a second or two before I’d wake up screaming.

            That was a good handful of years ago and nothing has been able to help me, but luckily due to how numb and dead I am to the visions, I can ignore them to an extent, but at times it would be dead quiet and all of a sudden, a voice would scream right behind me, or I’d suddenly find my living room reorganized from my previous nights walkabout. I don’t even want a cure nowadays; I just want to know why I have these dreams.