It’s 2009 and I’m six years old. My brother and I share a bedroom with two twin beds and mine’s in the furthest corner.
I couldn’t sleep right away. My nightly routine consisted of me singing to myself, getting yelled at by my brother to “shut up,” throwing my pillow in the crack between my bed and the wall — the place I called the ‘freezer’ — and pulling it out once it was ice-cold. Only then, when my cheek felt the cool case, could I begin to drift to sleep.
The only sounds came from the fan turned to its highest level. In Chicago, it was the only thing that tuned out the sirens of ambulances and police cars. Yet it couldn’t mute the scream, halfway between our world and a dream — it came from me.
At its peak, I had night terrors every month. Night terrors are when someone experiences the in-between of sleep and wakefulness, stuck in a limbo where a nightmare seems to seep into reality. Usually people do not remember their nightmares after experiencing a night terror, but I could remember bits and pieces.
Evil creatures chased me in pitch-black forests. Outside a window hidden in some bushes, I saw witches march out of their shack for me with lit torches in their hands. I’d hide under tables in haunted houses next to monsters who gathered before their hunt and scramble through manors, trying to outrun the things that stalked me in the dark. But then the floor would slip out beneath me and their faces would morph above me to the rhythm of their wicked laughter. And my body would try to force me awake but half of me would remain in this nightmare.
That moment would always happen during the witching hour, when the boundaries between the living and the dead are shattered.
I would shriek and sob for my parents while my brother cried. The door would fling open, they’d collect me from my bed and carry me down the hallway to theirs.
These journeys down the hallway are hazy, like resin blurring some details and hardening others — but the textures I noticed sent me into a spiral.
Every fear in my nightmares seemed to transfer onto imperfect surfaces — I would sob into tear-damp pillow cases or painted walls chipped by the trim. But especially any scrunched-up bedsheets.
My parents would try to tuck me under the covers to calm me down, but if I touched a crumpled blanket I would fight free from them both and run away to anywhere around the house that had a place to hide.
My parents had very different techniques to pull me back into reality — my mother would rub my back to soothe me. “This is all a dream, none of this is real,” she’d say.
That would work sometimes, and my cries would grow into soft sniffles. But there was always the risk that I would touch a crumpled bed sheet, setting me off into another spiral.
My dad took a different approach out of fear — he would yell and beg for me to wake up because he was so scared of how distressed I was, but I’d only freak out more. I remember snippets of what my mom would say.
“That’s not going to work, she has to wake up on her own.”
Sometimes it was music that would awaken me instead. I remember a few times fully waking up next to my mother at the piano with her hands over top of mine as she directed my fingers across the keys.
And we’d sit there together like that for a while, as my tears settled into dried stains on my cheeks. Neither of us knew how to play, so we’d mimic an off-brand version of my dad’s daily performances.
After some time, my mother would help me climb back upstairs and tuck me back into bed.
“Just imagine that all the witches are good and want to be your friend,” she’d say. And I’d hold my stuffed giraffe closer and let my eyes fall shut.
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