¹ Broken Clocks ✶ BUCKY BARNES

𝐢𝐢. wheres my mind?

TWO | WHERE'S MY MIND?

NIGHTMARE HAD BECOME SYNONYMOUS WITH SLEEP TO HARRIET IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS. She doesn't know if she got them much before but, she's been getting them every night since she first woke up. The dreams hardly ever made sense either. They'd jump around from scene to scene. Half the time she'd wake up not even remembering what had happened but have sweat beading down her forehead as she tried to steady her rapid breath. She'd even turned to home remedies to make them stop, buying a silk pillow case to combat the sweating (she's seen no change). At this point, she's gotten used to nightmares and the fact that sleep was her least favourite bodily need.

Over the last week, she's been having the same dream at some point every night. It'll start with her standing in a hallway of blackness then a glass will smash which will cause a women to scream. She tries, every-time, to reach the source of the scream and make it stop but she cannot. She stays where she is, no matter how hard she runs, consumed in the void until she eventually wakes up.

Her therapist, Meg, thinks her dreams might have subliminal messages or they could even be fragments of her memory. And so, Harriet has to keep a dream journal (seeing as she's not allowed to keep a real one as it could breach S.H.I.E.L.D's security or whatever Fury had said during her orientation.) Her and Meg go through the contents every week, talking out all the possibilities and what everything could mean. When she had first started therapy with Meg, she'd been hesitant to keep a dream journal—it sounds stupid, does it not? She'd never thought dreams could have meaning but Meg's convinced her they do. (Perhaps, too, it was her old-fashioned, closed-minded brain seeping through from the past. She doesn't like the idea of herself being closed-minded, however, if some of her old ideals were still ingrained in her mind, there might be hope for her memories.) However, some of her dreams were just pure nonsense or too hard to remember.

Meg told Harriet about this old psychiatrist once, Freud and how he believed all our dreams had super deep meanings. Apparently, his theories are frowned on by most modern psychiatrists now but Meg still thinks his ideas were interesting and works them into her sessions with Harriet, "Only the non-crazy parts, though," she had assured the unconvinced-looking red-head.