I have horrific dreams. I have dreams that seriously make me question my mental (in)stability. When I hear about other people’s dreams, I find myself wishing that I could have normal, safe, sane dreams like theirs; simple things like forgetting their milk money, being chased by wolves, being wholly unprepared for a test…I would love to have dreams that are so banal. No, I get dreams that are so violently graphic, so psychologically terrorizing that I am haunted all day long and often find my mind bringing me back to that world to dwell on the gruesome imagery and powerful emotions.

Just recently–Monday, I think–I had a dream where I was a middle-aged man with schizophrenia. I was outside on a street with my “handler,” and there was some little girl there as well, but I didn’t know (or care about) my relationship to her, maybe a daughter. I was catatonic except for when my handler–a man in his twenties with long blond hair–brought out one of those large bouncy balls that you see in bins in toy stores. It was blue and white with the cloudy swirls that are typical of that sort of inflated ball. When he bounced that ball and I heard the sound, saw the blur of blue as it formed parabolas across the sidewalk and street, I would come out of my paralytic fugue and start talking gleefully about how much I liked to play with bouncy balls, how much I enjoyed tossing them and catching them and rolling them on the ground. As soon as my handler picked up the ball and put it away, I would lapse into silence and stillness, catatonic once more. Yeah, totally normal dream.

I’m awake right now. I refuse to go back to sleep despite the early hour of 4:30 in the morning. I had a rough day yesterday, something I might try to get back to later in another post, but for now, my mind is still halfway in the realm of nightmares, and I want to relive it for a little while longer if for nothing else but to get some of it off my chest and out of my head. Last night’s dream… Last night’s nightmare was more or less about a library. It wasn’t any library I had ever seen, but I suspect that because it was in the slums had something to do with the fact that everything seemed to have a layer of grime and filth on it. I don’t remember seeing many books, but there were strange television and computer terminals set up around columns, the monitors being inset into the concrete pillars and the keyboards on small trays jutting out around the cylinder like flower petals–dirty, grimy, grey, dismal, dark flower petals.

A lot went on in the dream, and not all of it took place in this strange library. There were quite a number of strange characters in the dream, most of whom were dirty both physically and mentally, apparently to match the thematic whole of the degredation of my nightmare. At one point, I was simply trying to show a movie to a patron–a young girl about fifteen who looked like she probably worked the streets when she wasn’t hiding from her pimp inside the library–when a group of filthy, unemployed men came in pretending to need the library’s services. As a good librarian, I tried helping them find the information they needed, but when one of them grabbed my ass, I ordered them out. It was unfortunate that so many of them were still waiting on me when I exited the building…but that was later. To be honest, there were lots of scenes where I was put in an awkward or dangerous situation. The walk home after a long, frustrating scene where I was trying to shut the library down by myself despite beligerent patrons and an unfriendly staff was marked by seeing the dregs of society flitter around lampposts like moths as they smoked cigarettes, shouted obscenities to each other, and were otherwise as delinquent as you can imagine a young crowd being on the streets of some large downtown city. I had arrived to my “home”–a nasty, dingy apartment–only to find that there were unwanted visitors there already from the neighboring flats, and one of the neighbors–an older lady whose granddaughter was supposed to look after her but who often didn’t because she was too busy lying on her back for whatever man passed through her doors (pun fully intended)–had apparently made her way into my apartment and had died on my bed. I cried. In my nightmare, I simply couldn’t take it anymore and cried. To be honest, I haven’t cried in a good long while in real life, but in my dream, I simply had had enough and started to cry, knowing that I didn’t want to go on like this anymore but also knowing that there simply wasn’t anything I could do about my given lot in life. Turns out, the old woman wasn’t dead, seeing as how she woke up when one of the other neighbors tried to move her. That, of course, simply plays to my necrophobia since I’m always terrorized by the idea that whatever lying before me isn’t really dead, but that it’s still alive and quite possibly wishing to do me harm. Actually, my necrophobia’s rather hard to explain, so I’ll leave it at that.

Somewhere around this point, I collapsed on the floor from the sheer exhaustion of simply existing. And suddenly and blissfully, there were knives in front of me. I saw the end in sight: simply a few hacks at the wrists and I would be done with this place. The problem was that my limbs were too leaden to move, my body too unresponsive to reach for the object that would deliver the killing blow. The blades–Exacto knives, really–were too far away, and while there were people milling about my apartment (without my permission or wanting), I knew they would not help me. They had never helped me before, were not even supposed to be here, and probably thought that I deserved to suffer like this. I didn’t even know these people; they really didn’t even have faces that I can remember now that the dream has ended, but they were there, witnesses to my weakness and anguish and hatred and fear and disappointment. The fact that they were there at all made the dream that much more hellish.

I did finally get ahold of a knife, some sort of small saw blade actually. I held it in the palm of my hand and clenched down, knowing I didn’t have the strength to bring it to my other wrist and tear there. The blood that came out was thick like melted wax and was a sickly yellow color tinged with streaks of bright red. Fascinated, I simply watched my blood pour out in globby waves. Not long after, someone came to collect me–probably out of some perfunctory sense of “I’ve got to clean this mess up” rather than genuine concern. I don’t remember what happened after that, but it wasn’t long after being moved that I awoke, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling and wondering just what the fuck is wrong with my head that I would have such hideous dreams. There was a lot more to the dream that I left out and much more that I simply can’t recall because each time I believe I’m remembering something, when I look too hard at it, the image or sensation dissipates like smoke that I’ve accidentally breathed on. Honestly, I don’t care to remember much more. It was insane. It was disturbing. It was emotionally wracking after a day that was already far too long and draining.

At any rate, it’s now after five, and I think I’m going to grab up the novel and write for a while. I’m not going back to sleep, not while I still have the residual charge of the dream hovering around me like static electricity. I don’t want to sleep and tempt the charge to spark into another screwed-up dream. No, much better to get away from it as best I can, get into another world with characters I care about and situtations that I consciously create. I just… I just need to be awake for a while despite the fatigue pulling down on my eyelids. Maybe I’ll take a nap this afternoon.