Insomnia

I've written before about my nightmares.  I just woke up after having a nightmare, but today it was different.  I can't sleep, and it's shaken me up a lot.  There's no one here for hugs, so I guess I have nothing to do but write about it.

Sorry if this upsets you. It upset me.

This dream was about me having a child that I instinctively knew was mine, and I was chained in a cage, but the child (maybe 8 years old), was in the room.  I could tell we were underground, and there was a door that I somehow knew led to the stairs out, but it was as if the whole room was upside down (so the bottom of the door was lined up with the ceiling).

The room was filling with water, slowly, like one millimeter at a time.  This stupid child of mine was busy jumping around in puddles, not listening to me trying to teach him to swim.  It's weird how in dreams you just know things - I just knew the room was going to fill with water and I was going to drown, and unless I could teach this kid how to swim, he was going to drown too.  

Clearly, because kids are stupid, he had no idea what was going on, and despite the rapidly rising water (how it was rising rapidly at a millimeter at a time, I have no idea), he wouldn't listen to me trying to teach him to swim.  I remember thinking 'this is why all parents need to teach their kids how to swim, it would stop things like this!' - like that's the sort of thing that happens all the time.  

Anyway, I yelled and screamed and did my best to get his attention, then finally started trying to talk him through 5 years of swimming lessons, starting with floating.  By this stage, I was up to my chest in water, and it was freezing.  I was sort of like Rose from Titanic when she was lying on that door in the ocean.  Except, you know, I was chained in a cage, in a sinking room.  Anyway, somehow this child of mine was managing to float (why wasn't he standing on the top of my cage??), and I was trying to convince him not to be scared of the water.  He was crying and screaming and was clearly not comfortable in the water.

I was panicking too, and freezing, and was trying to force as much information into this kid as I could.  I ended up going under the water, but I was holding my breath and watching him struggle.  I remember thinking that I wished I couldn't hold my breath for 5 minutes, drowning in two minutes would be so much better than struggling and waiting to die for longer than that.

Every 3-4 minutes, a bubble would somehow float past me, and I would manage to breathe it just as I thought I was going to pass out.  In reality, this is impossible (believe me, I've tried), but anything's possible in a dream, I guess.  The room filled and the boy didn't get out.  I watched him struggle and drown, then finally be still and sink.  He landed face down, staring at me on top of my cage, with his eyes open.  As each bubble passed me, he moved a tiny bit, and I thought he was somehow alive.  After what seemed like forever, the bubbles of fresh air started getting smaller and smaller, and further apart.  Eventually, they stopped.

It's always been said that you can't die in a dream, but I die in my dreams without waking up all the time.  It's just how you'd imagine it, first, amazing peace.  After a few minutes of being dream-dead, every single memory I've ever had in my life came rushing back to me, slapping me in the face.  I remembered everything perfectly, and everything hurt.  I could relive all of the worst moments in my life, and somehow, this is what I was doing. 

Somewhere along these worst moments ever that I woke up.  I was up to when I was about 10 or 11 in my memories when I woke up, so I guess that shows how fast your brain can move when you're sleeping, huh?

Now I have every single one of those bad memories of my past as clear as anything in my head.  Every time I close my eyes, I see everything, from what I was wearing to what the weather was like.  It's much harder to deal with real life memories than it is to deal with not fully accurate nightmares like the one I wrote about last time. 

I guess the good thing about this is I know despite my recent memory loss, all of my memories are there, I just need to figure out how to access them.  The bad side is now I'm too scared to go back to sleep.  I don't want to remember.