Anxiety I: Hypnogogia

By Circe -

I hate waking up.

Back when alarm clocks were their own objects, and mine sat on the table next to my bed, it woke me up in a dead panic every single morning. I wasn't dreading what I had to do that day; I hadn't gotten that far yet. It was just a loud sudden noise that catapulted me out of a sound sleep, usually slightly earlier than my body wanted. I didn't bother mentioning it to anyone. I had already had it banged into my head that help didn't exist, and any attempt to ask for it were just going to annoy people.

I tend to sleep with some kind of media running. Silence spooks me. It feels like the world has disappeared and left me behind. I'm pretty sure that was the plot to a Twilight Zone episode. If there's a voice going while I'm trying to wake up, especially if it sounds authoritative, like a news anchor, my brain interprets it as an emergency bulletin. The worst is come to pass. It's finally happening. The bombs are dropping.

I assume a lot of people are having that nightmare right now, but it's been a go-to for my brain since about 2007. And back then, I lived in a tiny shitty mountain town of no strategic or cultural importance whatsoever, that no one in their right mind would waste munitions on.

Before that, it was hypnogogic spiders. I'm not freaked out by bugs when I'm awake, but apparently when I'm half asleep I do not want to be friends with the tarantula the size of a dinner plate I am hallucinating on the wall next to my head. I usually woke up on the other side of the room, hammering on the light switch. I had to start wearing real pajamas in college, just in case I made it out into the hallway and the door locked behind me. 

Stress gives me nightmares. Not about thermonuclear war -- if I wake up to wonder about it, it hasn't happened -- just about everything else in my life. The other night, I dreamt I was late to teach a very expensive dance lesson, in a style I hadn't learned but which seemed like a thing I could bluff when I looked it up on YouTube, only to realize no one could find my students, and the studio was arguing that they didn't have to honor my room booking. Just in case you wondered what dance instructors had stress dreams about. I woke the other day to a noise in the living room and thought, 'eh, can't go out there yet, Mom is banging around'. It was horrifying. I haven't slept beneath the same roof as my mother is almost twenty years. I'd rather starve to death under an overpass than ever do it again.

I slept five hours last night. I look like I function on that. I don't. It leaves me in a constant state of low-grade nausea. My supply of sedatives is slowly dwindling, and I don't know when I'll be able to order more. I don't understand how anyone is expected to be functional right now. 

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