Somehow Safer Now
But how can a nightmare be safe?
I must have screamed, but as I became aware of the room, I wasn't yet able to move my limbs. The sound of my sister’s frantic pounding on my bedroom door filled the room I still couldn’t quite see.
I had no way to know how long the sleep paralysis held me between the horrors of my dream world and the waking ones that crept back each morning, but it felt like hours before it let go and I was able to call out, “I’m okay. Just another nightmare.”
When her steady voice called back, “Okay,” I assumed it had taken much less time than I thought to whittle the scream down to the false composure of words.
I waited for the sound of her footsteps to trail away down the hall before I moved to escape the sweat-soaked sheets that felt like oozing remnants of the unknown death scene I had dreamed.
When it came to the cinematic series of nightmares that plagued me, churning horrific colors and dread into the depths of my subconscious, I always lied that they affected me like well done horror movie shocks that went away with the closing credits. I always insisted that I was all right. But how could I be? It was the same nightmare most every night, for weeks, now a month, the details of gore becoming more intense as if film students were remaking the same scene with a bigger…
