Nightmares

when your nightmares are almost as horrid as the reality was

The last few weeks have been rough. I find myself in bed all day, attempting to remain sturdy on terrible seas. The worst parts are the nights—I go to bed hoping that I’ll sleep eight hours and wake up rested—but instead, I drown in nightmares that wake me again and again until a final rush of adrenaline shocks my system to the point where I curl into a ball and can’t sleep anymore. And do I really want to sleep, anyway, because all of my dreams are about the home where I grew up and terrible things happening there, like insects crawling on every surface and the house turning into a horror-movie insane asylum. I dream of all the terrible things except for the terrible things that really did happen there.

I think my brain is trying to process my childhood in the best way it can. The psychiatrist who did my autism assessment stated that I had an ACE (adverse childhood experience) score of 5 and that my life was significantly impacted by trauma responses. When I read that my score was 5, I thought, “Well, it could be worse.” It could be better as well. There are secrets in that number that I can’t tell—or at least, not yet. Not until I figure out for myself what I’m willing to live with. For now, all I can do is dream about spiders covering the walls so completely that they look entirely black.

I’m a fool for trying to sleep. Yet I get into bed time and again, launching myself into the world of nightmares and dreamscapes. I am an adult, and yet the sound of C’s footsteps outside my bedroom door electrifies me with fear; I freeze up when he gets into bed beside me. You’re safe, I tell myself, and yet the self-soothing does me no good. I wake up in the middle of the night with my heart hurling itself against the wall of my chest. I want the lights on. I’m frozen in place, unable to make it to the switch.

Most nights, I sleep alone. Even that doesn’t protect me from the frequent startling, and the dreams that I wish would just go away. The nighttimes are so bad that I spend the daytimes unable to function until mid-afternoon, if I’m lucky, while the premise of executive function laughs in my face. Instead of writing or answering emails or doing almost anything, I lie in bed with my face pressed against the comforter, listening to the same droning podcasts over and over. I can’t function. I fall in and out of dozing.

These phases—the nightmares—come in and out like the tide. I am waiting for this phase to end. I do think I might have the strength to go on enduring it. All I need to do is breathe.

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When my husband’s mother was staying with us during his cancer treatment, she introduced us to the delightful snack of sliced, raw radishes with pats of butter and a sprinkling of salt. C and I would eat radishes and butter while watching movies, or while sitting on the bed in my office chatting; there were so many grim things about that year that I took solace and pleasure in the radish snack, and while I still eat radishes with butter, they've become inextricably linked with cancer. I know this sounds corny, but the bitter bite of the radishes and the creamy taste of the butter (we use Kerrygold these days), together, are like those days last year when bitterness laced the days with hospital stays and chemo appointments and the fear of death, and sweet cream laced the days with the love we felt from everyone we knew who love and care for us.

What is a snack that you enjoy? What does that snack mean to you?

❤️ The films that gave us unrealistic expectations about what makes a “home” “When I was younger I had an idea of what the perfect home should look like. There would be polished floorboards the colour of toffee and threadbare Persian rugs scattered about in each room. Books would be everywhere, and  I mean everywhere- piled on shelves, table tops and towers of them stacked like Jenga pieces at the sides of sofas.”

❤️ Your newsletter questions answered “Today is a beautiful day to be alive. Amidst the turmoil and pain and loneliness and the gravity of it all, it is such a gift to be alive another day. Today I have compiled two sections of words by you dear readers: WHY WE WRITE NEWSLETTERS, & YOUR NEWSLETTER QUESTIONS ANSWERED.”

❤️ Internal Family Systems, unattached burdens, and spirit possession “As Bob said, UBs have been a bit of an IFS secret, only taught in Level 3 training until recently. But a year ago Bob published a book all about UBs. And this book has been pretty influential in IFS, in underground psychedelic culture (where Bob is active) and in the wider New Age / spiritual culture (he was interviewed on the Emerge podcast and the Stoa has launched a talk series dedicated to the topic). Demonic entities are having a moment.”

❤️ How to fight back against an epidemic of loneliness “‘Do you think . . . Would it be okay to maybe ask you for a hug? With our masks on?’ I did not hesitate in my response. We needed each other, however briefly.”

❤️ Journaling to capture everyday magic (paywalled post)

❤️ Twist and shout, I told my dying husband “My husband lay on the floor, moaning. He’d fallen from the mattress into the 18-inch space between our bed and his nightstand, a distance exactly as wide as his body. It was 2:06 a.m. Pushing the bed away with my foot to give me enough space to kneel, I’d grabbed my phone and speed-dialed the home hospice agency.”