It’s 6:30am and my alarm clock is threatening to jump off of my night stand. A metal bar violently thrashes between two bells in an ear piercing ring. It’s the only thing that is loud enough to jolt me from any type of sleep. This particular morning I can hear my friend upstairs as she encourages her 3 year old to wake up his daddy. My eyes aren’t yet open but I’m awake and my brain thinks it’s 1997 and that I’m listening to my mother talk to my 3 year old sister.
I open my eyes and try to focus on the room in a hast of confusion. I know exactly what my room looks like in 1997 and where everything is supposed to be but what I’m seeing doesn’t match. I jolt upwards in a panic and survey my surroundings repeatedly until my current life, 14 years later, starts to slowly enter my brain. I’m not at my childhood home. I am… living with Michelle. She is talking to Jaydon. I slump back into my bed and continue to try and sort out what my current life consists of from all the other memories and thoughts that are running through my head.
Hours later while I’m at work, trying to focus on the duties of my job, my body has still not physically caught up to my thoughts. I can consciously say to myself what year it really is and that the events of my dreams never happened but my body thinks otherwise. It whispers one word that keeps me feeling like I’m waiting for the starters gun in a race: "run!".
My dreams are different from yours. I don’t often dream of fictional situations that make me giggle when I wake up. Instead I dream of people who have passed away and situations that either have occurred or I fear will occur. My dreams are actually real life nightmares that tear me from sleep only to taunt me by letting fear engulf my entire being.
People with my kind of PTSD spend there entire day keeping their brains in check. Every sight, smell, sound, feeling is a potential trigger that can send you into a fit of rage or leave you huddled in the corner shaking uncontrollably. Every waking moment, I’m fighting my largest battle but the very minute that my sleeping pill takes over my consciousness, I’m literally setting down my weapons and any mean of defense and surrendering to the demons that are continuously chasing me.
When I sleep, they win. I don’t have a choice. And in the morning, when I wake, I’m left to clean up the mess they’ve made. I have to gather my mental defense, my "wounded soldiers", and beg them to get back up and continue their battle. Most mornings I eventually succeed at this, although it may take a few hours to do so. Some mornings they are simply too tired to fight back. They may let demons slip past their front line and it takes everything I have to beg them to turn around and chase back after those demons.
And on very rare occasions (and by very rare, I mean maybe once a month) I just have to accept the fact they they’re just too tired and that any attack on my brain I may have that day will just have to be taken without a fight. I simply put up the white flag and vacate my mind.
On those days, I’m standing right in front of you, but nothing’s there. I’m just a shell of a human being because my entire body knows to simply shut down and run on auto pilot to get through the day. At the end of days like those and on similar days in which I have a break of triggers that slip through, I collapse on a couch in a fit of exhaustion. I can’t think, I can’t move.
Tiredness, is a strange feeling for me. Its not often I have the pleasure to be too tired to think or too tired to have a wandering mind, even too tired to not let the fear keep my eyelids peeled wide open. There are only a few instances that’ll happen, the first being the days that I’ve had to fight extra hard (or give up in trying altogether), the “fifth night” in which I’m severely sleep deprived, or in which I feel 100% safe and comforted (usually by the presence of someone else).
I could write 50 pages on sleep alone, but at the end of those 50 pages the truth is, the only person who will fully understand the devestation devastation of “I didn’t sleep last night” is another person with PTSD. It goes so much deeper and has that much more of an effect on a PTSDer than the “normal” human being. I can tell you that I awoke at 3am with such horror that I forced myself to stay awake, too afraid to fall back into the hellish trap that sleep gave me. Imagine if your worst nightmares were the truth. Imagine if your worst memories were mixed in with those nightmares, constantly reminding you of how unsafe and unfair the world can be.
