Dream of the Barbed Wire People - Part One
Dream of the Barbed Wire People
The following is a short story I began writing about two months ago following a vivid and incredibly graphic nightmare I had. Upon waking I forgot most of the dream, only small snippets of visuals and scenery, but the feeling of fear and panic and genuine discomfort stayed with me throughout most of the day to an incredibly strong degree. I wish I continued writing this story the day I started it as I now have very little recollection of where it was going or what I planned for it. But I figured I might as well take another look at it and here is a sort of "second draft" of what I originally wrote and what I think will be the first part of a short story.
With the doctor's guide, I was forced into embracing a darkness that far surpassed what I have ever thought to experience. A brand new nightmare landscape opened up to me after years of nothing. And now, the sleep I so desperately wanted to return to me is something I haven't been able to escape from. I despise sleep, I despise what it now gives to me. No longer am I even capable of recognizing the boundary between dreams and waking life. The images in the dreams stick with me like an everpresent tar coating my brain stem, polluting my already fragile state of mind and causing my every thought to spiral into a sinking oblivion of torment. And when I finally delude myself into believing that I’m free of them, that I can go about my waking day unshackled from the ceaseless effects of the nightmares, my ordinary surroundings seamlessly and without warning transpose back into that dreaded and repeated dreamland of isolated and delipidated warehouses, oceans of broken glass, mangled tortures, maddeningly pipping music of sick tones and overlapping phrasings, elaborate devices of mutilation, and of course, the barbed wire people that preside there - beckoning me to stare into the abyssal chasm of my final mental collapse. There’s no escape, there never was one. And Dr. Severin is there with me all the way, for what I don’t know and won’t ever know because the dreams won’t lead me to any answers. There’s nothing at the end, if there even is an end, but torture, hyperviolence, and exhausting shame.
As I explained to the doctor on our first visit, I spent a long period of my adult life up to that point "sleeping" completely dreamless nights. A flash of an image or a face here, a burst of unclear audio there, the common cycle of disembodied heads screaming various things through the fog of half-sleep, but nothing ever that I would constitute as a dream. This could, of course, all be largely due to the fact that for the past five or so years I have not been able to properly sleep. It started off as something Doctor Severin referred to as "middle-of-the-night insomnia", in which I would find myself frequently waking up shortly after falling asleep and be unable to return to sleep. Two heavily interrupted hours at the absolute maximum - some nights I am graced by a brief half-hour rest of silent, tenebrous, unconscious peace before being pried back into the waking world irrevocably. It is as if the second my mind feels at ease there is a defensive mechanism that kicks in that forces me back to highly alert, panic-fueled wakefulness. A brief moment of mindlessness and darkness and then all of a sudden I'm up; heart pounding throughout my whole body like a heavy church bell echoing through hollow caverns, the sheets thrown clear off of me, my clothes drenched in sticky, damp sweat - again and again, night after restless night.
While I have always had great difficulties with sleep I have also always treasured the idea of it. Something just out of reach to me - something just on the precipice - something that, if I properly obtained it, would grant me a small nightly taste of death. Darkness, silence, a void to nestle into and be cradled by while I leave my uneasy conscious brain to rest. But, of course, as anyone could tell you, the subconscious brain is what really stirs up the most trouble. All the repression, the fragments of memories once thought forgotten, the furthest depths of awareness of every single fault and worry and inadequacy within oneself and, potentially worst of all, the unknowable, unhinged, unspeakable desires now manifested and free to wreak havoc in vivid images and scenarios in your sleeping, completely helpless, momentarily trapped head. That was what I can now assume has kept me from a restful sleep when sleep was actually something obtainable to me - even in small, frantic, unnerving dosages. Although, as I know now, I feel for a large portion of my early life I have had my fill of these subconsciously crafted nightmare tapestries. This is what I explained to the doctor, though being able to introspectively see that this was a problem within myself, a problem that existed perhaps even more strongly for my child self, was not something I was able to so easily accomplish. No, I just wanted to go back to dreaming - to be able to successfully achieve an escape, no matter the dream, for a guaranteed six to eight hours a night. But the doctor saw the issue at hand, he pried deeper, and with him I was thrust back into childhood and all of the horrid, tumultuous nights I experienced. It didn't take much for the floodgates to open; my mental fortitude perhaps not what it used to be.
Nights as a child where I was held subject to the cavernous depths of my burgeoning subconscious manifested in grueling, ugly dreams were numerous and excruciatingly vivid. Furthermore, lucid dreaming was not something I was ever apparently capable of, if my hazy and blurred memory of childhood serves me well, which would turn every dream, no matter how bizarre or nonsensical or terrifying or completely illogical, absolutely and utterly undeterminable from my real life. Nearly every single one of these nights of intense, nightmarish manifestations that I felt I was experiencing as reality, always ended, as far as I can remember, with screaming, rivulets of tears streaming down my sickly face, soiled sheets, and occasionally deep scratches or colorful bruises along my neck, face, and arms - most likely done by myself while in the midst of a somnambulistic fit.
And with the isolating, guilt-driven, punishing childhood that I now remember myself experiencing, support or understanding for these nightly tortures, and the long lasting effects it would have on me throughout my waking day, was tragically nonexistence. I'd wake in total panic at what images and sounds and experiences my dreams subjected me to, and yet the panic that would come about from thinking of the possibility of traversing the dark hallway to my mother and step-father's bedroom to search for some sort of vague comfort or security, knowing I'd only ever be met by worsening disappointment, scolding, ridicule, and smacks from my mother and her frighteningly ungroomed nails, was far more paralyzing and overwhelming than what the dreams could leave me feeling. So I would stay in my cramped bedroom, with its sloping, mold-covered walls, left alone to try to return to sleep with my tear-stricken face, fresh scratches and bruises and soiled sheets, only for the nightmares to immediately continue.
And yet, even with the high probability of debilitating and mind paralyzing nightmares always in the forefront of my still underdeveloped brain, sleep - proper, rejuvenating sleep, was something I still deeply desired every time my frail, sickly body graced my often unwashed bed. Perhaps even more strong was the anticipation I felt every single day for the night to visit me once more. The nighttime, with all of its tenebrous stretches into the unknown, the desolate and liminal isolation, and, of course, the routine and worsening nightmares it could bring, was still so vastly preferable to the horrid light of the day and the vast, inescapable terrors, humiliations, boredom, and the droves of despicable, vacuous people that would operate throughout the day time. Night time was a time of solitude, of quiet, detached existence. A time where the unpredictable chaos of life would, for a short while, slow down and I could be left alone in my own tiny, moonlit world of imaginings and introspection. I yearned for it day in and day out. Then night would come, my mother and step-father would lock their bedroom door, and that squalid little house I was forced into growing up in would be awash with darkness and silence.
I would sit in my room, sometimes on my floor to avoid my dirtied mattress, in complete silence and look out my bedroom window at the arching dead trees and the crooked roofs of equally squalid surrounding homes. Occasionally a cat or some other small animal, another lover of the night, would appear on a fence post and glide through the night, between the dim cones of light from drooping lamp posts, right past my view from my bedroom window. I would follow it with squinted eyes and try my hardest to project some sort of telepathic call out to it. Something to tell it that I was there, watching it, as another being who felt comforted in the night. I wanted to join it out there, but my fear of what could be done to me if I sneaked out of that house overpowered me every single time. And then there was the wish for it to come up to my window, gracefully and under the darkened blanket of night, so I could let whichever nocturnal animal in. But that too would lead to unknowable scolding and punishment if I was caught - I shudder to think of what my mother and step-father could have subjected an animal to. Nights would exist in these fragmented, tiny little liminal bubbles where it felt no one else existed outside of myself in my cramped bedroom and my little window in view of the prowling cats and other nocturnal animals outside. But, of course, I would eventually succumb to sleep and night would reveal itself for the playground of unfiltered nightmare imagery that my brain would unleash on to me.
Despite my love and anticipation for it, night time would simply act as a prelude to torment rather than the restful respite that I desperately craved as an isolated, poorly-treated, overly stressed child - and little would change during my painful and awkward transformation into despondent, isolating adulthood. As the nightmares got worse and my sleeping more and more irregular, night and day became one and the same, neither acting as less of a catalyst for my many stressors and ever-present, worsening, possibly illogical growing list of anxieties. The only difference being that now I am untethered from the dreams of my child self and until I was pushed headfirst into the agonizing depths of remembrance, thanks to the persuasive Doctor Severin, I was no longer consciously haunted by them. But now, with knowing the full brunt of the cruelty my subconscious brain was capable of subjected my young self to, I'd actually prefer to be visited by them. That's what I told the doctor, and I meant that. At that point I'd prefer being visited by the cruel, gruesome, nightmarish screeching onslaught of brainwave images if it meant I could once again fully fall asleep. Doctor Severin listened, he listened to it all and inferred and drew correct assumptions on things I did not tell him as well as things I myself did not yet understand.
- end of part one -
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