Compilation of Local Writers' Stories

Please Don't Let Me Sleep

To many, sleep is something that just comes and goes, a part of life so ingrained and natural it just fades into the background, never noticed, never missed.

For those who can't find it, however, it's something almost like a wound, an absence of something inside of you, a hole that gnaws until the discomfort fades into the back of your mind.

Whichever extreme you swing to, the point is that sleep, or lack of it, still remains behind our eyes, deep in the mind, always present but never closely examined.

You don't stop your work day to ponder how exactly it is you breathe, do you? I'd hope not. You might be crazy, or bored. But the fact you're alive means you breathe.

Isn't that creepy, how your body works without your consent like that? That may seem a bit paranoid of me, distrusting something like your own body, but believe me, my own paranoia once went much, much deeper than this... There are things closer to home, deeper, and much more sadistic and powerful.

At least when your body fails you, or rebels in its slow moving but terrible fashion, there are signs, a lump under the arm, a bloody spatter in your hand when you sneeze. It's hard to miss something like your heart twisting in your chest. But what happens when the signs are clear to everyone except for you? What if the fact you're broken makes it impossible to see what's wrong with you?

When your mind wants to fuck with you, it's infinitely more dangerous then some tumor. I may be getting a bit jumbled here, I apologise. Let me go back a bit, explain how it used to be, before I needed to write my thoughts down to keep them from twisting.

A year ago, I had been diagnosed with a rather severe case of insomnia. I don't just mean I found it hard to get to sleep, I could go days at a time without so much as nodding off. When I did sleep, it was a short affair, and oddly, I remember nothing prior to, during, or after the four or so hour escape from wakefulness. Well, that's not true, I do remember flashes of images, brief sensations, all tiny pieces that didn't add up to anything when put together, and were even less telling on their own.

It was like a scene in my memory had been simply torn away, and the motion had rendered the edges ragged and leaving only the most inconsequential scraps of half thoughts and the beginnings of feelings. One minute I was riding my bike home from the store, the next I was shaving, and it was dark. My unpacking of groceries, getting settled in bed, and waking up and showering were all missing.

I don't have a bad memory. It's not photogenic, but it's not exactly normal for me to lose hours out of my day. Finally, I saw a doctor, and after a lot of waiting, and an even harder time of trying to make myself sound sane, a shrink finally gave me a curious shrug. It seems I'd stumped him. In his professional opinion, there was nothing wrong with me. Well, nothing that made sense, at least. There was no apparent reason for me to be randomly blacking out like this, but, he noted cautiously, there were signs of something else. Post traumatic stress syndrome.

He repeated himself, for both our sakes, and we were equally confused over this. PTSD sounded crazy, right? Nothing has happened to me that's kicked my brain into a closet... right? Maybe something could have happened while I was out, but that didn't explain how I got these blackouts in the first place. Almost as confusing, I seemed in good health.

Apparently I was some kind of mutant who didn't require sleep to stay on my feet. The shrink didn't believe me when I told him I'd been awake one hundred and thirteen hours. If he hadn't have noted the surface symptoms of PTSD, I'm not sure he would have taken me seriously.

He assured me that I didn't have any kind of traumatic disorder, and that it must be something else, impossible to tell like this. I'd need to see a specialist, to get the answers, and so I was scheduled in to see someone else. In the meantime, he advised I keep a diary of my sleeping patterns, and wrote me a prescription for some heavy duty sleeping pills.