Somni-Girl v. the Monsters

In my dreams, I am the hero. The monsters should know better than to tread where I sleep. But just as no one tells the fish not to welcome a deliciously deceptive knot of string or a worm dangling mid-stream, no one tells the monsters. Too bad for them.

I have saved rush-hour traffic from the terrorists in the car behind mine. I have sent my husband and daughter to safety in the attic while I have combated, with my fists, the two armed robbers in my living room. I have poked out the eyes of my attackers. I have saved my family with a one-two punch to a criminal’s stomach. I have shot. I have maimed. I have killed.

I am not a violent person, but in the dream world of him or me, I decide who wins. It’s a trick I learned long ago in therapy when bad accompanied the vivid dreams to which I am accustomed. I know someone who complained that wolves were attacking him each night. “Why don’t you just fly away?” I wondered. If you can do anything in your dreams—be attacked by a pack of wolves, for instance—then you can do anything in your dreams. Control them. Take over. Win.

Maybe it helps that I dress the part. For the past eight years, I have had, by my bedside, an assortment of props designed to snuff out the world, at least while I sleep: wrist guards to keep my hands from falling asleep for hours; a bite guard to keep from grinding my teeth to nubs; a memory foam pillow to keep my neck from collapsing under the weight of crushing nightmares.

Often, the things that happen in my sleep are simple things: my car gets washed, or I buy a new dress; they are so realistic that I wake up wondering why my car is still covered with bird shit, why my closet has the same old frocks.

Sometimes my dreams protect me from real-life accidents. I regularly have night visions of toilets that are upside down or in cobwebby corners or out in the open or door-less and next to a phone booth on a football field. I’ve scoured hallways for clean toilets. I have run miles to find a commode that isn’t one of forty arranged, like clock numerals, around a giant fountain. I know this is my brain’s way of keeping me from peeing in my bed. I am grateful not to find a comfortable place to urinate so that the urge can become strong enough to wake me.

My dreams incorporate whatever’s going on in the outside world; sirens, alarm clocks, birds, barking dogs all become the movie soundtrack. I imagine it’s to protect my sleep, keep me still and un-jarred.

Sleep is a prize for me. In my younger days, I wasn’t too concerned because I knew it would come even if I had abused my brain in some way. Now I can’t take it for granted. I know what things help me sleep—a bath, a daydream, the big Oh. And I know the things that keep me from it—sugar, worry, excitement. Still, I wind up doing things on both lists.

No matter how I am outfitted to meet the monsters of the night, two of them haunt me repeatedly: my lost teeth and a strange, narrow highway with a several-hundred-foot vertical hill. My real fears of dental work and heights show up at night, when I am especially anxious.

Last night, I ate a ham. The last thing I read before bed had Christmas ham in it, which informed the dream: garbage in, garbage out. It was delicious, though, and I awoke feeling satisfied and didn’t need to eat until 1:00.

It’s too bad we can’t extend our powers into the waking hours: win all our wars with the hateful and loathsome and criminally insane. Then again, how many times today will we look in the mirror and fret over a wrinkle or a zit or one breast that’s bigger than the other? How many times will we shrug off a compliment with self-deprecation? Sometimes the biggest monsters in our paths reside in our minds, creatures of habits that ought to be surrendered to the hero who fights them in her sleep.


* * * *


contraptions

blue pills
an inch of water
neck pillow
wrists laced up tight
foam compressed
and stuffed in ears
bite guard clamped
to clenched teeth
I sleep
Hannibal Lecter at night
trussed in snug contraptions
a shield against
light and sound
and touch.
And so I dream of
smell and taste—
putrid breath
a mouthful of killers—
wake as I slept
bound and gagged
unplug my ears to
ticking clocks
crackle of
ripping
Velcro straps
clatter of plastic
protector of teeth
awake to greet
a rude
encroaching dawn.