I've been an insomniac all my life. I've had nightmares all my life. It's always been a very difficult relationship with sleep and with my dreams. They were actually the main reason why I started therapy four years ago, because it was very difficult to continue living when all your nights are filled with weird monsters and disturbing images.

It's gotten a little less gory and monster-y in the last few years since I started therapy, but it's definitely still a part of my life that I'm very interested in, but also very uncomfortable with.

There was this whole period a few years ago [when] I realized that maybe I wanted to have kids and then suddenly all my nightmares were about giving birth to slimy, weird, tiny creatures, which I would straight away not be able to take care of. There's always this idea that they were deformed.

They've gone back to being pretty bad over the last year. Bizarre and awkward things happen in them, but there's always an idea of something chasing me. Something that's lurking somewhere. There's a threat.

There's one [dream] that happened in December [2020], end of November, maybe, which was really scary because of the looming paranoia that came with it. It was just a friend and I, and we were walking in a town that I didn't know. You'd see people in cafes dressed in kind of odd ways. There'd be wearing normal clothes, but on top of those clothes, you'd have, how do you say, more matter. So, for instance, they’d be wearing normal jackets, but then there would be this kind of rigid shape coming out of it that is the same material as the jacket. They'd all be wearing this kind of weirdly colored outfits. A lot of people were talking together, and [some] were dressed in scuba suits as well, the suits that hid your face.

Anyway, we didn't think much of it, but then we'd see them slowly walk and make their way to our friends' house. We were young adults or teens maybe [in the dream]. We were gonna go to this mansion for a party because we knew that's where all of our friends were. We were tailing this massive group of people, and they were all laughing and chatting and walking toward it.

And as they got to the house, we saw them assume positions. Some of them would just go and find a corner and kind of contort [themselves] into it. Their outfit would then blend with the shade of that corner, and you would no longer see them. We started realizing that basically the whole house was rigged with those people hiding in strange places in the house. And at that point, I realized that my friend had just been raped the day before in the street by someone whose face I recognized within this crowd. And I guess that's how we realized, okay, those people are here to hide and wait for teens to come into the party and jump them and rape them.

That's when they started putting this song on, which was a song with our names in the lyrics. It was all very, very weird. And then we decide to run away and as we get out of the house, we realize that all the bushes and all the things in the garden are actually also people who are hiding. That's where we'd start seeing weird, like rabbits, which looked like they were pregnant, but actually it's because they had a human head inside of their bellies. You could see their bellies and you could see the head with the kind of gaping eyes staring at you. We ran away and that's how it ended. That one really stuck with me because it was just super threatening.

The house looked the exact same as my home, my parents' house. I think because I haven't been able to go back there for so long. They're in France and so much has been happening, I guess there's been this idea of wanting to be there and realizing that it's not safe, you know?

I think the rape thing is from past experiences of having been assaulted before. And I think a lot of it stayed with me and I think a lot of that violence is translated into my dream life, but I don't know. There was just something very bizarre about the camaraderie of the people. I don't really know. [At first] they almost seemed friendly, odd balls, you know, like friendly, odd balls. They had weird hats, and they looked really fun and suddenly you realize they're still laughing but they're out to pray on people. And that was terrifying.

The thing that has changed in my dreams over the last year is the way that the scenes seem to be shot in my head. Up until now, I wasn't really seeing faces in dreams. And now I see those. A lot of them are either people I know very well or characters from shows I watch, but they kind of embody someone I know. It's weird because I see them vividly and I never used to see faces as much or pay that much attention to them.

Before there was always this idea of space, like very wide-angle landscapes, and there wasn't as much of an emphasis on people's faces. [Now] it's more narrow and claustrophobic. [A lot of] dreams are within houses, in confined spaces. It feels like the idea of home is completely different now.

The last dream that stayed with me was the one from the day before yesterday, because you wake up and you're like, Jesus Christ. I guess this one kind of felt a bit more realistic. I was living with some friends in a place [where] there were rules. One of them was that the streets were unsafe because there was loads of soldiers or whatever, people who were killing civilians in a pattern that we didn't know, but we knew was a pattern. We didn't know what we should or shouldn't do, [or what] would qualify as a reason to murder us. But we knew that something that we were doing would lead potentially to us being selected for killing. We're all very aware of this.

It was all at night. We were rushing to go back home. And there was this idea that when we were back home, in this tall building, you'd have to make sure to pretend that your room was unoccupied, because if the soldiers detect any kind of light or activity, then they would just bomb the house. So, the idea was that we'd go back to your rooms. In my dream, I knew we were doing this every day, that was the routine. We'd go back to the house I'd try and close the blind of my window and turn all the lights.

I remember in the dream having a bit of an anxiety attack because my blinds weren't shutting properly. There was still a tiny glimmer of light through the window, and I was panicking thinking they're gonna think that there's somebody here, so I need to go into one of the other rooms. And I'd go into my friend's rooms and try and hide out with them. And then eventually we started hearing the building rumble and vibrate. And then eventually we'd see shots coming from beneath us. The soldiers were a floor below us and they'd be like shooting those like massive bullets through our floors to find us like rats.

That's where I saw the back of my friends' skull just kind of get [sheared off], and she kind of stared at me and then kinda slowly bled, and [her head] exploded. Then I saw a couple of others exploding and was thinking, “Fuck, this is pretty bad.”

At the same time as that was happening, suddenly I'm somebody else on the other end and I'm this red creature who has a bow and arrows and I'm on like the other side of a bridge shooting arrows at this army of people [blocking] access to the bridge for the building where my friends are currently being bombed. I see myself shooting those people and then swimming below the bridge and then going to the basement of the building to try and save them.

In the basement of the building, the ceiling's very, very low. So, you feel the overwhelming weight of that massive building upon you, and it's very dark in there, and you can [hear?] drops of water, and it's very wet and scary. And I knew at that point, as I was trying to kind of make my way to the top and try and save them, that there was this guy who was after me and who was trying to kill me before I [could reach them]. And that's where I woke up.

It's weird, this one, I don't really know what led to it because, you know, obviously you watch a lot of TV right? [laughs]. So, I think a lot of my dreams have become intertwined with the TV world, but I don't like war movies. I don't enjoy any of that. So, it was very weird. I don't really know where that one came from, but I remember thinking very clearly, trying to get my room to be as dark as possible and thinking, this is so scary to be in complete darkness, because I'm really scared of the dark in real life. But it's the only option to stay alive. So, it was this kind of very weird, unstable, unbalanced [feeling], the idea of lack of safety. I don't really know what brought it, but it just feels kind of relevant. You know, you're in the streets and randomly, you don't know why, but you know, something, somehow, somewhere is going to kill you, and you have to hide away from it.