when I was 15 years old I went through a horrible bought of nightmares. I would wake up crying, and act like a zombie the rest of the day, I could not get the images out of my mind, they were so intense. I was that person that would sneak into everyone’s rooms in the middle of the night to make sure my family was breathing, and only then could I bring myself to go back to bed.

I couldn’t handle it anymore, and I became obsessed with the idea of not sleeping. I didn’t want to, I couldn’t. During the night I would excercise to keep myself up. During the day I took half an hour naps with a few hours in between. Toward the third month of this ordeal, I was getting too tired and needed more extreme interventions. I decided to stop eating, I thought (I mean, I really believed) that the hunger of not eating would keep me up. Needless to say I lost over 40 pounds in those months, without the intention.

One thing, I will never understand, is how my family never came to talk to me, they noticed my weight loss, but never asked what was going on. So I fought through this, when school started again, I started taking caffeine pills to stay up during school. I slowly had to talk myself into sleeping, and I had to come to the conclusion that dreams are not real and they don’t mean anything.

As I’ve gotten older, I still get the intense nightmares, but not everynight, sometimes I can go a few weeks without one, and then all of a sudden, I have a few days of really bad ones.

I do have actual insomnia, wich is my paradox, I don’t want to sleep because of the nightmares, but I’m so tired, and I can’t fall asleep easily, so I actually have to try to get into my nightmare.

My doctor prescribed some sleep aids, but they didn’t help me fall asleep, I thought I could start taking them because the nightmares were less and less. But one day my doctor prescribed Trazadone. I have to share this with everyone, especially if you have nightmares, Trazadone makes them worse. I had some of the worse nightmares of my life that first night, and the 2 nights afterward when it was getting out of my system. I now lovingly refer to it as the “devil pill.”

So now a days, I have my routines to lessen my nightmares, I tell myself there is no meaning, I will think about the nightmares and turn it into a movie I’ve watched and imagine I’m not in it (replacing the characters when I rethink them) and I can no longer sleep correctly on a bed, my head HAS to be where the feet usually go, or else the nightmares come in like crazy.

I don’t think I will ever be rid of my sleep problems, but now I can function for the most part. My friends can tell when I had a particularly bad night because my entire demeanor changes, but I’m doing well now.