How I "sleep"

When I was very small, before one is supposed to have developed the capacity to remember, but I do anyway, I used to have night terrors. My parents have told me bits and pieces of what I was like when that happened, but what they tell me doesn't match what I remember, and it took me a long time to realize that what I remember was probably what they tried to describe.

They say I'd burst into their room, eyes wide, sheen of sweat covering me, not looking at anything concrete and screaming nonsensical things as I wandered aimlessly around. They'd have to splash water on my face and yell at me to wake up. Sometimes I would, sometimes I would just go back to bed and fall into a more acceptable, quieter form of sleep.

I remember lying in bed while people and animals and other random entities tried to get at me, the foot part of my feetie pajamas suffocating me from bottom to top, the air closing out slowly and about to reach my head, when finally I jump out of bed to escape possible death, still living the scenarios in my dreams where things were coming toward me, taunting me, I unable to speak and hardly able to breath, and suddenly the light goes on and everything becomes this too-intense blur of garish color.

I recognize my parents, the wallpaper, the furniture, and see them waving at me with what I sense is concern and maybe even anger, but I can't hear what they're saying. I try to tell them what's happening, but the words won't come out, the "real" world in the background like the ghosts that my dream world should be but aren't. It's hot. I'm confused. And terrified.

Sometimes I end up with my head buried in my mother's arms while she's telling me to wake up, and I long to lay down and sleep, exhausted. Sometimes I don't remember how it ended, because in many ways it never did.

As I grew up the walking terrors stopped, but the dreams did not. Only on occasion, perhaps counted on two hands, can I recall having peaceful sleep, waking feeling rested. The dreams calmed for a while, but almost as if returning to the cradle, as I get older, they get worse.

I don't walk around anymore, or so I assume, since I live alone, but I wake up in full panic flop sweat as I try to remember who I am and where I am and what my "real" life is, because my dreaming life is so real, and so vivid--almost moreso than my waking life. I open my eyes and I feel like a stranger who's been ripped from their true home, forced to wander this strange land piecing it all together.

Sometimes I have false wake-ups. I open my eyes, I'm in my bed, I try to get out of it and some times I do, and I walk into the living room and there are the characters of my dream world in this one, or the floor drops out, or I walk into the sea, which shouldn't be attached to my room in the first place. I go back to bed, close my eyes, try to wake in the right place. I have known this to occur at least ten times before actually waking up, which has often led me to wonder whether I every actually succeeded.

Sometimes I have people beside me, enviably sleeping like "normal" people should, to cling desperately to and the heart beat and breath that comes from them, for a time, comforts me and eases the transition, but it rarely lasts long, and it's never a reason to have a person beside you.

There are places I frequent there (in my dreams), people who frequent those places too, people I've never met but know, things I could never know because I never experienced them but know at night, and there is no rest. There is never rest. I go to sleep, run from and to and between places and people, exhausting myself as I do in wakefulness, and enter each day fatigued and confused. It's probably how I enter each dream.

I try to remember what I dream but I also try not to. There are days when I wonder which is the real life I lead; who is the real me? The one who writes this? Or the one who perhaps writes this, annoyed at not being fully present, while I write and write and write, searching for a more stable picture of what people are and capturing it in a limited word count, clinging to my pile of clippings in the hopes that it might, one day, be as simple, or simply complex, as that?