Dreams and Nightmares
By: Nairi Eirian Jaden
I found myself waking up in the morning covered in sweat, my eyes snapping open from another nightmare I can't fully remember. Each one is different from the last, the faces I saw were sometimes old, sometimes young, and the eyes were either blue or black. These eyes would follow me into whatever nightmare that I found myself in, whatever that nightmare may be. Sometimes I wake up screaming, sometimes I am trapped until the morning comes and my eyes flutter open. The only thing that is constant in these nightmares is the ever changing eyes and faces that I can never seem to place. I then get up from my bed and start my day, not thinking to chronicle my nightmares until nearly a month after I start having these nightmares.
The first time I started to write about the nightmares, the words seem to pour out like water as whatever was inside my mind awakened. I wrote page after endless page after I woke up, I am thankful that my job doesn't require me to be in until later in the afternoon as I would otherwise be looking for another place of employment; every day I wrote for hours until I forced myself to get up and get ready for the day. Eventually I looked over what I wrote and saw that it was just random babble, when I tried to show it to others they either thought I was crazy or, in several extreme cases, thought I had the next best seller. The strange thing I found about what I wrote, was not about my nightmares but something much deeper then I realized. After a while I stopped writing things down and the nightmares faded away; I hid these pages away and went on with my life as though nothing had happened. To me nothing had happen, it was just another strange dreams.
This was not the first time I had a long string of weird dreams or nightmares. When I had been around the age of nine or ten I had a three month-long nightmare where I saw nothing but coffins, large rabbit-like humanoids, and people with their faces covered by newspapers. There were times that I had had kicked, screamed, and threw fits because I did not want to fall asleep, as these nightmares scared me and were the only ones I can vividly remember. Years later I had another long stretch of dreams where the only things I could remember was spiderweb galaxies, apples and oranges coming out of my closet, and flowers blossoming in my bed. Strangely those dream sequences were some of the few that I took solace in and wished that they would continue for as long as I could hold onto them. Sadly that wish didn't come true as soon as those dreams faded the nightmares would begin again.
The cycle of dreams and nightmares grew less frequent as I grew older and more aware of the things surrounding me. By the time I reached the age of twenty-five I could pin-point when I would have a dream-cycle that would be closely followed by a nightmare-cycle. I found that the dream-cycle lasted a month while the nightmare-cycle lasted a month and a half, broken by a period of about six months; the time between these cycles had increased by five months while the time of the cycles decreased by two and a half months. By the time I had started my current dream-and-nightmare cycle, the cycle with the faces and eyes, I was thirty. At this age I knew I should not be concerned about dreams, or be frightened by them, but here I am, looking over the pages of babble that still to this day makes little to no sense to me. At least there was no blood this time around.
Outside of the few people that I showed my pages to, no one knew of the sequences that I saw when I went to sleep. I knew that the people I lived around, and the majority of the people I worked with, did not experience the type of dream-and-nightmare-cycles I had. If I did tell anyone outside of the few people who didn't think I was crazy, they might have put me in a mental institution and have me committed there for life. So I kept these cycles to myself for the most part and once my current cycle went away, I would forget it just like every other dream and nightmares I had. File it away into a part of my brain that was nearly full of other files that I couldn't explain.
Until I met the only other person that I am sure had a better understanding of these cycles then I did.
I knew Paul Holland only by sight, since he worked in a different department then I did and we exchanged a few pleasantries in the communal break room or when passing on the sales floor. He often sat by himself when on lunch, nose in a book and ignoring everyone else, while I sat with others and talked about things. On the rare instance I had a book myself we would sit together in silence while we absorbed every word on the pages; only a few things were exchanged between us during those few and far between moments. It was during one of these rare moments that he broached the subject of dreams and their meanings and me having been just fresh out of my eye-and-face nightmare, broke down and told Paul about them. I don't know why I did, maybe because it seemed like he would be one of the few that didn't think I was crazy, or I was just tired of hiding these things from the rest of the world.
By the time I finished pouring out the odd workings of my brain, I sat there in silence as Paul tried to process what I had just told him. I started to get up, thinking maybe I should've stayed quiet, when he grabbed me by the arm and told me to sit back down again, and I did. Then he started to tell me of his own dream-and-nightmare-cycles, of how they started when he was a young child and that he could tell when the dream-cycles started and the nightmare-cycles began, when they tapered off, and how long between each ones. That he knew he was due for another cycle within the next few weeks and he was surprised someone else had them, too. I sat in silence just like Paul had, not aware that I should've been back from lunch twenty minutes ago, and one of my co-workers came looking for me; Paul apologized for holding me up and that it was his fault, we would talk after work.
Not long after that conversation Paul and I started to talk more about our cycles, what they meant, and if there was anything wrong with us. We compared notes, I showed him the pages I wrote and he should me the notebooks he had kept; I found it oddly reassuring that there was someone else out there that knew what it was like to have these reoccurring cycles. Paul felt the same way as well and when he lapsed into his dream-cycle he told me of what he dreamed of, of forests, clouds, and honeysuckle, it didn't take him long to transition into the nightmare-cycle. When he did he came to me to tell me about his nightmares he looked like a puppy that had lost his way and it struck me how vulnerable Paul was when his nightmare-cycle began. He, like me, could only remember certain fragments of these nightmares and his, like mine, had decreased in intensity as he grew older.
Eventually his nightmare-cycle faded away and he could sleep peacefully again, just like I could after my own cycles ended. Over the next two years we grew closer together and as we did our dream-and-nightmare-cycles continued to decrease and become less frequent. By the time Paul proposed to me we had just ended a cycle together, by the time our wedding came a year and a half later we had not had a dream-and-nightmare-cycle in eight months. Not long after our honeymoon I had my worst cycle since I was ten, it took Paul hours to wake me up during the worst of the nightmares. I don't remember when the cycle started, I don't even remember what the nightmares were about, yet the only thing that struck me as odd about this cycle was that there had been no dream-cycle before. No apples and oranges floating out of my closet, no feeling like I was comforted by a shining light, only darkness and despair.
Five days after my nightmare-cycle started, it ended abruptly and Paul's nightmare-fueled cycle began; his, like mine, had ended five days later and seemed to have similar effects on him as it did on me. It took us nearly two weeks to fully recover from these nightmares, the ones that we thought would never end and had not started with caressing dreams but started and ended with darkness. I was thankful that Paul had been there during the nightmare-cycle, I do not know if I would've woken up from that pit of despair; if I had and he was not there, I may not have been able to go back to sleep for fear of what lay when I was pulled back into that nightmare.
It has been nearly five years since the last nightmare-cycle and neither one of us has had a dream-and-nightmare-cycle. Are we done with them? Did some fate draw us together to get us away from a cycle that would've destroyed us if we had stayed apart? I don't know, I don't care to know, and I hope to never find out what could've been. All I know is that I will never take a peaceful night's sleep for granted again.
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