Waking Nightmares and Finally a Good Night's Sleep

Photo: Matt R.

Last night I finally got a full night's worth of sleep. That's the first time in about a week and I was really wearing out. The waking nightmares have been really strong since last weekend.

I don't think I've ever mentioned them on this site, but I frequently experience really strong and strange nightmares that often continue into half-waking sleepwalking nightmares.

It all started when I was about 8 or so. I became sick with a really high fever that took most of a week to break. During that fever, I experienced nearly constant hallucinations. I don't remember much in the way of specific details, but I do remember running screaming to my parents, deathly afraid of a giant beetle that I called "a Spanish bug" as well as being told that I was going to have to marry a purple kangaroo.

In retrospect, I'm really thankful that the experience happend when I was young, before I'd been exposed to more of the world. I suspect that if I went through the same fever today, I'd probably see much more extreme imagery instead.

Anyway, after I recovered, my waking hours went undisturbed. The nights, however, were filled with a strange sort of nightmare. Basically, it starts as a normal, dream-based nightmare. Then, I half wake up. The dream and the real world overlap and I get the ever so joyous experience of living the nightmare.

When I was younger, I had these nearly every night. And, most nights it was actually the same dream. There was a large, complicated bomb on the kitchen table and somehow it was my responsibility to disarm it or my family would be destroyed. I spent years of my childhood pacing the kitchen floor in the dark, staring at that bomb on the table.

By the time I was in high school, these waking nightmares had been reduced to maybe one a month and into adulthood they eventually disappeared for months at a time. At this point, they pretty much only show up when I'm stressed out.

Shelly loves to tell people about how she got to experience this when we were living in St. Paul. I was having an episode and was seeing an old woman, staring into our bedroom mirror. Not really threatening, but seriously creepy looking. That time, it apparently really freaked me out, because I screamed at the top of my lungs. If you've ever heard me speak in public, you know that I usually don't need a microphone to be heard. So, you can imagine what it was like to be in a small little bedroom when I unleashed a full volume scream.

She spent the next 5 minutes in confusion, trying to wake me up and get me fully into reality. Since then, she's pretty much figured out ways to cope with it.

That brings us to this week. I've been stressed out at work, Shelly's been gone, I'm trying to get caught up on financial paperwork, etc. It's just the normal stuff of life, but it clearly pushed my stress levels over the line.

Every night this week, I've half-awakened in the middle of the night absolutely convinced that there was someone hiding in our bedroom. And, when I couldn't find them, that they'd just escaped into the rest of the house. Only after searching most of the house did I wake up enough for my rational mind to take over and send me back to bed. A couple of the nights involved more than one episode and have generally left me exhausted every day this week.

Last night, however, I finally slept through the night. Here's to undisturbed sleep.