Content/Trigger Warning. 18+. Strong Violence, Death, Suicide I could fall asleep standing up at a bus stop in a thunderstorm. That’s what people said about me. I used to sleep in blissful peace and wake up refreshed and ready for the day. I never had any problems sleeping. I can’t pin down a specific time or reason, but I started having dreams. I know everyone dreams, but I had never remembered mine. Then, quite suddenly I started waking up with my head full of really big, powerful dreams that seemed to have gone on and on all night long. Exhausting. I started waking up more tired than when I went to bed. At first the dreams were me struggling to complete some arcane task. It seemed that in every dream I fought all night long to succeed but never completed the task. I can’t remember what any of these tasks were, but the struggle is a vivid memory. Occasionally I would have to fight someone or something to do what I needed to do and the dreams would then morph into a long, violent, physical, running bout, played out over huge distances. They were utterly and completely energy-sapping. I woke up with my legs and arms aching and my heart pounding but the bedclothes hardly disturbed from when I’d lain down. I started to spend days wandering around in a fog of tiredness. Worse, I began to dread going to bed. Every night I hoped for oblivion, I hoped for a deep, peaceful sleep. But every night the dreams returned. I began fearing sleep. I would sit up in a chair reading. I tried to read only nice soft things with no conflict. The trouble was I would fall asleep reading them and then the dreams would start. I tried pacing around the house. I watched TV and surfed the web. I walked around the block. Literally anything to avoid falling asleep. But, of course, sleep would overtake me in the end. It got so bad that I would stay awake all night and then, finally fall asleep as the sun came up. Eventually I lost my job. As time went on my dreams became less task oriented but more violent. Actually they became very violent. I’m not a violent sort of person and have experienced no violence in my life other than playground scraps at school. My head seemed to be in permanent horror movie mode, which was decidedly strange because I have never watched those sorts of movies. It was terrifying. I woke up every day shocked, sweating, shaking with fear and hardly able to breath, my chest felt so tight and my anxiety extreme. I dreamt that, for no reason that I can recall, I beat a man senseless with a large stone and then rammed a three foot long piece of iron fencing through his temples, pinning him to the ground while he died. I did everything to avoid falling asleep after that, but whatever I tried, and I did really try, I would, sooner or later, doze off and then replay the whole dream again. Then, after a few weeks of this dream it changed. I found myself living with a woman I didn’t know. She was horrible, with a vicious temper and utterly unlike anyone I had ever met. In this dream I cracked her hard on the side of her head with a cast iron frying pan and then grabbed a pot of hot bleach off the stove, squeezed her mouth open and poured it in. I woke up whimpering and blubbering after this one. I swear I could still feel the bleach fumes stinging my throat. It didn’t stop the dream coming back again the next night. Sometimes, for several weeks in a row, I dreamt an ever-changing carousel of horror. I forcibly impaled a Rottweiler dog on a large parking bollard, having first muzzled it with a short length of razor wire. In another dream, I set fire to three cats, a tabby, a siamese and a ginger, with lighter fluid. I have no idea why. Several times I killed a horse by hammering a large foot-long iron tent peg smartly into the front of it’s skull with a four pound lump hammer. I have never been near a horse. I have no idea where these dreams came from, they were completely outside of my experience and knowledge. But they were so frighteningly, vividly real. So exhausting. But then came the very worst, the one that has finally cured me of sleep for good, which is why I’m standing by the railway line waiting for the next Euston express to hurtle through the station at one hundred and twenty miles an hour. I had stayed awake all night in a chair. As daylight started to shine through the gap in my curtains. Sleep won. I had tried so hard. I swear I was going to stand up, but I was really tired and just couldn’t. This time I dreamt that I strangled a mother and child, who I’d never met before, in the local park with a length of electric flex and left them in the middle of a large patch of rhododendron. It was so real. I could smell the damp earth, I could feel fading strength in her fingers as she tried to prize away the electric cable from her neck. I could hear the child crying and then the silence. I could feel the weight of the woman as I dragged her into the bushes, her arms limp and floppy, her shoes coming off as her heals dragged across the damp grass. I woke up hours later, a pink evening light through the gap in the curtains. Exhausted, I realised that I was muddy and damp. My hands were sore. In my lap lay a length of grey electric wire, covered in mud and blood.