#14 Nightmares

I'm going to try to be a little less somber now.

This is one of the dreams Dr. Harper wanted me to write down the next time I had it.  I've had it for a long time. For the last few years, I have it once every couple months or so.

I wake up back in my room at Coral Shores.  Only it's different.  You know how sometimes you have dreams about places that don't look right, but you know where you are anyway?  This is like that.  I'm in Coral Shores, but my room is smaller and the door doesn't have a window (which would have been nice).  And I specifically remember this feeling like I'm back, because I'm pissed at myself for screwing up and getting myself thrown back into a place like this.  I told someone about all my crazy thoughts, and they threw me back in.  They wrote it all down and gave it to the doctors.  (I'm sure this is anxiety about therapy.  Not hard to figure that one out.) Anyway, not important.

So I wake up and look out the window, and there's a forest outside.  But all over the forest are these people lying down.  They're moving around and talking, but I know they're dead somehow, and that's their "graveyard."  And Carrot is out there.  She's running through it, and I'm scared they're going to reach up and grab her.  Right before I see if she made it, all the lights go out and the hospital shakes violently as if there were a giant earthquake.  The quake is over after a few seconds, and the hospital is ruined.

My door is open, and I walk outside my room.  The hallway is destroyed, like it just fell apart.  It's also empty.  And I'm walking really carefully and quietly, because I know the devil is under the floor and if he hears me, he's going to kill me.  It's like directly under the floor is hell.  I can see it without seeing it.  I just know that under the floor is fire and evil and I have to get out before the devil knows I'm awake.

This is the weird(er) part.  It's at this point, the trek down the hallway, that I remember that this is a reoccurring dream.  In the dream, I remember that I've done this before, and every time it ends the same.  But I think in the dream that this time I'll go a different way, or try something else to avoid Satan hearing me and killing me.

There's someone else here too.  Someone who I want to help get away from the devil.  But she's already been seen by him and she's running.  She's a scary old lady, and when I see her, I know she looked at the devil because her head is on fire.  She runs through the hall screaming, and I try to will her to be quiet, because at this point I know he heard us, and he knows I'm up here too.  But she doesn't shut up.  And she starts laughing because she knows she's fucked.

None of the hallways make sense.  I'm panicking now and I'm trying to find the way out, but I don't know the way.  The halls are like a maze and turn in weird places.  I pass another person, another patient.  She's sleepwalking and has no idea that she's in danger.  And for some reason I feel like I have to help her, but can't because I'm too scared.  She's carrying a dead rabbit.  I don't understand it, but I feel like she's got the right idea.  Like the dead rabbit is the key to getting out.  Maybe to give to the devil, or use it as a distraction or something.  I have no idea.

(You know how sometimes things "feel" in dreams.  Like you understand them even though logically they make no sense?  My therapist suggested that the dead rabbit is Carrot, or symbolic of Carrot.  And as I look back, it sort of makes sense.  When I imagined Carrot as a kid, one of her favorite toys was a stuffed bunny rabbit.  She always had it with her.  So now this other woman is carrying a dead rabbit and walking with her eyes closed.  The thing is, Carrot always "feels" a certain way, and this woman didn't "feel" that way.  Does that make sense?)

So anyway this woman turns a corner and I don't follow her.  And I imagine she's going to be mad at me for not following her.

And this is where last night's dream goes differently.  This time, knowing I always die in this dream, I decide to follow her.

But it ends the same.

I turn the corner this time, and I am in the White Room.

The room is just white.  White walls, white floor, and white ceiling.  In the middle is a giant skull.  This thing is massive and horned, the size of a barrel.  And I know it's Satan, and I wandered into his lair.  You can see the heat radiating off the skull, but the rest of the room is cold.  The skull doesn't move but it has a heartbeat.  And it's loud, and that's how I know it's alive and I'm about to die.  I turn away from it and in the wall is a small observation window.  Very very small.  Just enough to look through with two eyes.  And someone is looking though it at me, waiting to watch me die.  A doctor, like just observing an experiment or something.  I feel like he doesn't care that I'm about to die, like I'm a test subject.  Just a number.

Carrot is there.  Her eyes are closed as always, and I feel like she wants me to close mine too.  And I'm sad, because I know it's over.  But I'm also relieved.  My fucked up life is about to end, and I got out without losing control and hurting someone, or doing something wrong.  (It's common in people like me that you are terrified you will lose control of your actions at some point and do something horrible.  You know how sometimes you can't sleep on vacation because you are obsessing over whether or not you locked the front door of your house?  It's like that, except instead of worrying if someone is stealing your TV, you're worried you're going to get the electric chair for shooting up a mall.)  In this way, my death feels like success, and the world will be safer and better now that I'm gone.  I guess self esteem has never been my strength.

My head starts to get hot, and I know the devil is behind me and about to kill me.  And at this point, I'm strangely calm about it, and somehow I'm sitting relaxed, although there were no chairs in the room.  I'm scared, but I just want to get it over with.  The heat is awful and I can't breathe and my skull starts to crack like glass in the back.  I scream.

And wake myself up screaming.

It always ends like that.

#13 why bother

This isn't working.  This is a waste of time.  All of it.  This blog, the meds, therapy all of it.  I feel like I'm just postponing the inevitable.  This is going to kill me.

#12: Boys

I got my dosage upped.  The truth is, the medication isn't always 100% effective.  Like anything there are good days and bad days.  Sometimes there are flare ups, so to speak.  So to anyone reading, I'm okay.  Thank you for any concern you may have had if any.

It's been a rough few weeks.  I'm sleeping less, although it's a little better now.  The meds make me feel like shit, and now they're heavier.  I have a hard time falling asleep, but once I do, I have a hard time waking up. And to be honest, I still feel a little keyed up and shaky.  It's like being drowsy from no sleep but wired on caffeine at the same time.

This is why I don't have a boyfriend, or really many friends in general.  This shit is embarrassing enough to write out sometimes.  And while I accept who I am and the struggles I live with, asking someone else to do the same is a little much.  It sucks, to feel like you'll always be alone.  Stuck in this little one bedroom one bathroom apartment.  No one to love you but yourself.  No boyfriend, no husband, no kids.  I love kids, but I couldn't dream of passing this on to them.  Studies show schizophrenia to be prevalent in families, that it is passed on from parents much more frequently than can be explained by coincidence. Besides, no child deserves me as a mother.

Poor me, right?

Thing is, I'm not wrong.  I've accepted it.  I've moved past it.

It's not easy though.  It feels like other people have this thing, and I have to watch.  I've never really had many friends.  I got pulled out of school after third grade.  That's a fun story.  When I was in second grade, the week before summer vacation, I had a seizure in the middle of an oral report about my favorite book ("Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Mysterious Handprints." Seriously, I remember that.)  In front of the whole class, I fell over, breaking Julie Dent's diorama of some book about a vampire rabbit, and hit the ground shaking.  According to the teacher I was babbling some shit about god knows what, and when I woke up, I had wet my pants.

They took me to the hospital, checked me out, and said I was fine.  They couldn't explain it.  And when I got back to school, my name had been changed to Emily Pisser.

So, summer vacation started right after that, and then it was over in what seemed like a blink of an eye.  I told my mom I didn't want to go back to school, because the kids would make fun of me.  She said they'd all have forgotten it by this point.

Kids have long memories.

Day one it was "Hello Pisser!"  Someone would spill something on themselves and say "Hey look, I'm Emily!"  Kids would fall down and shake around by me, and then laugh.  I went through it for all of third grade before my mom let me be home schooled.

She wasn't happy.  She raised hell with the principal, the school board, the PTA, everyone.  Mom had my back.

So really, I haven't had a lot of friends.  I've been alone most of my life.  I'm mostly okay with it.

Sometimes though... It would be nice to hug someone, ya know?

-Em