Nightmares

 I've started to hate going to sleep.

That is a strange thing to say because I used to think of sleep as something neutral, or even comforting. You get tired, you go to bed, you close your eyes, and for a few hours you don't have to do anything. You don't have to be productive or think about everything that is going on in your life. You just rest. Lately, though, sleep has become something I am genuinely afraid of.

For the past few days, I've been having nightmares every night. I don't want to talk about what they're about, because I don't think the actual content is the most important part. What matters to me is what they have done to me. I never really understood how much a nightmare could affect you after you wake up. I always thought of nightmares as something unpleasant that happened while you were asleep, followed by the realization that it wasn't real. You wake up, maybe feel a little shaken, and eventually you move on with your day. I didn't know how wrong I was.

Now, when nighttime starts approaching, I get an incredible amount of anxiety. I don't want to sleep. I cry a lot and the only thing I can think is, "I don't want to go to sleep. Please don't go to sleep." I've started delaying going to bed for as long as I can, even when I'm exhausted, because being awake feels safer than knowing what might happen when I close my eyes.

My room and my bed have become frightening to me too. That might sound ridiculous, but I genuinely don't want to go into my room sometimes, even during the day, because there is this irrational fear that I might fall asleep and have another nightmare. My bed is supposed to be where I rest. It is supposed to be one of the safest places in my life. Instead, I look at it and think about having to sleep there eventually.

There have been so many times when I have been exhausted enough to know that I need to sleep, but I still don't want to. I would rather stay awake because at least when I'm awake I know what is happening. The problem is that I inevitably fall asleep eventually. I'm already sleeping badly, and sooner or later my body wins. Then I wake up terrified all over again.

When I wake up from a nightmare, my heart is usually racing so hard that I can feel it beating in my ears. Sometimes I wake up gasping for air. Every muscle in my body feels stiff and tense, and I am completely exhausted but also incredibly scared. The strangest part is that I know it was a nightmare. My mind knows that. I can look around my room and understand that I am awake and that whatever happened wasn't real. But my body doesn't seem to understand that.

My body reacts as if the nightmare actually happened. For a while after I wake up, it feels like I am still there. It doesn't matter how unrealistic the nightmare might have been. I can know logically that it wasn't real and still feel like it was. The fear is real. The adrenaline is real. My heart pounding is real. That feeling of being trapped inside something that isn't happening anymore is real.

And then I have to start my day.

Except I don't really feel like I have started my day. I feel like I am stuck in some kind of constant crisis mode. My heart seems to pound throughout the day, I cry constantly, and I'm much quieter than I normally am. I feel exhausted both physically and mentally. Everything seems closer to the surface, and it takes much less for me to start crying.

Sometimes I cry, and other times I stop showing emotion altogether. It isn't that I don't feel anything. I feel everything. I just stop showing it. I don't have the energy to explain what is happening inside my head, so I become quiet instead.

I've also started becoming afraid of nighttime itself. That scares me because the fear isn't staying inside the nightmares anymore. It follows me while I'm awake. It's there during the day when I look at my bed. It's there when I realize that the sun is going down. It's there when I start getting tired and know that eventually I'll have to sleep again.

I never thought I could hate going to sleep. I never knew that something happening while I'm unconscious could have this much power over me. I always thought nightmares were just nightmares. I didn't understand that they could change the way you feel about your own bedroom, your own bed, and something as basic as closing your eyes.

There is also something strangely embarrassing about being this scared. One night, before even going to sleep, I had such a strong panic attack that I felt like a little kid. Like a toddler who needs to sleep with the light on because there might be a monster under the bed. I felt small and helpless, and I hated feeling that way. It made me realize just how much this has gotten to me.

At some point, I even started feeling like I somehow deserved to have the nightmares. Not because I thought I had actually done something to deserve them. It wasn't a rational thought. It was more like this feeling that maybe I was just supposed to endure it, that I didn't really have the right to complain because technically nothing had happened. But something has happened. I am scared. I am exhausted. I don't feel safe sleeping in my own bed.

And more than anything, I miss resting.

I don't necessarily miss dreaming. I don't even know if I want to dream again anytime soon. I just miss being able to sleep without being afraid of what will happen when I close my eyes. I miss being tired and simply going to bed. I miss waking up and feeling like sleep actually helped me instead of feeling like I have just survived something.

I don't know when this will stop. I don't know when my room will feel safe again, or when nighttime will stop making me anxious, or when my body will finally understand what my mind already knows: that I am awake and the nightmare is over.

For now, I just know that I am tired. I am tired of being afraid of sleep, tired of waking up feeling like something actually happened, and tired of carrying that fear with me throughout the day. I don't know when I'll feel comfortable sleeping again. I just hope that, eventually, sleep can become something simple again. Something that lets me rest instead of something I have to survive.