Episode 2: Denial

There was something under the tarp. The way the tarp moved slightly in the breeze––as if it were alive––as if it were inviting her over––made her think she might still in a night terror. She couldn’t begin to explain how many times she’s started her day just to realize, at some point, she was still asleep. Of all the countless hours she’d spent in therapists’ offices, she picked up a few tricks to try and distinguish dreams from reality––whatever “reality” even meant. When one spends so much time preoccupied with the demons in her dreams, the realities kind of merge on their own.
It was all theory––no one really knew what the fuck was going on in her head and how to prescribe anything to help––but the one theory she wound up taking the most seriously was that her dreams were portals to the astral plane––the celestial plane beyond the physical realm. Yeah––she knew it sounded fucking crazy––so it wasn’t something she ever brought up at barbecues… but it made the most sense to her. When you suffer from something like chronic night terrors, brought on by deep, childhood traumas, sometimes the most outlandish explanations made the most sense. You try living in a state of mind where you’re never really sure if and or when you’ll wake up––over time the two “dimensions” seemed as real as the other. There were a lot of adverse symptoms from the terrors, one of the worst being that the dreams were so real it made her “reality” seem less important, and it made her dreams seem more crucial. One symptom of this was that she’d developed an extreme apathy. She could even feel the weight of her smile in her wedding photos on the wall. She knew how to be happy, sure,––but it also hurt to pretend to smile for so many years.
Sometimes, her feet felt anvil-heavy in nightmares whenever she was lucid. Sometimes she could fly; sometimes she could sink through the ground. She never really had a handle on the nightmares the way some of her therapists told her was possible. Just flick a switch, they’d say. Just look at your hands, they’d say. As if it would bring about some type of control. That didn’t always work.
Therapists had taught her various tricks to emerge from the astral plane. It starts with learning to move your limbs in a dream. It’s like someone handing you the controls to a video game you’ve never played before and pushing buttons until you get the right sequence to take a few steps, open the door, and enter the new world. There were no confines to the imagination in the plane. You could do anything… which is why, she feared, she had a hard time purging herself of the severe nightmares. In a way, she was obsessed with staying there––even with all the horrible things that happened––she was more alive in the dreams than she was here. She would never tell Jake that. She knew better than to diminish his reality with her own fractured sense of reality.
She loved the extent to which he’d brainstorm ideas to make her feel better about sleep. But, in the dreams, as terrified as she could be, she was also… free. As frightful things could get in a dream, they could also become equally peaceful. A part of her thought that maybe if she could just get a good handle on the terrors, she could make a life for herself in the plane––a life that was just as rich and real as her day-to-day––if not better. The therapists did not like when she opined these feelings––and deep down she hated that none of the therapists took the dream-world, the plane, as seriously as she did. They’d never been there, so what do they know? One therapist said that when Ash started to talk like this about the plane, all positive and happy, that it was proof of her denial. That it was like her mind’s way of protecting her from the true horror. Denial was like a lullaby, easing her into a false comfort. So––she learned to stop telling people about all the good things that also happened in the dreams. There were things she did in the dreams that she could hardly bring herself to admit to.
The tarp in the backyard below the sugar gum tree was an extraordinary sight. It hadn’t been there the night before. And she knew that one of the ways to exit a dream was to confront the very thing that seemed to be the epicenter of the fear. So she decided to walk downstairs and see what the tarp was all about.
Everything in the house seemed just as it always was––she even grinned back at the little pig on the towel before opening the door that led from the kitchen out into the backyard. The shadow from the sugar gum tree seemed to reach for her.
The shovel leaned against the tree, and the tarp was held down at three corners by rocks from the yard. The corner without a rock waved gently in the breeze. Growing up in and out of nightmares, she found herself attracted to certain movies that seemed like they were for kids, but the older she got, she realized how they were really just as dark as any horror film––if not darker––on an existential level. She always saw herself as Dorothy. And whenever she went to sleep, she’d visit her own version of Oz.
There was something under the tarp. Her heart raced. All the same sensations still occurred––dream or not. She knelt down and pulled back the tarp. The earth had been disturbed. A hole was dug and it had since been refilled. She noticed now the soil under her nails. Was this how she lost a fingernail?
She placed her hand on the disturbed earth. Then, as if it came out of her molars, and into her ears, she heard Jake’s voice again:
“Kill this thing.” His voice was low now and sinister––it was his voice but it was warped.
She pushed the dirt away with her hands as if to uncover the sound.
The more dirt she moved away the louder the voice grew. It repeated itself louder and louder until it got so loud it became a distorted squeal.
Not a minute later, she felt something. She knew what she would find. And the horror of her understanding was almost calming––the unpredictability of dreams can become predictable––if you pay close enough attention. If there were ever any logic to these twisted dreams, it was that they would tend to show her something so horrific, to shock her so deeply, that it’d wake her up. She couldn’t tell if the horrible images were the nightmare’s creations trying to destroy her, or if it was more like something her immune system would send into the astral plane to wake her, to save her.
It was a body in the dirt. She knew it would be Jake. This is how her dreams played. This is what the organism does, the bobbit worm, whatever––it was a sadist. It liked luring her into comfort and then watching her squirm.
She wasn’t surprised when she brushed the dirt away to find Jake’s face. It wasn’t the first time she’s seen his corpse in a dream. There were entire architectures built in her dreamscapes assembled exclusively with corpses.
She wondered how her body, which she assumed was in her bed, was reacting as her sleep-self found Jake in this way. Was it writhing? Screaming? Or was it composed––as composed as she was finding Jake in the dirt?
She closed her eyes and waited to wake up. It was like trying to leave Oz. Her ruby red slippers just happened to be some kind of sick, violent nightmarish image. In this case, her dead husband.
She opened her eyes, still in the dream, and noticed that Jake’s right cheek and throat were mangled. As if some animal had mauled him.
It seemed too real––but it always did. These are just images assembled to scare you, one therapist offered her as a kind of mantra.
A sharp pain shot up her thigh and into her lungs. She couldn’t catch a breath. She doubled over and started to heave. Her bones ached. She puked in the grass.
There was one other way of getting out of a bad dream. This was the thing she couldn’t admit to anyone. Even thinking about it made her uneasy.
Of all the things the different therapists had offered as a tool to help her escape the dream, this was simplest and most effective, once she finally built up the courage to do it the first time. The thought hadn’t even occurred to her until she read about it on a forum for people who experience similar terrors. Someone put it pretty simply in the comments section: “have you ever tried killing yourself to wake up?”
Suicide, in the nightmare, was her ideal ruby-red-slippers. There was something beautiful about being able to take your life and wake up from it. To experience the release. to know it would bring you peace from horror. She wasn’t proud of these thoughts. She tried to keep them locked up in the darkest corners of her soul. But––such was the nature of a dream.
Ever since Jake bought the 12-gauge for the new house, it’d become her go-to ruby-reds in, oh, maybe a dozen dreams since. It was the fastest, most painless way.