Once Upon a Nightmare

death is the least of your worries

iv: death is the least of your worries

 

“That thing is creeping me out.”

“If only,” Alexander mutters.

A gigantic eye roves around in the sky above us, studying and blinking like thunder. It’s Alexander’s attempt at representing the doctors currently studying my dreaming patterns. I glare at it with distaste.

“Do you think they’ll notice you in here?”

“No.” He sorts through the assorted cookies on the table between us until he unearths a dark chocolate delight. At most, he’s entertained by their attempts.

I sigh. “This stinks.”

“I would say it can’t get any worse, but you have a habit of proving me wrong. I thought it couldn’t get much worse than being stuck in a human’s mind—but it in fact can get worse when the human is annoying and knows you’re in there. But wait! That’s still not the worst, because guess what? She has narcolepsy.” With a calmness that belies the venom in his voice, he brushes his now crushed-to-crumbs cookie off the table. “Worst day ever? It’s probably tomorrow.”

I grimace, but don’t retaliate. Jerk though Alexander is, our time together isn’t the only thing slipping away. He looks like a tiny drain is letting life out of him every day. My dreams lack the luster they once had, as if he’s too tired to hold everything up. I don’t ask what’s wrong, mostly because I don’t trust him to tell me the truth, if he answers at all.

“Here comes the wake up drug,” he says, sucking a final crumb off his finger. He waves with the same hand and I stick out my tongue.

I wake up; my mouth tastes like I swallowed a can of wet cement before going under. I cough, trying to sit up.

“Easy there.” A firm hand pushes me back down. The two suction cups plastered against my temples itch, but when I reach up to scratch one, my hand is swatted away.

The sleep clinic is cold and metallic, about as comfortable as a dirty toilet seat. The doctor at my bedside scribbles on a clipboard. The light from the fluorescent bulbs above our heads reflects off his glasses, so I can’t see his eyes. A woman, similarly clothed in white coat and stern manner, enters the room. After a few minutes of whispering, she shakes her head. The nametag over her left breast reads Dr. Wang, MD, PhD. “Strange, very strange,” she says, without a hint of an Asian accent.

They turn to me. “Can you recall if you dreamed?” the male doctor asks me, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. His eyes turn out to be boring, shallow brown.

“I . . . yeah, I think so.”

“Can you remember the dream?”

I nod. More whispering with bent heads and scribbled notes. I look toward the half-open door, surprising myself by wanting to see my dad.

“Let’s run one more test.”

I stifle a groan. Goody.

Unfortunately, I don’t get to sleep for that test. It involves a lot of tapping and color association, something to do with my left and right brain. I don’t really pay attention.

An hour later, the four of us —Dr. Wang, Dr. Fletcher, my Dad and me— sit facing in a conference room as they try to explain what’s wrong. Just like Alexander, they tag the problem as narcolepsy.

“Normally,” Dr. Wang says, “when an individual is awake, brain waves show a regular rhythm. When a person first falls asleep, the brain waves become slower and less regular. This sleep state is called non-rapid eye movement, or NREM, sleep. After about an hour and a half of NREM sleep, the brain waves begin to show a more active pattern again. This sleep state, called REM sleep, or rapid eye movement, is when most remembered dreaming occurs.”