Nightmares

Ellen Morris Prewitt

Word Count 901

Before I began making crosses from broken and found objects, I thought the place to find driftwood was on the beach. It’s not, at least not at the Gulf of Mexico. You’ll find driftwood in rivers, because trees line rivers. Whether what you pick up is driftwood or downed limbs bobbing on the current depends on how long the wood has been in the water. More time in the water, the more hollowed out it is. What I mostly find on the beach is seaweed and, once, a dead rat, Gulf waves gently rocking its plump body.

Before I began having night terrors, I thought I knew what sleep was: it’s when when we’re not awake, right? Adjectives divide it up—twilight sleep, deep sleep, REM sleep—but we all agree there is such a thing as sleep. I’m not so sure anymore.

*

My hand shoots into the air, palm out, like a panicked school guard. I am not aware this is happening. My eyes are wide, my mouth full-on screaming. Please don’t expect this sentence to end, but I can’t see. I see perfectly well, just as clearly as if I were walking on the beach at noon and spied a dead rat riding the Gulf tide. What I see is an attack, a figure emerging from the shadows. Man, wolf, warthog. Think hallucinations but supposedly when asleep. The one person who helped me with the night terrors—a tech at a sleep clinic, but not the sleep clinic itself—told me night terrors were past trauma triggered by present trauma. A form of post-traumatic stress disorder, at night. Says a lot for the quality of my life, both that present and the further past, doesn’t it? 

For six months or longer, this behavior went on in my secret night life. My then-husband knew about it, of course he did. But he assumed I did too. Bolt upright, eyes staring, mouth yelling bloody murder, my brain yapping about what ferocious thing I was seeing—how was he to know I was “asleep”? Over the years during these episodes, I’ve thrown myself off the bed and not quite, but almost, broken my nose. 

These are not nightmares. Nightmares are really bad dreams. Night terrors happen during the deepest trough of sleep where dreams cannot reach. In that subterranean world, bodily mechanisms that protect you from acting out your dreams aren’t engaged. You can, for example, sock your husband in the nose if he tries to comfort you during an attack. My attacks uniformly appear early in my sleep cycle (so embarrassing to be screaming for your life when it’s not even midnight.) Back then, I woke up with no idea I’d been creating chaos in the night. If that first husband hadn’t eventually told me of the screaming, would it have continued ad infinitum? 

I don’t know, but once I was informed, my awake brain must have told my “sleeping“ brain to get with the program. After that, when I woke, flashes of what had happened blinked like the sun off Gulf waves. Gradually, I came to understand that trying to have a baby with a man who was psychologically abusive awakened memories of childhood abuse, leading my body to say in the most dramatic way possible, Not today, Ellen. Poor body, even if it’s scaring the shit out of me, it’s only trying to help. 

Years of psychotherapy did not erase the terrors, I just learned what to do. I no longer sleep in a pitch-black room. If I’m in a hotel, I remind myself unfamiliar bedrooms are frightening places so I don’t have to scare the bejesus out of myself to remember that. For a while, during the epicenter of the disruptions, I forewarned hosts: “You might hear me screaming in the night.” Now, when I encounter something that raises memories of that terrible time with my first husband, I note them. Otherwise, nightlight or no, the memories might trigger night terrors. Like waves ceaselessly rewriting the shore, that which was the present trauma has become the past trauma triggered by any now-present trauma. The brain inside its fluid-filled skull rocks on.

*

I swim in the Gulf. I wear goggles because I’m swimming free style, and my head is underwater most of the time. There, the world thrums emerald green. The Gulf is my training ground to switch from pool laps to open-water swim. I’m hit or miss with the practice, and when I saw the rat’s skinny tail undulating in the surf, I almost gave it up entirely. That’s what I’m swimming in? Then I thought, where do you think the dead fish go? Where do sharks poop? That’s what I swim in, shark poop and decomposing starfish and the remains of afterbirth slipping from the jaws of the dolphin. I can either get in there and swim or not, but it isn’t safe. A gator lives at the pier down the way. You can see him on a video, his snout poking from the sun-licked waves. 

The Gulf is a dark, unknown place full of shit and beautiful flickering light. So is life. We can call it sleep or awake, it doesn’t matter. It’s all the same thing, a place whose no-woman’s land of a shoreline is hospitable to dead rat trauma. Waves crash or not, but I swim the Gulf, and every night, I lay my head on the pillow, waiting. 

Ellen is a Pushcart Prize Special Mention recipient, former Peter Taylor Fellow, and current writer-in-residence at 100 Men Hall in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. She is a long-distance swimmer. Her first traditionally-published novel, When We Were Murderous Time-Traveling Women, releases from Literary Wanderlust next year.. Ellen lives in Uptown New Orleans where she (and her house…and her dog) are frequently found in costume.