Living Nightmare

 

("They say you should keep your dreams a secret before noon, especially nightmares and bad dreams. If you reveal your nightmare to another person before 12 o'clock on the day you dreamt it, it will come true."

 Not all dreams should come true.

 Violet knows that better than anyone. And yet, she is the only one who can stop nightmares from turning into reality. However, the price is high, and her dreadful power is evolving...)

I.

They say you should keep your dreams a secret before noon, especially nightmares and bad dreams. If you reveal your nightmare to another person before 12 o´clock on the day you dreamt it, it will come true.

“Violet! Can you hear me?”

The girl sitting in a sofa opposite of the psychiatrist winced. She crossed her left leg over her right and forced an endearing grimace. “Excuse me?”

Her doctor sighted. “Violet, this has been going on for too long. Before our last session you had gone two night without sleep. Today you came with sunglasses again. Come on, take them off!”

Violet´s hand shook as she did as he asked. The doctor then shook his head and wrote something in his notes. I hate when he does that. All conceited and clever, so sure that his notes will later help his solve my case. Ignorant fool.

“Your dark circles tell me everything I need to know. I guess you haven´t been taking the medicine I prescribed you.”

“I´m not bothered by insomnia.”

“Then what is it? Because you´re obviously not sleeping!”

Violet recalled the last night she slept. Oh, she had no sleeping problems. Not the ones her doctor thought she had. She could sleep for ten hours without waking even for a second. Sleep and dream dreams so vivid anyone else would confuse them for reality. Violet had a lot of experience with such dreams, so she knew they were just that. Dreams. But they could come true.

She slept on Monday. And dreamt. She hadn´t allowed herself more than five minutes of sleep since that day. Even those five minute naps could prove to be dangerous.

Today was Friday.

“During one of our first sessions, you told me your dreams scare you.” Violet blinked. That was poor simplification of the situation. “Have you had more nightmares? Haven´t anti-depressives helped you?”

“I´m not depressed.” She never was. She wanted to be around other people as much as anyone else, but she learned long ago that would never be possible without exposing them to the danger that came with her. For this reason it was hard for her to find job after she dropped out of high school. She drove her parents crazy, changing four schools in only one year, before they decided it was best for everybody to give up. Her father found her job in a local book store. It didn´t last. After that, they made her go see psychiatrist. This was their ninth meeting.

“You don´t have friends, you don´t sleep, you barely eat. Your mum told me you haven´t left the house this whole week. Listen” he leaned over, setting the stage for some kind of intimate conversation even though Violet barely knew his name, and he knew nothing about his patient except for what she let him believe, “you´re sixteen and quite capable of handling the things on your own. I don´t want to include your parents in your treatment. This should be between you and your doctor, me. I´m telling you this because I want you to trust me. I might pass to you something that your parents told me, but I won´t tell me what you entrust to me. So please, if something´s bothering you, you must tell me. Lack of sleep causes serious problems with hormones, a decline in the immune system and affects blood pressure. It´s dangerous.”

“Sleeping can be dangerous too.”

“How?”

Shit. She said too much. Luckily, the clock showed exactly five PM. “I think another patient is already waiting in the hall.”

The psychiatrist squeezed the pen in his hand. Poor man. He really wanted to help her. “Fine. You always say that. If you don´t want to cooperate, there´s no point in your parents paying me. Maybe you should go see someone else…”

“No, doctor Nandes!” You can´t help me but you´re trying. You´re kind. Someone else might not be so patient. “I think you are helping me, really! It´s just that…”

“You need time” he said after she bit her tongue. “Okay. As long as it´s not in vain. At least you´re willing to try.” He smiled. “Some patients curse me and want to run away, but I continue to treat them anyway. It wouldn't be fair to give up on you so easily.” He sat up and opened the door for her. “We'll get to the root of your problem and help you, Violet. Together. I promise you.”

It was a cloudy autumn day. No matter what weather was like, Violet has been spending the last couple of months locked in her room.

At first, she stopped talking to people. She used to have friends, but she excluded them from her life. She had to do it for their own good. She managed to fool her parents for a while, but teachers noticed the change in her behaviour and reported it to her father. The proud lawyer was first concerned about the degrading of his daughter´s grades. His wife was more worried about their daughter´s health. She sent Violet to the doctor. They tested her blood and found that she lacked a lot of vitamins and iron. Her mother started paying more attention and noticed how much food Violet left on her plate, how the light in her room would stay lit until three, sometimes even four AM, and the time threshold was only rising. Violet stopped going out on the weekends, then she gave up all extracurricular activities she used to love. She crossed the limit of her father's patience when she started to skip lessons. TV was the only friend she kept. TV and lots of energy drinks.

Her father wanted to punish her, but mother was scared that Violet was ill. She thought Violet might be a target for some bullies in her school. They decided she should change school, but her behaviour hadn´t improved afterwards. It became only worst. Her dad´s yelling didn´t help, her mother´s tries to have an honest talk were useless.

Then Violet fainted in the kitchen one morning. It was her first try to live without sleep. At that time she had not yet developed the quick nap survival technique. Three days without sleep, poor diet and too much TV drove her body to the edge.

She barely went to schools those days. Now truly worried, her mother allowed her to sign out of school for good. Her father wasn´t happy about that at all. Violet thought things might be better if she simply had a job. If she worked somewhere where she wouldn´t have to talk a lot, it will be fine!

But she had to talk to the customers in the book store, and to her co-workers.

When poisonous spiders came out of her co-worker's hair one morning, Violet decided enough was enough. The girl ended up in the emergency room. She survived, but her hair had to be shaved. It was all Violet's fault.

She quit her job. If the situation had been the same as before her sixteenth birthday, she could work the afternoon shift. But things have changed since then, and noon was no longer Violet´s entry into the safe zone.

“What did the doctor say?” her mother asked once Violet reached home. Her mother had been looking at her with sadness in her eyes for weeks. She will never get used to her daughter's dilapidated condition. Violet used to be a cheerful little girl with blond hair, with freckles on her ruddy face. Now she looked like a ghost with black circles under big blurry eyes.

“He promised me we´ll get to the root of my problems. And he´ll help me.”

Her mother sighed. “It´s been nine weeks… Are you going to your room again?”

“I…” She wanted to spend some time with her mother. They used to play card games every Friday evening. But I can see it in her eyes, under all that sadness… The nightmare…

Violet rushed and closed the door behind her.

Words weren´t needed any more.

Mere eye contact was enough to make the nightmare to come true.

II.

It´s been like this for as long as Violet could remember.

At four, she was as lively as any other child from a bourgeois family with a decent amount of love in the family. Though she couldn´r recall what her first dreams were like, Violet could swear they´ve always been strangely vivid. Faces were as clear in her dreams as they were in reality, colours were bright, objects clearly separated and recognizable in space. Later she found out that other people can't smell in their dreams. Some do not even hear sounds, and the language, although they later know what the dream was about, is often reduced to gibberish invented by their mind. None of this was true for her dreams.

Before kindergarten, Violet had a friend called Jena. Jena was her mother´s friend´s daughter. She was one year older, but that didn´t make much difference when Violet was five. Mum´s friend would come to their house. While their mums were chatting in the living room, the girls would play in Violet´s room. Violet had a beautiful doll house. It was as big as its owner. It has pink walls, plastic flowers and miniature furniture. She loved playing with it so much that she often dreamt she lived inside of it together with her dolls.

It was ten in the morning. Jena and Violet had fun playing with their dolls. “I had a beautiful dream last night! We were in the doll house, trying all the shiny dresses our dolls are wearing!”

“But did the house get big, or did we shrink?”, Jena asked.

“I think we got smaller…”

Violet´s words worked like magic. She felt tingling in her stomach. Then her perspective started to change; the chandelier moved away, became smaller, the walls became longer, the chairs and the bed grew. The doll house reached up like a real house. Only Jena's size matched what Violet was used to. The girls looked at each other in confusion and fear.
Then their puppets moved. They looked at them with their unchanging faces and raised their hands as if in greeting, but it was not like in a fairy tale that every child hopes to see come true. No, it was creepy and Violet screamed.

In those days, the realization of what had happened was enough to reverse the spell. The next moment, both girls returned to their normal sizes. The dolls froze in the poses they came to be in by their own free will.

This traumatized Violet´s friend for good. She threw the doll she brought to Violet´s place that morning away. Violet wouldn´t see her for years.

It took some time for Violet to realise that she was the one who tricked the impossible event of that day. Whenever she told someone her dream before noon, it would briefly come true. Her power scared her. "Mum, my dreams are coming true!"
"What a great imagination you have," replied her mum, who never wondered why her friend stopped bringing her daughter to their place.

If she told someone about her dream after noon, nothing would happen. At least it was like that until she was ten years old.
At school, during lunch, she gathered her friends to tell them about her dream. More and more often, she dreamed creepy dreams. She wrote them down in a diary and sent them to teenage magazine contests. They published her stories every time. Nobody wrote horror like Violet.

“A man with a black mask that clung to his face like latex burst into the school. The mask was actually made of squirrel skin."
"How do you know it was squirrel?"
Violet looked reproachfully at the skeptical listener. "I just know." She continued: "He had a rifle. First he shot the librarian. After the librarian, he turned on the janitor. He shot him twice in the forehead. Then he pounced on his body and started biting his throat. He had the teeth of a rodent…"

The class finished, but just when the students were about to leave, someone broke into the school. It was a man with a black mask. He shot librarian and janitor. The janitor was found with his throat as if some sort of rodent had bitten it until all that left was a bloody mush.

Violet convinced her friends that she had dreamt of a murderer about whom she heard somewhere. They believed her. It was impossible that her words brought this man whom she devised in her dream to life.

But Violet knew that janitor and librarian died because of her. Her twisted mind dreams horrific dreams every night, and if retold out loud, they would come true in all their destructive and dark nature.

Wicked spirits, old ladies who become sinister bloodsuckers, pets that grow sharp teeth to devour their owners, poisonous flowers and monsters that come out of books; terrible visions lined up every night. Violet was not afraid to fall asleep. She learned to distinguish dreams from reality. Her dreams were lucid and she knew how to save herself from evil in her nightmares. What she was afraid of was what would happen if her dreams came true. She wouldn't be able to protect herself or others in reality.
So she stopped talking about her dreams.
But others did not, and when Violet was thirteen, her grandfather told her about his dream about the frog king who devours people who do not bow to him. They were at the seaside.

The sea was rough. Out of the water came a hideous creature with bulging eyes and slimy skin so nasty that it didn't even resemble a frog. But it creaked. It attacked people in the sea, and among them there were mostly children. People on the beach started to panic. Someone called the police. Help came quickly. They killed the monster. No one could determine what species it was, but the newspaper announced that it was a mutated amphibian.

Now even if it was other people´s dreams, if Violet heard them they´d come true. Violet was careful to run away whenever someone would speak of their dreams.

But the time came when she couldn´d stop her dreadful power. As her nightmares became worse, her magical ability evolved.

“Violet, answer the question” her teacher demanded.

Violet raised her eyes towards the blackboard. She reached into her memory of the First World War to provide the requested answer, but the teacher's eyes caught her attention. Underneath her overly varnished red hair, behind green-rimmed glasses, the history teacher had blue eyes. They became glazed as if there was some kind of reflection in them.
Violet disappeared from the classroom for a moment. She found herself in an unknown house with white walls, alone with a glass of wine in her hand. Suddenly, the walls began to melt like clay. The substance gathered around her feet and pulled inside, burning her skin, bones, organs.

It was a terrible experience. Violet ran out of classroom. She threw up through the window in the hall. This is where history teacher found her and sent her home.

“Miss… what did you dream about last night?”

The teacher looked at her carefully, aware that Violet was probably sick and sensitive, but confused as to why is she interested in her dreams. “I doubt that´s relevant at this point.”

Violet spent the rest of the day huddled on the bed. During that time, her history teacher disappeared. She was last seen entering her house. A glass with wine spilled was found on the floor of her house. Apart from the unusually deformed floor, no other traces were found in the house.
Violet was the only one who knew that the owner of that house had been swallowed up by the building itself.

Then Violet started skippin school. Everyone's eyes revealed that person's dreams to her, and then that terrible dream would come true. Her ability was expanding its range, and Violet feared what the next stage would be. There had to be a next level. It started with talking about her own dreams before noon, and now... It couldn't be the end.
She was careful, but she couldn't control herself all the time. That's why spiders started crawling out of her colleague's hair at work. Isolation was the only way to protect others from her curse.

Of course, she could´t reveal this to her parents, not to doctor Nandes. What her mum once called a great imagination, would now be considered madness.

III.

Violet wasn't the only person in the house lacking sleep.
Her father always worked. Since Violet left school, he started working even on weekends. He had previously reserved days off to spend with his family, but Violet's decision disappointed him. He had big plans about how he would send his daughter to a prestigious university and relive the student success through her. All that failed, and staying at home reminded him that he would never applaud his offspring as she received her master's or doctorate degree.

Meanwhile, her mum was stuck at home. Being a housewife, there wasn't much she could occupy herself with except for the household. She used to have hobbies and friends who would often visit. When she was Violet´s age, she loved photographing. Her equipment was still somewhere in the attic, out of use. She liked visitig local galleries, supporting small artists, and went to aerobic classes every Thursday. But all those interests vanished when problems with Violet occurred.

“I was a deplorable mother. I haven´t even noticed how pale you´ve gotten!” Her mother told Violet after the first session with doctor Nandes. “I´ve occupied myself with so many things, I didn´t have enough time for the most important thing in my life; for you!”

“That´s not true, mum. Don´t punish yourself…”

“No. It´s done. From now on, you´ll have my full attention and dedication.”

It was horrible.

Violet felt sorry for her mum. She couldn´t help her daughter, and the poor woman wasn´t used to being so asocial. At first, Violet spent a lot of time with her. But then she had to stop.

There was a dark spot in her mother´s eyes. It was deeper than any other Violet has encountered. Her mother had a nightmare which emerged from a dreadful fear. Violet saw only the brief edge of it; their house emptied of life, and there was blood…

“I´ll be in my room”, she started excusing herself in such manner every day. Living with her mother, yet avoiding her, hurt Violet. Her mother tried to make her stay, but Violet had to get away for the good of them both. The longer she stayed away from her mother, the nightmare she was so scared of became darker. Her mother was the one with insomnia, so Violet left her the pills doctor Nandes prescribed to her on her bed. She started taking them. She didn´t have the strength her daughter had. She couldn´t live without sleep.

But every time their paths crossed, Violet noticed that the dark spot in her mother´s eyes became deeper.

IV.

There was one person Violet could look directly in the eyes without fearing that some horrible fantasy will come true.

Doctor Naneds´ patience wasn´t the only reason why Violet wanted to keep him as her therapist. She searched his eyes numerous times and never found anything frightening.

“My dreams scare me”, she admitted to him once, which was a part of the whole truth, and asked: “Don´t you have nightmares, Doctor?”

“Everybody has nightmares, Violet. The thing is, those dreams are so traumatic to the mind that it becomes unable to discern them from the reality. While dreaming, people actually believe they are living the nightmare. On the other hand, some, like me, are capable of discerning nightmares from reality. And I´ll make sure you learn how to do it, too.”

He was actually like her. He understood the essence of dreams. There was no fear in his eyes; Violet could actually talk to him. Doctor Nandes was something like her only friend, and she didn´t want to lose him, even though their conversations were like a never ending circle.

On their tenth session, he asked her: “How´s the situation at home?”

Dad´s always out. My mum is becoming hysterical. Her nightmares are getting worse and I don´t know which one of us is more scared. “Not the best.”

“You´re still not sleeping.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

The Doctor sighed. “I have an idea. It´s a huge step that could significantly improve your condition. It could remove your fears and improve your general mood.” He leaned closer. “Hypnosis.”

“Hypnosis?” Violet had other possible outcomes of this experiment on her mind; what would happen to her powers? “You say my fears could be gone? And… could something else disappear as well?”

He gave her a confused look. “Like what? If you mean whether it could damage you in some way, stay assured that this is a safe procedure. We will reach into your subconscious and drive away what´s affecting your peace.”

Violet swallowed her worries. Maybe my power would be driven away together with the fear. Any way, it can´t get worse. “Okay.”

With proper words, the psychiatrist lulled her into something like a dream. But Violet was not dreaming. She stayed in the room with the doctor and her body, but out of her body.

“Violet” he led her subconscious, “remember everything that scares you, all the nightmares you've ever had. Collect them in one place in your mind and delete them!”

While this was going on, Violet watched as her eyes rapidly moved beneath her lids. And she suddenly remembered every nightmare she had ever encountered, ever since the incident with the doll house. Not only nightmare, but also nice dreams, like when she heard her cousin speak of dreaming someone had mysteriously sent her a very expensive dress she longed for, and the other morning the package was on their doorstep. Every dream she made come true was exposed in front of her and then suddenly they all disappeared.

Violet woke up. Doctor Nandes´ face was blurry. “How do you feel, Violet?”

“I feel… relieved.”

“Of course, we´ll know if it worked only in a couple of days… You reacted quite well, though. I think it might have been successful!”

“I think something changed.” In truth, she felt weir. Relieved, yes, as if the responsibility for all those terrible things which happened had gotten off her back. The death of the janitor and the librarian, spiders in her colleague´s hair… It all melted away. “But another patient is probably already waiting in the hallway.”

V.

When she got home, she talked to her mum. She dared to look into her eyes. The dark spot was gone. Violet was laughing in her mother's company for the first time after months of isolation. Her mother burst into tears, saying how worried she was that one day Violet, locked in her room, would take her own life.
"It's okay, mum. I was just protecting you. You can't understand, but I would never hurt you like that."
In the night, they went to their beds. Violet's room was located opposite her parents' room. Her father hadn't come home yet. Violet was waiting for the day when he would abandon them. Or maybe he wouldn´t. She seemed cured, and that meant she could go back to school. After all, she wanted to go to college as well. She wanted to have friends, be successful, have a good life. Doctor Nandes has cured her! Now everything will get back on track; she has a new chance to live the normal and exciting life without nightmares tormenting her!

And she could sleep. Ah, the softness of her bed, the nice smell of fresh sheets. Maybe she´ll dream about something nice, or even better, she won´t dream at all. Whatever the case, the dreams will remain locked in her mind as they should.

Empty house. Bloody walls…

Sleep came quickly, but it didn´t seem like a dream. Violet walked around in her home. She touched the rough walls sticky with blood. The blood was leaking from the attic. All the furniture was gone. She wanted to get out, but there was no exit. All the doors were gone.

“Mum! Dad! Where are you?”

The walls began to inflate. Forms rose from the blood-stained surfaces. Heads were sticking out of the walls, mouths agape, arms reaching out to Violet. Each on one side of her, the monsters reached for her making sounds like deep screams. They had no faces, but Violet knew they were her parents, as she always had a certain knowledge of her dreams. Except this wasn't her dream.

She ran. The corridor stretched on and on, the distorted bodies of her parents following her along the walls. Eventually she reached the end of the corridor. There was a photograph on the wall there. This was a photo her mum took a few days before Violet enrolled in high school. The whole family together, the father with a sombrero on his head, her mother with sunglasses and a bright smile on her face. Violet held a cat in her hands. It took her mother a long time to get the camera set up exactly the way she wanted it. She was very proud of the result.
The faces of her parents in the picture melted into an unrecognizable mush. Her face, on the other hand, was distorted so that her mouth fell down like in an obscene cartoon.
The bloody creatures grabbed her.

As they were pulling her into the walls, Violet realized there was no way out. She´ll never make another dream come true, but her mother´s dream became her reality.

While dreaming, people actually believe they are living the nightmare.

The walls swallowed her.

VI.

After Violet´s death, her parents split up. Her mother had a terrible nightmare on the night of her daughter´s passing. She dreamt that two creatures trapped inside of the bloody walls were chasing Violet. Those creatures were herself and her husband. She knew they were, even though they were unrecognizable. The whole experience was so traumatic, she came to believe that she had somehow murdered her daughter, even though the doctors confirmed it was a stroke. She ended up going to see Doctor Nandes. She stopped sleeping, eating, talking to other people.

She committed suicide after five months.

Violet´s father used the money he was saving for his daughter´s education to establish a foundation to help young people with sleep problems. He was surprised to find out how many cases of severe insomnia in adolescence end in suicide. Doctor Nandes helped him. They helped a lot of young people.

However, there were also a couple of those like Violet. Kids who used to be just normal, perfectly happy, until something changed. Doctor Nandes struggled comprehending their problems. Whenever one of those rare poor souls was sitting opposite of him, he´d remember Violet. Was it his fault? Was the hypnosis actually a deadly move?

“I don´t have insomnia”, his patient would say, “it´s just…” And nothing. There was no explanation.

Doctor Nandes dedicated the rest of his life to mental disorders connected to sleep. He wrote several articles and became known in the scientific circles. However, what he really wanted wass to understand Violet´s case.

But the truth as buried together with the young troubled girl.

THE END

Submitted: 1st September 2023

©Copyright 2022 Anakronizam aka Arijana Grginčić. All rights reserved.