Why I nap

I nap. A lot. Every day that I can. People think I'm monstrously lazy or ill-disciplined.

Then I tell them about my dreams.

Last night, I was in a warehouse. There were guards stationed at every entrance. They had guns. Knives. Some of the knives were a rusty crimson. Blood. Old blood that had dried to a permanent stain on the metal. They were silent, frightening, and would kill us.

Us consisted of myself and about fifteen other girls in this warehouse. Most of them were chained to the walls in discolored cuffs, bruised, bleeding. Blonde hair was matted brown from bloody cuts along the skull. Brown hair was painted black from months of not being allowed to wash it. They were as silent as the guards. Opening their mouths would only get them bashed in the head and tossed outside along with the other corpses stacked up like firewood along the warehouse walls. They were chattel and they knew it.

I was not chained. I was alone in a room that dripped filthy water from a cracked corrugated roof. The concrete floor was bare and sticky with mold. It was cold and I had no shoes. I knew there was a guard outside this room. That scared me. What scared me more was the corpse a young girl in the room. She was lying on a slab of broken concrete in the corner and wrapped in muddy gauze. I could see her hair - at one point, it had been blonde. Now it was gray with dust and decay.

She was dead. She had been dead for some time. Days. Weeks. Maybe years. I don't know. Her name was Hannah and she was special. That's why she was still around.

Hannah had been special to the man who kept us all here. I'm not sure what she was to him. Some kind of talisman, perhaps, or a lover. She had died. And he had put me in a room with her to see if I could be like her.

I kept along the wall. I didn't go near her. I didn't want to know if we were anything alike. I knew eventually it wouldn't matter anyways. The man would come and haul me out of the room and whatever happened after that, I wouldn't be able to stop him.

Dreams are strange like this - they shift from one place to another without explanation, but you know that you have not moved into some other dream. I found myself running through a crowd, desperate, more desperate than anything I had ever felt before. I had somehow managed to escape. I'd fled and there was a park. It was afternoon, sunny, and the park was very busy.

Safety, I thought. Safety in numbers. That's all I could think about. I ran. I ran straight into the crowd and I kept running.

And  they were following me. Men dressed in cameo black and brown, holding massive rifles and machine guns, knocking over women and children in the crowd, screeching along sidewalks and shouting into walkie-talkies. The man wanted me back and he had sent his guards to bring me back.

I wasn't worried the guards would kill me. He wanted me back at the warehouse. And whatever he had waiting for me back at the warehouse was going to be far, far worse than death. I kept running. I rounded the corner of a stone fountain in the park and slipped - just for a second - on the wet pavement.

That was all they needed. They grabbed the man who had been in front of me. Once the bystander had been dragged into the fountain, then two guards seized my shoulders and forced me to my knees. They wouldn't shoot me. But I knew I wouldn't be able to get up. So I cringed under hands like stone, waiting.

And this is the part of the dream that really scared me. When I rolled over at 5 AM, whimpering, wanting to cry, not being able to, this is what I had echoing in my ears.

The punishment for my escape wasn't going to be physical. Not for me. The punishment for my escape was to watch and listen to an innocent man's slaughter. I didn't know what was happening at first. The man and the guards struggled in the water, just long enough for a knife to flash out into the sunlight and sink like butter into the man's stomach.

Another knife. Another stab. The fountain turned red. And then the sound of tearing flesh. The wet, ripping sound like paper being shredding except it was this man's entire body being ripped apart by the guard's hands.

And I could hear it. The sound of pieces of a body being forced apart, limb and ligature being twisted off by sheer force....The man screamed. He kept screaming. I could hear him dying, being ripped to shreds, and all around me, were his screams. The screams of his family, being held back by another set of guards. I closed my eyes.

That's when I began screaming. If I screamed loud enough, I wouldn't be able to hear those screaming around me. I wanted to bury the sound of a human being rent to pieces. I wanted to somehow find something else, anything else, to listen to.

I screamed. And it did nothing to drown out the sounds. I heard everything. I kept hearing everything, every slash, every shout, every snap, everything.

Eventually the man stopped screaming. His vocal chords were flung along with pieces of his throat on the stone steps of the fountain. The two guards who had held me down yanked me to my feet. They didn't have to say a word. They didn't even have to restrain me.

I walked with them back to the warehouse. I knew that the cost of my insolence had been this innocent man's life. The guards had not killed him. The captor back at the warehouse, who had given the order, had not killed him.

I'd killed him. My actions, my terror, was what led to his death and his dismemberment. The horror of what his family would be picking out of the stone for weeks was my fault. I had done this. Had I not left, that man would still be alive. I HAD left and he was dead. I knew this.

I don't know who Hannah was or why I was supposed to be like her. All I know is that I went back to that room with the black, cold floor and I sat there, looking at her. Whenever the man came to get me, I would do whatever he said. I wouldn't fight. Maybe Hannah had tried to fight back.

I knew better than to try that ever again.

This is not an unusual dream for me. An unfortunate combination of a troubled history full of childhood abuse and misfiring neurons in my skull pull out these images time and time again. I wake up screaming from nightmares on average of twice a week.

I have tried: medication, meditation, lucid dreaming, writing them down, not writing them down, analyzing them, trying to forget them, sleeping in silence, sleeping with white noise, sleeping with stuffed animals, without stuffed animals, watching kitty videos before bed, countless other tricks....to no avail. Not in 32 years. They come as they will and they will always come as they will.

Sometimes the dreams are sad and beautiful, which I will take over "terrifying and horrifying" any day. Once I dreamed of a world in which powerful sorcerers were stealing memories, and I was in contact with the last woman who knew herself. She knew she'd forget everything that was important to her, so she'd send me pictures of her family, trinkets her children would make her. She needed someone else to know what was important to her, so somewhere out there, someone would know who she was.

The dream ended when I received a letter asking me to stop writing her, for she no longer knew who I was nor why we had been writing. I stared off into a dying sunset, holding the pieces of a woman who didn't even know she existed.

Those dreams are very sad. But they do not wake me up. The dream last night did. The ones with blood always do. And there are always dreams with blood.

I nap during the day. The dreams never come in the sunlight. Why, I don't know. They just don't. So I nap.

It's not like I'm getting good sleep at night.