Conscious Unconscious

Every night I sleep a little less. And every time I finally give in to sleep I sleep a little more.

The night is no longer the restful place it once was. It is instead, a harbor for the delusions of my mind to become closer to the reality of the day. When the sun sets, my mind takes off, running rampant over the serene field that is my sanity. It seems to know that I am defenseless towards the visions it creates in the darkness. Dreams mix with reality without my awareness of the passage between the two. I am unable to trust the world I see, for it always carries the possibility of being a lie.

My dreams too, keep me from sleeping. Even when I am no longer physically able to stay awake, I do not want to give in to the unpredictable world of the subconscious. Yet, when I am awake I am still haunted by the nightmares of the nights when I allowed myself to give in to sleep. I cannot allow myself to go back into that haunted world. Each stretch without sleep is a little longer than the last.

When enough time has passed without sleep, I finally have to give in. My body can no longer handle what my mind forces it to do. I prepare myself for the coming cold of sleep and let go. In the time when I let my consciousness disappear, I sleep for a long time. The sleep is numbing, thoughtless, as there is no energy to spare for dreaming. It is almost pleasant to feel that nothing.

When I awake from my slumber coma, it feels as though years have passed while I slept. My mind aches with a sort of pain that cannot be described, for this is no physical equivalent. Perhaps it is the sudden shut-down of my rational thoughts that causes it, but whatever the reason, it leaves me unable to think for a long time afterwords.

My physical body too, is affected by this long shut-down. It aches in one constant hot wave, moving around to reach places in which I did not know could feel pain. I am left in a state of physical exhaustion because of the "rest" I had. My bed becomes the only place I am willing to be. I stay there for hours, thinking nothing, moving nothing. I am awake, but I lie still, being nothing. Sometimes an entire day passes before anyone forces me out of my state of nothingness. Each time I lay still for a little longer.

I wonder if someday I will stay awake long enough that when I give in I will simply never wake up.

The Wall

A white wall stretches out in front of me. It reaches out in both directions as far as I can see. It towers over everything, ominously looking down upon my diminished self. I think I might be able to see the top, but it really could go on for ever and I could just be tricking my mind into seeing the vertical end of the wall.

I need a way to pass to the other side of the barrier. It is an urgent matter, I remember, but the reason now escapes me. The surface of the wall is smooth, unblemished, and flawless. I was hoping to find footholds with which to climb, but there is nothing to be had. The ground too, is impassible, as it is frozen solid into stone. Instead I begin to walk along the wall to the left. The wall cannot possibly go on forever.

The whiteness of the wall continues as far as the wall does. It stays the same untouched colour, never changing and never fading. Soon it begins to blur, creating gray spots in my vision and begins to affect my balance. The white is too repetitive and hypnotizing. I start seeing other colours too now, blues and reds and yellows, all blending together in my vision, coloring the dull world. I know the visions are just in my head, but my mind has become reality.

And the wall continues on.

Intrusion of Sound

There is too much noise.

When it forces its way into the expansion of my mind it destroys what is there. The sound tears apart the long strings of thoughts until they are nothing more than shreds of ideas. The smaller thoughts are scattered, far from where they used to be and far from others similar to them. Everything becomes chaos when the sound breaks in.

The noise seeps into my mind, filling it with things that should not be there, foreign pieces of the world. The words of others are all around, and my natural defenses kick in, rejecting all that I hear. However, the defense only works for a short while. After that time, the thoughts and words render all my protection useless. Then, my mind is free for the taking and every idea that was once mine is replaced with those of others. My mind is no longer mine.

Even once I've run away from crowd and the noise and the chaos, the sound lingers. I can feel the hot breath of those words on my skin spilling from the mouths of the people from whom I have run. The silent place I have found only amplifies the battle raging on in my mind. It seems as though the physical crowd has simply transferred into my head.

Can I never have silence?

Scream

I wish I could scream into the darkening night.

I want to let go of the pressure inside me; of the stress building up; of the weight on my shoulders. I would be an earthquake, cracking the earth's crust open in order to relieve the uncontrollable energy underneath. Everything will spill out, blast upwards, fall everywhere, in an explosion of anger and sadness and frustration and freedom.

I want to feel my throat go raw from the shrill scream, over and over again killing my every hope of sounding normal for a long time afterwords. It will be a sound that is only ever heard coming from the depths of a person's soul. It will reach into the corners of the moonlit land and into the minds of all who can hear. Those who hear it may pass it off as the normal sounds of the night, but their souls can feel all the emotions rushing out in the sound of the cry.

But I cannot scream. Whether for simple reasons like the fear of losing my voice, or much deeper things like the fear of losing those around me, I cannot give in to that most primal desire. I cannot let the world know so openly.

So instead, I keep screaming inside.

When You Save Me

You saved me yesterday.

You made me laugh more than I have in a long time and gave me something to hope for. I felt whole with you, like how I used to feel. I did not feel ashamed of the things I did or the things I said. Even when I managed to mess things up, I knew it would be fine because you were there to hold me together.

Now in the morning of the next day I am back to where I was before. I can still feel the happiness of yesterday lingering, but it is in the background of the pain of now. I feel as if it were all a dream. A dream in which I was someone who others wanted to be around. Someone worth knowing.

I need you to save me again. Every day I will need you to save me from the world and myself. I fear that I may fall apart on the days when you are not there. But I cannot always depend on you to pull my out from my hole of darkness; I must figure out how to depend on my own strength. Until then I will just have to hope that you are near.

When will I be able to save myself?