Nightmares (Part 2: Sleep Deprivation)

On to the Year From Hell.

First, I’ll talk about sleep deprivation.  In January of 2002 I was living in my brother and sister-in-law’s house in Springville in kind of an extended house-sitting arrangement.  My housemate and I shared the main floor, and the basement was rented to two college guys; Zach would continue to be the landlord while he and Kathleen were in Ohio, and I had planned to live there for at least the next 5 years.  In the meantime, I was paying half the rent and the Basement Boys, as I called them, paid the other half.  Unfortunately, soon after my brother and sister-in-law left and I moved in, the Basement Boys decided it would be cool to invite other roommates in violation of their contract.  I think there were ultimately 5 men living in a one-bedroom basement apartment, but I can’t remember.  What I CAN remember are the loud LAN parties they’d have nearly every night that kept me awake until 3 or 4 in the morning.  At the time, I was in school and working at least 30 hours a week as the assistant manager of a specialty gift store.  I would come home late from work or being out with friends and not be able to sleep because of the noise from the basement.  There were nights I only got three hours of sleep.  This went on for weeks until I was so exhausted I couldn’t do much more than pray and cry until I finally fell asleep.  It was both a shock and a relief when the Basement Boys told me they were moving late that February, but it was a little late for my body and mind to adjust back to normal sleeping habits.

I’d stay up late, struggle to sleep, and then have to get up and start all over again.  I don’t even know how I was functional except that I was suddenly liable for the entire rent and was working more hours than my housemate--I had no choice BUT to function.  My sleeping was pretty messed up before my trigger event, and the exhaustion of depression hit harder than it probably would have normally.  I remember being so tired I could hardly move or think, but so afraid to sleep because of the nightmares that I forced myself to stay awake until I absolutely couldn’t anymore.  When I finally slept, I had horrific dreams that woke me up with my throat tight from crying or screaming (I don’t think I ever screamed aloud, but I sure did in my dreams) and so scared that I couldn’t easily get back to sleep.  Not a good cycle, I know, but the thought of seeing a therapist hadn’t crossed my mind yet, so I lived (sort of) with the constant tiredness.

I don’t remember when, exactly, after my trigger the nightmares started.  I don’t even remember the first one I had, and I’m glad.  As they continued for close to two years, I learned to be grateful I didn’t remember some of them, because the ones I remember were horrific enough.  A lot of them involved houses--my house, my grandfather’s house, a big house that doesn’t exist in real life but that I’ve visited frequently in my dreams--or, infrequently, other buildings, like the museum/saloon that was haunted or my old junior high.  A lot of them involved people or things trying to get into the houses, or trying to sell the houses, or trying to burn down the houses.  Later on, as I was studying psychology, we learned a little bit about the theory of dream symbolism.  I don’t buy into all of it, but when I learned that a dream house symbolizes your psyche, it made a lot of sense.  My psyche was being attacked and the things I couldn’t deal with during the day were things that came out in my subconscious at night.

If the dreams weren’t just frightening, they were very violent.  I remember fires and blood and guns and death.  In one, my sons had been killed--their little bodies were behind the couch we'd used to try to barricade the window against attackers--and I remember seeing them, dead, while reloading my rifle and praying I would have good enough aim.  In another one, I accidentally shot a friend right through his forehead, and no one seemed to care.  In another, the trees in my yard were on fire and people had kidnapped my youngest sister, and I couldn't move fast enough to chase them and save her.  In one of the worst ones, I watched T get stabbed in the stomach from outside a locked door.  I screamed and screamed but no one helped and when I finally somehow got through the door, he was almost dead and all I could do was cradle his head in my lap and sob.  I woke up before the ambulances got there and was so shaken that I had to make sure he was ok and not dying in some storeroom somewhere.

Night after night after night, people died, houses burned, my loved ones were attacked...and I couldn't stop it.

Disclaimer – The views expressed here are the opinions of me and do not necessarily reflect the views of or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Nightmares (Part 1: Background)

As I've been writing, I've realized that I need to break this subject up or it will be too long and difficult for me, so the nightmare posts will be published in several parts.  

I thought the food issues were difficult to talk about.  This one might be worse.  I’ve put it off for months, but here goes.   

Two weeks ago I had a really bad dream about a worm that got into you if someone who already had it bit you.  We were on a spaceship, and two women had the worms.  I had to help in the medical bay, but while I was watching, one woman started flailing around because the worms were multiplying and moving under her skin.  Suddenly, while the doctor was trying to help the second woman, the first woman’s skin stopped moving and she grew very still and opened her eyes.  Her eyes became reddish black and I knew that the worms had eaten her brain but couldn’t move in time to prevent her attacking the doctor.  Then I woke up.  It was bad.  It was bad enough that I couldn’t go back to sleep without turning on my lamp, the bathroom light, and the light over the kitchen sink to make sure there weren’t zombie-like people in my house, waiting to infect me with a brain-eating worm.  I know I'm not the only person to ever have vivid dreams, but MAN.  Right after waking up, I knew that if I didn't turn on the lights, I'd be next.

Useful background points:  

Sometimes things really get to me, and sometimes they don’t.  I can spook easily, depending on the nature of the spooking--a documentary about Charles Manson can spook me more than a ghost story before bed, for instance, unless the ghost story is about demons or possession, but I like some scary movies and am usually ok and rarely have nightmares after watching one.  I’ve watched some pretty scary (and really well-made) foreign horror films and, while I may get a little nervous in elevators (thanks to the original “The Eye”, not to mention “The Silence of the Lambs”), I’m usually just fine once I get home.

I remember, vividly, the very first nightmare I ever had.  I was three, and mean people were my parents and made me sleep in a closet, and I had to find my real parents, but got lost in a big warehouse full of strange people.  A very fat man with a red and white polka-dot tie helped me find my real parents.  His “house” inside the warehouse was a sink and he sat in the sink and told me not to worry.  

I had another one around the same age (I think) in the back of my dad’s sleeper cab semi.  My little brother and parents and I were all sleeping there during a drive my dad took (my middle sister might have been born, but I don’t remember her being there).  I woke up because there was someone else, with a blue face, in the bed.  The person turned around, and instead of the back of her head, there was a red face just like the blue one.  When I had chicken pox for the second time (again, around 3), I had bad dreams that there were spiders crawling all over me--oddly enough, I remember being completely unafraid of spiders before that dream, and since then I’ve been terrified of them.  I had a dream while spending the weekend at my grandparents' house that my grandpa's big black and silver angel fish got out of the fish tank, swam through the air, and touched me (more on this when I talk about the weird phobias in a different post).  When I was in junior high, I dreamed about a wild man who came down from the mountains, took people from their beds, ripped them apart, and then felt bad about what he had done.  He would put the people back together wrong and leave them on their front porches in the night.  I’ve had some pretty bad dreams that have stuck with me for a long time, and sometimes I remember them just as I'm falling asleep.

I dream in full color.  Almost Technicolor.  The non-color dreams I’ve had have always been sepia-toned or turned into color eventually.  So blood, for instance, is REALLY red, and fire is REALLY fiery, and if I shoot a gun, I can almost feel the bruise on my shoulder the next day.

I’m afraid of the dark and have been since I was a child.  I can’t sleep without a light on unless there is someone else in the room.  Sometimes a tiny nightlight is enough, and sometimes I have to have my bedside lamp AND the hall light on.  It’s just one of those things I deal with.

I have a pretty vivid imagination and things that don’t frighten me in the daytime come out at night, so, as interesting as they can be, I avoid TV shows about ghosts and hauntings.  I have a healthy respect for the power of darkness and I don’t mess around with it--it’s one of the lines I draw with scary movies and the main reason I will never see “The Exorcist”.

So, you know, take a woman who has all of these factors already stacked against her, and add a major depressive episode and sleep deprivation (coming in Part 2) to the mix, and it's really no wonder that, at some point, she'll develop a phobia of sleeping.

Trying to write about the nightmares

I've started a draft about the nightmares stemming from the Year From Hell, but it is proving to be incredibly difficult.  Much more difficult than I thought.  Remembering some of them has me almost in tears, and the old fear of sleep threatens to come back.  It never really does, but the threats are, well, unpleasant enough.  Now, as I'm typing this, I've remembered that I need to talk about the sleep deprivation I experienced for a long time, and how the nightmares and the sleep phobia exacerbated it.  Looks like I'll have to do the nightmare posts as a series.  Maybe that'll help me write them, because, MAN, it's hard.  It's really, really hard.