Last night (or should I say early this morning), I woke up screaming and hyperventilating. I can’t remember that I was dreaming anything horrifying, but I was in the throes of panic anyway. I could swear that there was something on me---not a person, but a creature of some kind. I tried to tell myself to stop screaming, that I was going to wake the whole house up and make everyone fear for my life, but I couldn’t. As the seconds wore on, the hysterics increased.
The good news is that my dad can make it into my room wearing an I’LL-KILL-IT look immediately after hearing my shrill cries of alarm, and my mom follows him, no questions asked. Aaron doesn’t wake up as quickly as all that, even though he’s closer. Rodney was getting ready to go to work upstairs, but he thought the noise was coming from outside. Just as well; I wasn’t in the mood for a come-as-you-are party in my room.
It’s never happened to me before. I wake up nightly because of dreams or noises or just plain over-stimulation, but I’ve never started screaming as though I were being attacked. Granted, I thought I WAS being attacked. Ah, hallucinations.
The general consensus is that I’m over-stimulated, doing too many things, thinking of too many things, that I don’t know how to relax, that I should take up Yoga, and according to my grandmother (who was promptly consulted in my mother’s attempt to deal with her daughter’s latest signs of psychosis), I should stop being so tight-assed (my term, not hers) and holding in unhappiness. This last one surprised me, even more than the Yoga suggestion. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of my merciless temper would not exactly say that I am a person who keeps things to herself. On further consideration, though, I guess I can hold in unhappiness---in the sense that I deal with the immediate worries through sarcasm, ranting, verbal castration, the works, but don’t often address the longer standing annoyances. I am easily accustomed to the lasting undesirable situations, and to the hurts. On a daily basis, though, there’s no guarantee I won’t send the nearest object careening at your head in frustration.
Personally, I think that the phantom creature who attacked me was just a fluke. My dad keeps calling from work to check on me (I think I scared him more than I scared myself), even though there is clearly less danger when I’m conscious. My mom has offered the following: “There’s only one solution to this sort of thing. You need to sleep WITH someone. Preferably some young, strong man…”
She thinks she’s funny, that one.
In the meantime, my latest false alarm has prompted me to return. I don’t want this ‘blog to die, after all, and I suppose that undergoing terrible sensations begging cathartic recounts is one way to sustain it. Now, I’m off to edit my latest short story for the fourth or fifth time. (What is this over-stimulation you speak of?)
You Break It, You Buy It,
Miriam
