Hardi’s Hierarchy of Nightmares

(content warning: this one gets a little bloody and mean. i won't be disappointed if you skip it)

I’m lost. How are you?‌‌‌‌

I have lots of dreams where I am somewhere and I need or want to be somewhere else and I can’t figure out how to get there. This includes the classic I’m at school, work, or late for an appointment and can’t find the room where I’m supposed to be.‌‌‌‌Last night I dreamt I was lost in a bombed out city. Buildings in ruins, rubble blocking streets, a pall of smoke hanging over everything. People were wandering around picking through the shattered flotsam of their former lives. I walked for hours and knew that Elizabeth was somewhere out there in this apocalypse and I had to find her...
Trains. Why did it have to be trains?

Something deep inside me is afraid of trains. I personally love riding on them but their rigid and unforgiving schedules and terrifying mass as they roll down tracks are a source of deep anxiety to me. If a train or train tracks show up I get the feeling that something horrible is about to happen.

I crawled through a gap between buildings and found myself on a train platform in a grand old European train station. The roof had been torn off of the vast building and a light dust of snow or ash was falling out of the slate grey sky. I could see fires flickering in the lights of nearby sky scrapers. Trains of every description were pulling in and out of the tracks between the platforms which where overflowing with a mass of humanity desperately trying to get out of this hellscape. I caught sight of Elizabeth on the platform across from me and when I couldn't get her attention started looking for a way to get off this platform and onto another. No stairs or walkways seemed to go the way I wanted to. As I pushed my way down the platform I kept having to step around people by leaning out over the tracks as trains went rumbling by. Eventually I got to the end against the wall but where I expected the turnstiles out I found a mural of a hand raised in the Vulcan salute with an eye on the palm. I rolled my eyes and told myself to shut up and started looking for another way across a dread filling me that Elizabeth had already boarded a train and I would never find her again.

I found a ladder that went down the side of the platform to what looked like a crawlspace under the tracks and hurried down it as another train pulled in toward me...
Fight and flight?

I don't have a lot of dreams that feature violence but when I do they are personal and vicious. When I was a kid I was always having dreams about getting attacked by beasts or beat up by bullies. At some point I told myself "enough" and started fighting back. Since then when I have dreams of violence I completely let go of my temper and and become a monster of rage and death. I ask for no quarter and give none.

I came out in a room that wasn't a ruin but the stage of a ruin. The fallen bricks were made of styrofoam, the twisted girders of papier-mâché. Silverware of all kinds were stuck into everything. Before I could get my bearings and find a way back up a bedraggled man, long hair hanging down in greasy ropes around his wild face, open wounds and sores covering his body, wearing absolutely nothing but a Howard the Duck T-shirt, came hurling out of the gloom, wielding a bejeweled saber and screaming "Sasquatch! Sasquatch! Sasquatch!" attacked me.

(I'd say I don't make this shit up folks but it's my subconscious so I guess I've got no excuse.)

I grabbed a butter knife out of a nearby plastic rock and with a bestial howl I parried his blows furiously until his blade bent and snapped and I punched him in the face repeatedly until he fell down. I stabbed my little blade into his junk and then told myself that I was done. I was going to fucking wake up now...
Am I awake?

I have been waking up paralyzed with night terrors for as long as I can remember. I lie there not asleep but not awake, unable to move and terrified that I am trapped in my body forever. I scream but only hear my breathing loud in my ears. The feeling of my heaving lungs reconnects me to my body and I get control of myself. If I'm lucky I can close my eyes to the horror of the outside world and begin to recite the Litany Against Fear and then wake up. But sometimes I don't...

I got up with Herbert's words of power echoing in my head and a squeaking cat at my feet. I rolled out of bed and stumbled in a daze to the kitchen to feed him. As I stood up from pouring kibble into the food bowl I noticed blood on my hands and on my chest. In a daze I walked into bathroom wondering how I could have cut myself so badly and why nothing hurt. Was I in shock?
Where are my teeth?

Things are really bad in my head when I dream of my teeth falling out. Most often it's shades of loosing my teeth as a kid when I would twist and wiggle them out and look at the blood and the roots 'cause I was twisted little fuck. Other times they fall out like crumbling chalk.

My face in the bathroom mirror was a mass of bruises and blood. I opened my mouth and more blood flowed. I noticed that one of my canine teeth was very much askew and couldn't resist poking it and it fell out into the sink with a clatter.
There are things growing under my skin…

Oh fuck. What is it brain why do you do this to yourself?

I lean in close to look at the gap in my mouth and see a tiny worm crawling out of the hole. It has little cartoon antennae and tiny hands.

I wake up staring at the gap in the blackout curtains next to my bed. The wan morning light leaking through the blinds reminds me of the stormy skies of the ruined train station. The mother of all migraines is threatening. I roll out of bed (again?) and stand making sure I feel my feet on the ground. The bedroom door is open so I was up and feeding cats in my sleep...

I trudged into the bathroom, poured a cup of water, swallowed some ibuprofen, and started my day.

I'm writing this not because I have some great lesson about fear I want to share. I've just been through two years of my own personal hell and I guess it needs to get out and it will keep haunting me unless I give it to an audience.

I can't go on, I'll go on...

Stay safe out there. I love you.