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Banging, banging, why doesn’t he answer?
Smoke rolls down the hallway. We start coughing, Jude worse than me. I make a fist and pound hard on the door.
The wood splinters. The door swings open. Dad hangs on the handle, lurching. The whole ship is tossing, nobody’s steering.
Smoke rolls into his room. He blinks in the haze, his eyes glassy and dazed.
“W-what’s happening?”
“Fire, Dad!” I’m screaming. Smoke burns in my throat. “The ship’s sinking!”
He stands there frozen and dumb, like he can’t understand, like he can’t even hear me.
In the dream, his paralysis infects me…it spreads like frost up my legs, through my body, down my arms…
Cold grips my chest, my heart, my lungs. I can’t breathe, can’t scream, and I’m pinned in place, unable to do anything but stare upward through the spiraling darkness…
My eyes are open.
I’m seeing the room around me but also the shape of my dream laid over top.
A pale face floats in the window, staring down at me.
I see the figure but with my father’s blank face.
We’re locked in place, this faceless man watching, and me pinned to the bed, paralyzed.
Until at last I scream, and he drops out of sight, the dream dissolving, the hold broken.
I bolt up in the bed, sweating, my T-shirt drenched. There’s no face in the window, nobody around. But he was there a moment ago—someone as dark and solid as the trees outside, except the dream blurred his face.
My heart is rabbiting a thousand beats a minute, my breath coming ragged. I force myself to inhale and exhale, deep and slow…
First get control, then take action…
I picture my father saying those words. I’d rather think of him calm and encouraging instead of remembering his awful white, frozen face.
I picture the way his eyes crinkled at the corners and the little brown freckles at the edges of his beard.
Only one problem, Dad…I haven’t had control in a very long time.
I cope and I make it work. Those aren’t the same things.
Still, I make myself count breaths until my heart slows a little.
I hate the paralysis dream. This isn’t the first time I’ve had it, or even the thirtieth. On my list of most hated nightmares, it ranks around the middle, behind the ending where fire sweeps down the hallway and burns us all alive, and the one where the ship rolls over and everything hangs upside down.
The ending I hate most of all is the one closest to what actually happened—Jude and I escape the ship alone in the life raft.
But in the dream, instead of being tossed around for eight miserable hours in the dark before the Coast Guard arrives, Jude and I float on black, still, water. Until, without warning, our raft tilts and Jude is pulled down into a whirlpool. I try to hold onto him, I cling to his hands, but I’m not strong enough. He’s yanked away and dragged down under the water. And I’m left all alone because I couldn’t save him.
It doesn’t take Freud to explain why that one fucks me up the worst.
Jude is all I have left. Taking care of him matters more to me than anything—and he doesn’t always make it easy.
I understand my nightmares.
What I’d like to know is how to stuff them back where they belong so I can get a decent night’s sleep.
