Dream Demons – Colombo, Sri Lanka – [03/24/2013]

But I am always dreaming…even when I am awake […] Drown out my dreams! Keep me from remembering whatever wants me to remember it! – The Last Unicorn

Dreams are such strange things. So many have tried to interpret them and every interpretation comes out differently. For my part, I simply wish I would stop dreaming. Or at least that I would stop being so aware of my dreams. I am very conscious in my dreams, I am aware of what’s happening to me, I have full sensory perception of what’s going on but no control over whatever circumstances my subconscious is presenting to me. This is quite lovely if you are the kind of person who has flying dreams or other things along those lines…but I don’t. I have nightmares. Near lucid, twisted, nightmares. The kind of dreams that make sense in the context of the dream, that tell a story with characters and a logical sequences of events. Nearly every single night.

And when I wake up, the fragments flutter away almost instantly, leaving only incomprehensible bits behind: a black collar decorated with raven’s feathers, a knife, a flash of light…whatever…and the sense of being dragged back up to reality from the depths of something that may be sleep but isn’t rest. Sometimes I wake up frightened, other times I wake up feeling actually ill, almost always in a cold sweat, and always, always exhausted – like I’ve just run a marathon. I can get a solid 8 hours of sleep and wake up for work the next day so tired I feel sick.

The thing is, this isn’t the first time this has happened to me. I’ve had the whole night-terror thing before when I was in university; for a several months in my mid-twenties I had these same symptoms, the same types of dreams and the same types of reactions. But they simply stopped as quickly as they had come and I haven’t had trouble with them since.

So why now? Why are they happening now?

Any time but now would be good. Because when I’m this tired, I end up holding myself together by a thread for my working day, I pull up my show-business training to get through the day without people knowing that I’m about to crash onto my desk, I have trouble focusing and I get abnormally edgy. Also – as my mother will attest – I cry at the drop of a hat when this kind of exhaustion gets its claws into me. And with us being just on our way out of the mid-season slump, this kind of exhaustion is the last thing I need.

Thing is, I’ve tried everything I can think of to make them go away. I even have sleeping pills, but those just knock me out quickly, they don’t do anything dream-wise, I’ve tried making sure I watch, read, or eat nothing unusual right before bed – zilch effect. Besides, from what little I remember of them, the dreams seem to have no tie to anything in my real life, not even vaguely…

So someone…please? Drown out my dreams…?