It was creepy to wake up violently in the middle of the night. It was creepier when no one could tell me why it was happening.
Illustration by Adam Setala for BuzzFeed
It is the middle of the night, and there is something very wrong in my apartment. I leap up from my bed and rush to the closet and crouch down and throw aside my shoes, which are arranged on a rack on the floor. I know I must work quickly; I am breathing fast and hard. There — there, behind the shoes, I see it: I don’t know what it is, but it needs to come out, or I am going to die. I pull and pull and finally get it out.
But something is still wrong. I am now completely panicked, and I jump back onto my bed and lean over the half-wall that my bed is up against, overlooking the hallway. There, I see what’s causing all the problems, and I push it downward and off the wall with all my might. It shatters loudly, glass flying everywhere.
Then, finally, I wake up. My two dogs are cowering in the corner, and I put on shoes to sweep up the glass. I am confused and embarrassed, though there is no one besides the dogs there to see that I just pushed a framed poster off a wall and broke it. I clean up the glass and go back to sleep, and it is not until the morning, when I see my shoes scattered everywhere, that I look into the closet and realize that I have also ripped the TV cable completely out of the back wall of my closet.
These brief but incredibly vivid nightmares happen for years: they're never quite so violent as that first one, which happened around 2003, but almost always as scary. I don't know what to call them, but they become a familiar part of bedtime, and there are times when I am afraid to go to bed because I know that just as I start to fall asleep, I will be jolted aware in a state of sheer terror. Then, just as suddenly as they start, they ebb for a time, and I wonder if I've gotten better. But they always come back.
Here are some other things I've believed in the middle of the night:
They are monitoring my breathing. If I don’t hold my breath and stay completely still, I am going to die. I am not allowed to move at all, or they will know, and they will kill me.
I need $5,000. I need $5,000 so desperately that if I don’t get it, I'm going to die, and I wake up screaming that I need money.
There is someone trying to get in the front door of my apartment, so I jump out of bed and run to the door and unlock it.
A woman has come to my apartment and taken all of my things — everything that I own — and now she has laid down in bed next to me and she's wearing a plaid shirt, one of my plaid shirts, and I scream.
I see a huge roach, or a rat, in the bed, and I scream. My boyfriend wakes up and I say I have seen a creature, and he is half-asleep himself but he grabs something to kill it but there is nothing there.
The walls and ceiling and floor are all slowly closing in on me, compressing, so that I will suffocate if I don't escape. In another version, the ceiling is about to cave in on top of me and I will be crushed to death.
I need to escape, but I'll have to be quick, and I will need to have the necessary provisions with me. I run to my closet and grab a T-shirt and shorts and a bra and underwear and a pair of flip-flops, and I put them on a chair in the living room, everything neatly folded, so that when it comes time to flee I will be prepared.
I let a girl into the apartment and she steals all of my stuff, and I jump out of bed and run into the living room to try and stop her.
I am at my parents’ apartment, sleeping in the guest room, and I need to escape, quickly, or else I am probably going to die, and so I climb up on the desk by the window so that I can open the window and jump out of it, and it is not until I am on top of the desk and about to open the window that I actually wake up.
I sit up, bolt upright, in bed, and it feels like my heart is in my throat, and I need to get out of the bed as quickly as possible, or they will kill me, and so I leap over my boyfriend, who is sleeping next to me, and land with a thud on the floor, and he wakes up and asks what the fuck I am doing. When, a few months later, we go looking for a new apartment, we rule out anything with a loft.
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