Excerpt

Thursday, Oct. 6, 1983
Dear Diary,

I don’t remember the dream, just the waking up part. Or should I say the almost not waking up part.

Does this happen to everyone? This inability to wake up, to move. This struggle to get out of a dream. I hate it! And then when I finally do wake up I don’t want to go back to sleep. Because I don’t want it to happen again. And sometimes it does. Like tonight. It’s happened twice already and I really don’t think I can handle a third time. So I’m sitting here writing about it at three thirty in the morning and I’m going to be so tired at school. It’s hard enough staying awake in some of my boring classes without having been awake half the night to escape my nightmares.

And the bad part is, I don’t even know what the nightmare was about. But I remember that first I thought I woke up from a bad dream and I felt really relieved. But then weird stuff I don’t remember started to happen again and then I started to fake wake up again, but I was trapped in that terrible in-between place where I’m awake but I can’t move. I wish I had better words to describe the feeling. It’s kind of like I’m underwater or in a cave or a deep well that I can’t climb out of. Except, I can breathe. At least I can breathe. I just kind of lie there breathing and trying to decide whether to just stay and let it go on or to fight to come back, which sounds like the right thing to do, but it’s really hard and takes a lot of effort and also kind of makes me feel panicky. In the end I always do fight; usually I try to scream, and I guess that’s why I’ve woken up screaming so many times that the neighbours probably think I’m crazy. But I’m getting control of that part now. I don’t want to wake Mom and I feel childish calling for her when I’m fifteen years old, practically an adult, so I can usually stop myself from screaming quick enough that I don’t wake her up.

The problem is, if I don’t wake MYSELF up enough, when I fall back asleep I sometimes slip right back into that trapped place. That’s what happened tonight.

And the second time was so strange.

There I was in the in-between place, breathing but suffocating all at once, and all of a sudden I just floated off my bed. But it wasn’t like a flying dream or anything (those, by the way, are the best!), as I said, I wasn’t dreaming, I was awake, but my body wasn’t. So I floated off the bed and over to my door and I grabbed the doorknob and the door opened, and then it just started to swing open and shut, swinging me back and forth with it. I know it doesn’t make sense, because I would have gotten stuck in the door if it really happened, but I am telling you, in some way it was real. I was, again, trapped, just holding that door and swinging and somehow I felt it was like someone (or something?) else was making it happen and watching it happen. And laughing at me. Cruelly.

Eventually I managed to scream, which brought me back to my bed (and my body?) with one big, hard thump, and I only called out for a second before I caught myself, stopped myself, and then grabbed all my courage to reach over and turn on the light.

I just read over what I wrote and I know it doesn’t sound so bad, but I am telling you it scared the shit out of me. Because it wasn’t like a dream at all but like it was really happening.

Now I have to pee. I don’t even want to put my feet on the floor, I’m so creeped out. I guess I’ll just run and turn on every light along the way!