Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul. - Dave Pelzer, A Child Called "It"
Strange, isn't it? That you can be living in your dreams and your nightmares at the very same time. You learn to run from what you feel, and that's why we have nightmares. To deny is to create madness, to accept is to control. There are many who don't wish to sleep for fear of nightmares. Sadly, on the other hand, there are many who don't wish to wake for the same fear.
I still get nightmares. In fact, I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I'm not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares.
Nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.
They exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry that is fear.
Stop trying to throw logic at nightmares. Sometimes the monster chasing you is real. Sometimes they're real and the only way to defeat them is to become the bigger monster.
They spring from deep within us, these nightmares. They speak of the deepest needs, the ones we have all been taught since our childhood never to put into words, because these dreams reveal our other face, the one we keep hidden, the Hyde to mankind's Jekyll.
My nightmares don't spring from rational fears.
I'm scared of the dark, they don't place me inside a dark room.
I'm not surrounded by storms.
My nightmares rip me into pieces, piece by piece, and before the last piece is ripped, I'm awake, and I can't tell the difference between what's real and what's not so I avoid everything and everyone because I don't know if I actually said things or if it was all in my head.
I can imagine entire conversations with people that I don't talk to, actual text messages that I think I'm waking to so I hide my phone from myself in shame so I don't get torn into scraps again and again and I'm tired, I'm so tired of living a life that I can't control because I'm scared to control it for the fear of hurting someone's feelings in the slightest.
So instead, I accept the footsteps pressed into my back. I yield to anything thrown at me.
I go to bed, I play with your hair. I close my eyes as your voice hits me. I tell you how my day went. I hear your plans or tomorrow. I realize it's been forever since you were there. I open my eyes, wipe a tear, close them again, and dream you were here, and let you shred me like a piee of tissue paper in a baby's hands.
You forever haunt me.
I thought, when it stopped, I could move on with my life. Instead I am still running from you. The only difference is now I am running from you in my dreams.
I'm tired of the acceptance of how things are.
I'm tired of being a side piece in the plans of my friends lives, when I could be planning my own life.
The extra monopoly piece.
