Blessed by Nightmares

I keep promising I’m going to delve into nightmarism, but before I can do that, you must understand my influences.

I’ve already covered the marks left on my psyche by Catholicism and the internet. Let me shine a light on a much bigger influence:

Hypnagogia.

A couple of weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night, covered in blood. The sheets were soaked in it. Butters lay next to me, eviscerated, his insides spread out all over the blankets. A few panicked seconds later, the hallucination faded, the splatters of red melted back into the pattern on the linens, and I stroked the sleeping dog. I stayed up for a while that night, all hints of sleep chased away.

Several nights ago, I woke up at around midnight and my entire room was glowing a venomous green, like an alien ship was hovering outside my window, bathing the entirety of my bedroom in its light. I sat up, staring at my green walls, not daring to look out the window behind me, blinking and rubbing my eyes, trying to figure out where the light was coming from. Had someone changed the light bulbs in the alley? Was someone shining an emergency light into my room? What did green emergency lights mean? As I pondered these questions and looked around my room, the color faded. Green became shadowy off-white. My bedroom returned to normal and I was finally fully awake.

Last night, I woke up and there was a woman standing in the corner of my bedroom. Actually, to be specific, she was hovering a foot off the ground. She had her back to me and her head down, her long, dark hair covering her face. She didn’t move or make a sound, and a few seconds later, as my waking mind battled my sleeping one, her body disappeared and the curtain of disheveled hair reverted back to the lampshade it always was.

This weird phenomenon—these hallucinations—is thanks to hypnagogia. I have no idea what causes them, as I have no idea why they have become more frequent in the last few months. These hallucinations affect me as a person, of course, but also as a writer.

I am constantly trying to play catch up when it comes to sleep. When the norm is interrupted, nightmare-plagued sleep with panicked waking hallucinations interspersed throughout, you better believe it affects my outlook on life. Never mind how rested I feel during the day.

And as a writer?

They say to write what you know, and I know nightmares. I know hypnagogia. I know nighttime disturbances and hauntings and midnight horrors. I’ve lived with them since I was a child. I have become intimate with the anxiety that comes when the sun is down and our brains are in nocturnal mode. Terror isn’t the other, for me. It’s always—commonplace. I soak in those waters every night and when the sun rises, I have to choose whether I’m left with a feeling of fatigue and a damaged emotional state, or I can plumb the depths of those treacherous waters and wring out some use from them.

Some days, I can only do the former. Wallowing, yawning, grumping. On other days, the good days, I do the latter. I wrestle the incubus and put it in a chokehold. I beat it into submission and tell it to whisper its secrets to me. And I add every new secret to an ever-growing list of ideas and inspiration for my writing.

I went out to lunch with an old friend recently and he asked me, do you ever worry you’re going to run out of ideas?

It was an easy answer.

No.

I am inundated with them every night. I could write ideas down from now until my dying day and never have time to use them all.

I am a writer, and I am blessed by nightmares.