Shadows in my brain, part two.

It’s dark, and I’m thinking nightmares under the covers, nightmares that spring unbidden to my mind, and nightmares that I brought upon myself, one way or another. It’s too warm, too dark, I’m suffocating—I was never, am not, afraid of the dark. At least, not any more than I am of the light, and what does it matter when they’re invisible? Shadows, strangling, shoving, grabbing, terrified I shrink and shrink, but it’s never far enough. Imagination is a terrible, terrible thing. When you say imagination, unless it’s in a very specific context, people think of rainbows and butterflies and castles in the air. No one thinks about the writers who came up with horror films, or the kids who grew up reading The Brothers Grimm and Jack Chick. I’m not kidding, and I’m not exaggerating—if anything, I’m not talking big enough, because I… because the nightmares don’t go away if you talk about them, and the worst feeling isn’t fear, it’s guilt, and because I thought maybe I couldn’t lose my soul, maybe I could, because Hell hath no fury like the demons your mind puts together. They’re not always big and scary, except when they are. They’re sly, and slinking, and they don’t bother trying to scare you, they tell you what they want you to hear, which is what a part of you wants to hear, and they screw with your dreams, and your daydreams aren’t gold-edged affairs with that cute boy from whatever. They’re shadowy, and dark, and you’re alone in the dark and so, so vulnerable, and you’re not alone.

This is the part that really sucks, the part I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, the part that follows me through my dreams and nightmares and my waking days. And it doesn’t go away with medication. The medication helps, makes the nightmares less tangible, and light becomes my friend a little more, but they don’t go away.

Picture this. You’re curled up in a dark room, nondescript if it was light, probably, facing the wall because the shadows behind you might be taking shape. There are cold fingers stroking your back, like the epitome of a shadow on Midwinter’s night. You’re shivering uncontrollably, cold, so cold; you don’t feel it in your real body, because the part of you that’s real is toasty warm and suffocating, but most of you is cold, shaking. And you hate being cold, you’re never cold. The shadow is whispering now, things you don’t want to hear, don’t want to believe, things about yourself that may or may not be true, and you’re trying to tune it out but every time you close your eyes it’s the same thing.

It gets worse. There’s a part of your mind that is feeding off of this, not enjoying, per se, but… craving. And if you shut it off for long enough, it seeps through in your subconscious, and you dream things worse, and worse, and worse. When I was a little kid, I made a dreamcatcher with a circle of wood, and feathers I’d found in the land behind our house, and some twine, and it used to work, for a long time. But only for the nightmares. Things still happened when I was daydreaming, things still happened, if I let them.

Picture this. You’re standing in a corridor, awake and laughing, and suddenly behind the friend you’re talking to, there’s an immense, terrible shadow of something. You know what it is, but at least it’s not just the shadow—there’s a shape there, looming, for a split second everything blurs and melts in your vision and the one clear thing is a monstrous dragon. It looks at you, and then the moment passes, but you can feel it watching you now, and when the day is finally over, you find yourself racing, running as hard as you can through the park because it is Right Behind You, and no matter how fast you run, it always will be, and you’re terrified but you can’t turn around, because then it will be right On you. So you run, and run, and eventually force yourself to walk, and walk, and force yourself to stop thinking about it (impossible, of course), and you can’t see the shadow in the dark but you know it’s there, even if it’s not real, and that night, after you’ve gotten home and huddled down in the dark, you dream about it. And again, and again, and again, for weeks afterwards there’s a dragon chasing you through your dreams.

I hate dragons. Hate them, hate them, and if I ever write a novel with a dragon in it, the dragon will be the monster that chased me for so damn long I was afraid to sleep, not some pansy feathered lizard with telepathy and magic sparkles.

So anyway. “What’s it like being in your mind?” Now you know. This is how I write, this is where my words come from, they are forcibly wrenched from a mouth by the shadows behind it. And I laugh, when the imaginary cobra rears out of the pile of grain at my head, because I know it’s not real, because after spending the night hiding from my dreams, the blood that splatters across my mind’s eye, the explosions around my imaginary mind, are almost a breath of fresh air. Not quite, but you get the point.

I don’t want to post this, but it doesn’t feel right posting the other one, the happier bits of my brain, and leaving this out. So, yeah.