*Trigger Warning*
Last night, I slept for more than nine hours and I didn’t wake up once all night, not even to drink water, which is something which basically never happens. One would think that this is all good news; one would be wrong. Not waking up even once all night means that I spent nine uninterrupted hours trapped in my brain. I woke up more exhausted this morning than I usually do.
I have a weird pattern when it comes to sleep; I always want to avoid it, but I also get anxious at the thought of having less than 7-8 hours of sleep. I plan my sleep, shut off screens x amount of times before sleeping, know exactly where my water bottle is before I sleep, make sure I can easily reach it, have my pillows by my side so I have something to hug, but far enough to give me space.
One of the main reasons why I need to do all this is because sleep for me tends to mean either dreams which feel so real that the line between reality and dream gets blurred and messes with my brain, or nightmares which act as time machines and force me back to different moments in my abuse and make me feel like I’m actually there, not in a dream. They’re both pretty exhausting options, and neither make me feel like my brain gets any proper rest while I sleep.
Over the years, I’ve got better at waking myself up at different points to stay in touch with reality. In dreams, I have a real me and a dream me, who often engage in debates about which is which, and what is actually happening and what I’m dreaming. In my nightmares, there is no real me which acts as a possible anchor to reality; reality goes out of the window. You see, when I’m in a nightmare, I have no idea that I’m in a flashback or in memory; to me, it feels like I’m living that moment all over again, but rarely even know that it’s a moment I’ve lived again. It feels like someone is messing with the timeline of my life and just putting me in all those moments without letting me know it’s a repeat.
It’s terrifying. For someone who doesn’t easily show or feel fear, my nightmares leave me no choice. Because I’m not someone who doesn’t feel fear in my nightmares, I’m not the woman who knows she has the strength to handle anything in her life; I’m the terrified girl who is being systematically broken and letting it all happen. If I’m lucky, I’ll see myself being torn apart only a few times a week. Recently, I haven’t been that lucky. Almost every night, I see the men who hurt me, I hear some of the things they said, I feel their fists and other ways they physically hurt me, I feel them penetrate me, touch me, make me touch them. I don’t really see myself, because I am myself, but I see the bruises, the bleeding, I hear my own screams, everything I said.
I’ve got better at waking myself up at the same point of time. It’s usually not quick enough, and I usually live out almost, if not actually the entire memory before I succeed in waking myself up, but I do wake up. The phases when the nightmares are stronger and worse, I can’t leave waking up to my ability to do it myself, and in those phases, I set alarms at a fixed interval throughout the night, so it’s a guarantee that I’ll wake up. Once I wake up, by whatever method, I touch my soft bed, move my limbs to make sure they aren’t tied, look around to make sure none of the men from my nightmares are in my room, have some cold water and go back to sleep to survive another nightmare. In the morning when I wake up, sometimes my head just has a fast-forwarded reel of all these memories playing in my head, and I can’t be certain that they’re just memories. It probably sounds ridiculous to someone- how can I not know whether what I just experienced was in a dream-state or an actual experience?
Well, it’s easy to understand when I sort of lived in a dream-state for all the years I was being abused. Even now, if I’m asked to draw a timeline, every time I draw it, it’ll look different; I don’t remember what happened when. Even back then, I knew I had holes in my memories, and there would be nights all I’d remember is leaving my house and then coming back, nothing in between. At one point of time, I started noting down the times I left and returned because sometimes that’s the only way I would know how long he’d hurt me. Sometimes, I wouldn’t remember the entire night, and just know that something had happened the night before, when I’d wake up in the morning in more pain than I’d gone to sleep in. Sometimes I would have those little glimpses, sometimes I wouldn’t. Sometimes I’d get a quick flash of memory much later in the day, and that would be it.
Maybe it’s easier to understand why I wake up after all my nightmares and need to convince myself that I’m safe, that I was safe last night, that all these glimpses in my head are of a horrific past which I relived in a dream, and not of a horrific present I can’t remember. Waking myself up a few times during the night helps because I can remember finding my water bottle, drinking cold water which felt a little jarring, and then going back to sleep. I remember waking up, so I can believe I was asleep. But it isn’t always enough, and then I assess myself for injuries and pains; I start at the top of my head and systematically lightly squeeze my entire body and check for anything which hurts.
Only when I realise that my head doesn’t have any bumps, my jaw isn’t half dislocated, it doesn’t hurt to breathe because of any soreness in my neck, my back isn’t swollen, that my waist isn’t cut, my stomach isn’t bruised, my groin isn’t bleeding, my fingers don’t feel like they’re twisted, my legs and hips don’t burn or have finger gouges, my toes don’t feel stomped on, do I finally believe that I had just been in a dream. It doesn’t take away the terror I felt in that dream, because that terror was real at some point. All it does is make me believe that I don’t need to be feeling that terror today.
I slept for nine uninterrupted hours last night. I didn’t have any breaks to provide me with a narrative which wasn’t hundred per cent nightmarish. Nights like this make me feel like I was trapped in the sleep, trapped in the nightmares, trapped in the past, trapped in my own mind. I woke up exhausted, reminding myself to not wish that I was dead, had to do two rounds of my body scan to believe myself, and even after all that, the images were trapped in my head all day. I did so many things today, and even with all the potential for distraction, these images, little clips of memories were always there.
I would be talking to friends and somewhere in the back of my head, seeing myself trapped in this box or chest or something, naked, barely able to breath, feeling the blood dry on parts of my body, my arms pulled behind my back, with almost no room to move, and hearing myself cry and beg, and them laugh and take bets on how long it would take me to piss myself or pass out. I’d be listening to their friends say something, and blank off for a bit because now I’m seeing myself tied to a bed, completely unable to move, his body above mine and forcing its way in, and just feeling my body tear, his hand on my mouth to muffle the screams, and that expression on his face which told me how much he was enjoying everything all the more because he could see how much pain he was causing, how much I wanted to die.
I’ve spent all day today just holding these memories at bay, to not get lost inside my own head. I’ve been angry at my head because it trapped me, and now I don’t know how to escape it. I’ve wanted to be able to cry, but even if I could cry, it definitely doesn’t happen when I’m with people and I am with people for most of the day. I did the work I needed to do, pretending to myself and everyone else that I was fine, putting a wall between those memories and the present moment, so they could both co-exist but at least for a few hours, didn’t interfere with each other too much. I worked so many times harder to be myself in the public, with half the success, because the one thing I couldn’t control after a point, was the exhaustion.
I got over nine hours of uninterrupted sleep, and it was terrifying.