Nightmares Don't Die (Third Draft)

Nightmares Don’t Die

            My first memory was of a nightmare. They say that your earliest memory is usually a traumatic one. A ruined birthday, getting lost at the store, a scary visit to the hospital. In these moments, we wake up into the world we are to know for the rest of our lives. It is the earliest moments of our consciousness. In a sense, it is when we first attain self-awareness. We do exist before that, but on a subjective level, we cannot say for certain if that is true. All that is left before then are echoes. Emotions that linger but cannot be grasped like wisps of smoke. It is there where most phobias are burned into our lives. Stuck to us for the remainder of our days like a brand. All from a time and place we can never quite remember. That first memory is our first visit to the real world, and it is almost always that of pain. For the briefest of moments, all that we know of the world and our lives to come… is pain.

            My first memory was of a nightmare. When I gained awareness, I wasn’t even in our reality. For however long it lasted, I thought I was awake. I thought this is my life. This is reality. Reality was fear and confusion. It was where time and logic are fluid, ever shifting and melting into one another. People could say that they were awake for the first time, but I could not. I had to wake up twice.

            The first thing I remember seeing was the forest. It was dark and there was no one around except for the trees. The only light that I could process was from the moon. The bluish light formed shadows all around me. Abstract images of the surrounding trees. I remember being terrified of one of those shadows. My own. In that tangled mess of darkened ground my shadow was darker than all the rest. It was a pit, an abyss that tore any light that touched it apart. It clung to me like cancer and I was forever standing on the precipice of its hungry darkness. Those were the first few moments. Then, it started to grow.

            It no longer resembled my form. The thought of it clinging to me unnerved me greatly. The shadow’s arms and legs elongated, stretching beyond all comprehension. They became less like limbs and more like the branches. It was almost as if it had become the shadow of one of the trees. I would have thought that it was, except that the torso had grown hardly at all. Where my chest would be, the area had grown wider, but all other proportions stayed the same. That was to its detriment. The unfettered growth of this shadow had cannibalized its own head until it had disappeared into its shoulders.

            I remember wanting to look at myself, to make sure I did not resemble this thing. Had I never woken up I would have thought I did. I would have gone on thinking it was me who had become malformed and decrepit and the shadow was merely a puppet of myself. I stared at it for so long. Time can be an eternity in dreams. They only feel short after the fact. I endured this dream as my heart pounded with such vigor that my throat began to burn. I was so thirsty, but I could not move. I could not look away.

I must have been on the verge of collapse when the shadow finally played its hand. Its bounds shifted in the moonlight, the edges bleeding in and out of the light. I had to watch as the hand, that had once stayed confined within its dimensions, reached out from the ground like the dead rising from their graves after being rejected from Hell. At the time, I of course did not know Hell. I did not know Heaven nor life. For all I knew, we belonged on the same plane of existence. We shared that reality as kin.

What had started as just a hand was accelerated as the dark flesh planted itself into the ground beneath it and pushed against the soft earth. Though I silently begged for the dirt to crumble underneath this strain, sending my shadow back to its bounds, it clawed itself further out of its confinement. I’m not sure if the details of its body were blurry, or if time has dampened my ability to recollect this nightmare. Dreams are hard enough to remember as is. On top of that, memories are never as reliable as we wish them to be. Despite this, something within me has always told me that I remember these things correctly, that they did happen exactly as I recall them. I do not like that feeling. I sometimes wish that I could escape into that possibility, where nightmares are nothing more than a stain on paper. I wish time would let the ink spread and distort what was once a cohesive thing. But, it simply hasn’t.

Instead, I remember seeing its blurred visage stand over me. All that was left for it to emerge from were its legs, the part that I was still connected to. I tried to run, but my feet felt as if they were a part of the ground, like when you bury your feet in the sand. I could do nothing but watch as the legs slowly ripped themselves from the darkened earth. When the shadow finally reached my feet, I felt a tug at my legs that nearly caused me to fall. It hesitated, like it had not expected to meet any resistance, as if it had not been aware of my presence up to that point. A worrying thought passed through my mind. Which of us was the shadow? And with one last sharp tug, I was dragged into its abyss.

That was when I woke up. While the 4-year old mind that emerged from that slumber did not question what had just occurred, even then the emotions were sharp despite the dream itself being out of focus. Since then, it, in a sense, disappeared from memory, or at least the significant feelings behind it. As I’ve said, I can recall this memory with precision, perhaps even too much. It was the emotions that faded first. When in my most quiet moments, either on the verge of falling asleep or in the depths of peaceful meditation, flashes of the nightmare occur, but do not form any connections in regard to how I feel about it. There was a distinct lack of horror. A sort of dissonance formed like when you watch a cheesy slasher from the 80’s. The events were horrific, but I lacked the fear. It wasn’t until recent events transpired that I ever felt any fear from this dream after the fact.

It was the night of my 21^st birthday. I had not thought of my first memory in years. As one would normally do on their birthday, I went out with friends. Drinks were involved. As it was my 21^st, I decided to go extra hard that night. I probably worried my friends, but by the end of the night, we were incapable of worry. We were incapable of just about everything. By some miracle, I managed to get back to my apartment. Unfortunately, I did pass out on the floor.

That was when it happened. When whatever sense of happiness that I was able to claim for myself throughout my life was ripped away from me. When a future promised to me by my aspirations was burned to cinders. I had a good life. It wasn’t until that night that I realized that. I also realized how much I cared for it. I would talk to others about making a go of things and finding adventure. To find some respite from the monotony of my life. Now, I beg through tear-soaked eyes for that life back. It happened again.

I was much older now but the feelings that had been lost to time came back to me in full force. I felt fear. It played out less like a dream or even a memory, but instead, what was there was this sense of déjà vu. Something that only seems to happen when you are awake. A time when you can focus. A time where you get to tell yourself that this is reality, and I am perceiving it correctly. But I couldn’t believe that, or rather I denied it. It all played out the same only I was older. I wasn’t that little kid anymore. All the years of feeling nothing every time I thought about this crazy dream came crashing down on me. I would have considered it nothing but a bad dream had it gone on to play out exactly as it had all those years ago, but it didn’t. When I reached the part where it wanted to pull me under, something changed. I think it knew.

It knew that the moment I woke up, it would disappear again. It would be a shoe box in the back of the mind of some guy who would rather think about what to watch on TV. It did not want to be forgotten. It wanted out. I had weakened myself. I gave it the opportunity it needed to take hold of my mind and infest it with its darkness. It had waited all these years just under the surface, avoiding the light. It was angry but worse, it was patient.

Instead of pulling me under as it had done so before, it knocked me over and began to drag me. I was not sinking. This time it pulled me along the ground, taking care not to pull me into itself. It was slow at first. I was even able to pick myself back up a few times. But as I took in a few hurried gulps of air, I would once again feel it tug at my foot, knocking me over and starting the whole ordeal over again. I would have tried to scream for help, but some part of me felt it was pointless, as if a part of me still entertained the idea that this was all just a dream. As it got faster, it became harder and harder to resist it. It adapted to my presence and dragged me to wherever it wanted me to go like a ball and chain on a runaway prisoner. It was not long before I lost any sense of my surroundings. All I could tell after a while was that I was no longer in the forest.

The air had changed, grown heavier. What few times I was able to look up from the ground showed to me that the moon was fading away. I wasn’t sure what it would mean for me once it disappeared. Shadow cannot exist without light. However, it could just as easily empower the beast. It started to happen all over again. I wondered to myself if this was my reality. If all I will ever know from this point forward is pain. Unlike before, I now had memories of a world outside of this. A place where pain was only an option.

With that last spark of hope dwelling within me, the moonlight ceased, and I was cast into unending darkness. I thought of the place that the shadow had dragged me into all those years ago, and just like before, I woke up. The morning light hurt my eyes, but I still smiled. I thought I was passed it all. When I finally entered my bedroom the euphoria of being alive passed, and I cried on and off for the rest of the day. I still bore the scars of my time in the dark. The emotion was there. It refused to fade this time.

At first, I thought that writing this down would help me sort through it all. Put it all in a box and leave it in the darkest reaches of my mind. Trap the beast where it can never reach me again. But this isn’t like last time. I can no longer call it a nightmare. What it tells me is prophecy. It will be back for me and next time I don’t believe it will turn out in my favor. It learned from our last encounter and it will use that against me. It tried to drag me into its world the first time. The next it merely tried to prolong its life. Next time, I have no doubt it will try to escape. Even if I were to die, I can’t say for certain that it will be stopped. Perhaps, it will just find another person to dream it real.

All I can say now is that I am near the end. My next encounter will be my last. It will bring ruin and darkness, but those have become the least of my concerns. When I see it for the last time, all I have left to give to it is just one question. Did I ever wake up?

Author's Note

Wrote this for an assignment. Any tips for improvement will be much appreciated.

Reviews

[DC]

Hi,
Thanks for the opportunity to read your story - I hope my comments prove helpful!
To start, 2 small comments:
Instead of: “We do exist before that, but on a personal level”
Maybe: “We do exist before that, but on a subjective level”
“My shadow was darker than the rest” – I liked that image
More generally, I really enjoyed the idea and the finale. There could be room to simplify the language I think. As noted above, some of the imagery works really well, but some of it may be a little lost in phrasing that feels like it could be whittled down. Of course this is just my opinion, and I hope my description makes sense!