Dream Demon

Something won't let me sleep

I don't know where else to go, so I'm going here. Maybe someone can tell me if there's something wrong with me or if it's something else.  I can't sleep anymore. I can't really remember when it started, but I know for sure that the voices came before I broke. 

Let me give some context, or at least what passes for context under the circumstances. When I was younger, I would try to stay up as late as I could to watch shows that would come on TV late at night. I knew I shouldn't have tried staying up to watch adult swim since I was only around six at the time, but the more my mother told me to stop, the more I couldn't.

As you might expect, I failed every time. It would always get to around nine or ten and I would pass out. Years went on as I tried to beat my record of staying up. One night though, I heard a voice. 

I was in my bed with empty cans of soda and bags of chips and candy all over myself, the bed, and the floor. The TV was in front of me. I think I might have been watching He-Man or something related... Or was it his sister...?

Whatever, it doesn't matter.

My eyes were getting heavy and my breathing began to slow as the world around me began to blur out of existence and into darkness. But before I could sleep, a voice jolted me into awareness. The voice sent adrenaline coursing through me with a refined energy.

The voice sounded familiar. It didn't take long for me to recognize it. It was my mother's voice. It had simply said two words. Well, yelled two words.

"Wake up!" The voice said it with commanding authority. The way she would tell me to do something when I was being lazy. 

It sounded like it was coming from behind me, which is impossible because my bed was up against a wall. I looked around me, expecting my mother to be standing at my door with a belt and evidence of something I did wrong and had forgotten about.

But there was nothing. Just the darkness of my bedroom and the noise of the TV. After a while of confirming that I wasn't in trouble, I went back to watching TV. However, the adrenaline had long since passed, and I fell asleep. After a few weeks of attempting to stay up past midnight and failing, I didn't encounter another event like that and the incident had been completely forgotten.

Or at least I wished it had been, because, around the age of ten, I stayed up past midnight for the first time.

It was the scene is the same as before. Junk food, TV, warm blankets and drifting eyes. Just before I passed out into sleep, a voice shook me awake. This time, it sounded like my friend from school.

The voice said, "Wake up, Ace!" Again, the voice sounded exactly like my friend and sounded like it was coming from behind me. Where a wall is.

I was almost convinced my friend was in my room because only he ever called me Ace, but with a thorough look around, I confirmed that my friend wasn't playing hide and seek in my room. The voice shot me with the same adrenaline as before, boosting my energy just enough to make it past midnight for the first time. 

I remember being so happy... It was sometime around 12:15 when I fell asleep. I was so tired, I fell asleep for the first time in class the next morning. After that, the voice came more often, and after a while, I figured out the rules the voice abided by. 

The voice never spoke more than once a night. No matter what, I could never get it to happen twice. The voice was always someone close to me. A teacher, a friend, parent, it doesn't matter. As long as they mean something to me. The voice only ever told me to wake up or something similar depending on who it was imitating. Like "Wake up, cupcake!" If it was imitating my boyfriend at the time. It only woke me up if I was planning on staying awake. If I wanted to fall asleep, it never woke me. Finally, the last thing the voice always stayed consistent in, that it was never guaranteed to speak. One night it might wake me up, the other, nothing. 

I wish it could have stayed that way.

Whenever it did wake me up, it always got me the energy to stay up past midnight. Sometimes it even got me up to daylight. I asked my mom about it and she dismissed my claims as a frivolous imagination combined with lack of sleep and sugar. My dad and everyone else always told me the same thing. After a while, I stopped searching for answers and just accepted it as a gift I had. Something that made me special. 

Later, I learned it was never my gift to accept.

I enjoyed my gift all the way up into adulthood. I married the man of my dreams, Jerry, despite my parents wanting me to marry a woman. They eventually excepted me though, as I expected. I got a decent job as a construction worker and even adopted a sweet baby boy, who we named Liam. That brings us to almost a month ago now. I've been married six years, my son is turning three soon and I'm 29.

One night, I was in my living room trying to stay up again. I was binge-watching Rick and Morty for the first time. Despite the sugary sodas and candy, I had been consuming, my eyes were getting heavy, my breathing slowed and the world seemed to get farther away from me. Just before my mind slipped away, a voice yelled at me, seemingly from behind my head. It was my husband's voice this time.

"Honey, wake up!" The voice sent an energy through me that rivaled any energy drink or caffeine that ever or will exist. 

For the first time, I ignored the voice. Rick and Morty was getting a bit stale at the time and seemed boring to me. Especially compared to sleep. So, I simply kept my eyes closed and allowed myself to slip into unconsciousness.

Before I could, a voice roared and boomed around me so loud it felt like my ears were about to burst. My head ached and agony shot into my head from every direction. I know brains have no pain receptors but I swear I felt like my actual brain was melting as invisible heated knives seemed to plunge into me. I screamed at the top of my lungs and felt like I was going to die. I couldn't think or do anything but scream as the voice yelled at a volume that could bring down buildings.

The voice was saying something in what sounded like a broken language. As if someone took English and stretched it a million miles long and wrapped it around an unending nightmare of horrors and creatures that could break minds. I grabbed my head as it repeated its self over and over again.