Sleep…
A disappointment for energetic children, a panacea for adults.
And the bane of my existence.
For the longest time I have wondered how do people manage to fall asleep, how do they keep sane within the oneiric realm. How can they rest altogether without realizing the danger they’re putting themselves into.
Or… Is it only me the one who is hunted down?
Time after time over countless noons I have wandered the empty aisles and passageways of my conscious mind, always finding new things to focus in, to learn from. Always keeping myself occupied and nurturing my brain. I have learned crafts, arts, cookery and unraveled some of the mysteries of language; to that extent, I have also found interest in learning a couple more, just to keep widening the range of what I can take in. I have also learned a little bit of the workings of the mind. All of these in varying degrees, all of them more or less than the last one.
Yet, as I scoured through my texts, a particularly sunny and hot noon, whether driven by tiredness or lulled by the heat haze, I found myself drifting into a sleep, and a dream, in which I finally felt I had control.
I finally felt I was myself.
I took advantage of this chance, after all, anyone would kill for the opportunity to explore the deepest reaches of the mind without the hinder of consciousness. I delved, descended. I pictured myself in an endless library of sorts, with equally endless tomes that ranged from memories from my tenderest youth to what might await me should I follow a particular path into the future.
I felt the grip of eagerness in my chest, its claws slowly digging into my heart as I kept reading.
I explored, I sank myself deeper into this hole —spelunked, if you will, deeper into this gold mine—. I found myself going through hallways littered with my achievements and walls painted with what I had yet to accomplish. I found many a portrait depicting the people I have known over my life. The countless beings I have lent my help, and likewise, those who had tended to me in my deepest moments of despair. Not much time passed until I reached what I thought it was a dead end, which hanged out from a crag into an abyss of nothingness.
I glanced over. A dark pit lied underneath, no visions seemed to escape and no light I could imagine could illuminate what I thought were the deepest reaches of my mind.
Maybe, and only maybe, they weren’t those deepest reaches at all, maybe that thing was a lock to keep in check what has tormented me ever since.
I leapt, using the power of my mind to reduce the distance between these unfathomable deeps and the crag I was glancing over, and as I fell, I heard what seemed to be like bells.
Of course, if my recollections were any accurate at all, the time in which I fell asleep was probably a few minutes before the afternoon mass, and the church was already calling its pilgrims. The tolls were offbeat, though. After many years listening to the bells, I could distinguish when the church called for mass, marriage or funeral, and none of these matched the rhythm these bells seemed to follow.
I tried as much as I could to ignore it, it might as well had been my heart pounding as I dragged myself over this tartarus lookalike and hoped to glance into it. Maybe I would be able to face my inner demons. Maybe I could look at them in the eye and destroy my deepest fears.
The bells rang louder as I walked more and more towards the summit of what now appeared to be a dark mountain reaching into the sky. I looked puzzled to my sides, the scene changed without me willing it. I looked behind, the crag I jumped from was now part of a road leading to where I currently was, the entire place’s ground now pitch black.
I tried to climb, but each step made the bells ring far louder, as if the sound itself was being multiplied, to the point I ended up crouching, covering my ears, overwhelmed by the unbearable noise around me. Instinct moved my body and I yelled, trying desperately to fight the pressure every bell toll placed on me, trying to soothe myself.
Whatever happened after that I don’t remember, my last memory of that dream was me, walking through a dimly lit alley at night, the streetlights flickering every other minute. Aimlessly I walked, the road never coming to an end. Fruitlessly I roamed, trying every turn for an exit.
No turn was any different from the last, no streetlight shone brighter but merely sparkled shyly beneath the overpowering darkness.
There, amidst the gloom of this endless night and the slight hope the lights provided me, I saw a figure fading into existence, a humanoid shape with a multitude of arms that squirmed and wriggled. A head —what appeared to be so, at least— that resembled a sharp oval shape. Legs that didn’t bear resemblance to any kind of human limb. And eyes so dark they ate the light shining on it.
The scene changed, now a desert all around me, a sandstorm raged as I struggled to move towards a small dune, on top of it, the same figure stood, still looking at a side.
The place shifted, a huge pit opened agape underneath the sand, swallowing everything but the figure, which started looking at me.
Once again everything turned.
I lied on a bed looking at an unknown ceiling.
The figure standing beside me.
The arms moving in absurd ways, writhing as if in pain.
The ovoid head and a single eye on top staring down at me.
A single word I couldn’t understand.
Then a scream.
I woke up on my couch, drenched in sweat. Reality felt strange, different. It felt alien to walk again through my house’s hallway, almost like it was about to collapse on me or vanish were I to touch anything. I tried lying on my bed to sleep, but as soon as I closed my eyes, the figure came back, growling through an invisible mouth, screaming what seemed to be obscenities in a language my mind could not comprehend. I woke up once again, not even a minute had gone by, sweat streamed down my forehead.
This repeated every single day, every single night. I went to sleep or at least tried to get some rest, and the same creature would find me, some times faster than others. I sought help, they told me I was just having nightmares, but they felt different, they felt surreal. It was as if this aberration was trying to communicate with me in its own outlandish way. They told me I was having visions and prescribed me medicaments, they wanted me to believe I might have started suffering from dementia, but my dreams, my nightmares. This creature, it was real!
I don’t know if this happened because I stepped farther than I had to, or if this was orchestrated by this creature. But in different dreams it spoke to me. It called, it told me that because I looked for him —because I became aware of him— he could find me. And because I slept, he spoke.
Maybe the only solution is not sleeping anymore.
But… How long will I endure?
