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INSOMNIAC GAMES, MARVEL'S SPIDER-MAN (2018)
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III. GIRLS ON FILM
REST UP, Ezra had said, but to Juliet, rest never came easily: the good nights of sleep she'd had since she turned thirteen could be counted on one hand. At the beginning, Ji-Ae, unsure of how to handle her daughter's mutant problem—in itself, a problem that she struggled to both separate from Juliet and describe in her flawed, fledgling English—had bought her sleeping pills. They were a saving grace; relief in the form of five-milligram pills, they smothered Juliet's nightmares, suffocating them like a hand over her mouth and nose, burying her in dreamless sleep like dirt over a grave.
But then, the money for pills ran out. What little comfort Ji-Ae could offer her daughter was gone, its absence glaring from the very first night Juliet was forced to go without. Falling asleep itself wasn't difficult; what was difficult was staying asleep when Juliet knew what was to come. At first, the dreams were simply vivid, unsettlingly so, like a painting in hyper-realistic detail. It was just a little too real for comfort. Just a little too close to touch.
They lulled Juliet into a false sense of security, like a horror movie she'd put on to watch but lost interest in. With her attention elsewhere but the screen still in her periphery, when the jumpscare came—and it always did—she would catch it in the corner of her eye. The monster. The fear. And then she would be wrenched back into focus, held captive by her own consciousness; bound and gagged and tossed into the sea, forced under the churning waves and dragged into the darkened deep.
A month after the pills ran out, Juliet moved into the back room in Young's Alterations and Dry Cleaning. Arden needed her beauty sleep, and Juliet's screams in the middle of the night tended to disrupt it.
As she grew older, the dreams grew with her. As if trying out Juliet's changing body—her longer limbs, her bumpy skin—or testing the ache of her growing pains, they took on new forms. Shadowy copies of people she knew, eerie imitations of places she visited. Things she'd said or heard. Things she'd seen or done. A punch-card of psychological trauma, every stimuli she was exposed to, every experience she had, her mind collected and kept for later—for after dark, when the lights went off and Juliet was no longer in control.
There was no escape—during the day, Juliet had to shut off the outside world, clearing her mind of every thought she heard save for her own, ignoring the emotions of the people around her as if she were severing a nerve. New York was a city of eight million: Juliet passed three thousand people a day, give or take, whether it was at school or on public transport. Her ability to shut out the thoughts of every one of these three thousand strangers was, back then, unreliable. In a mere encounter, in brushing past them or turning their way, she'd take something she couldn't just put back.
