Can you smell it on my breath? Is it the whispering of death?

Sleep and I have a very deeply complicated relationship.

I'm not an insomniac, though that's probably the closest term I can find without sounding like a quack. There's 'somniphobia' - the fear of sleep itself. That's not right - I'm not afraid of the process of sleeping itself, although I certainly was when I was a child. (I don't understand why more people weren't - you're submerging yourself into a coma where your subconscious fully takes over, laying yourself fully bare for analysis or harm: when is a person more vulnerable than when they're asleep?)

Oneirophobia sticks a bit better.

Falling asleep when I was a child consisted of a few simple steps: I would force my eyes closed. This never came easily to me, paranoid as I was, seeking danger in every shadow cast by a jacket against the wall, but inevitably, I would get there. I'd fall into the hypnagogic state and stay there for a few hours - half-asleep, half-awake, conversing with the people who drifted through my mind (popular cartoon characters, characters of my own design, musicians, politicians, Mother Mary and Jesus Himself). Then, the theatre staff (vague shapes with human faces) would take me to - well, the theatre. From there, I'd sit with all the others, and we'd decide on a movie to play.

Each 'movie' had a frame around it, of a different color. Green meant 'safe'. Blue meant 'caution'. Red meant 'nightmare'.

I was never able to control my dreams past that point. Once the movie was chosen, I would fall into it - my sense of self entirely replaced by the knowledge that I am but an audience member.

My dreams were never about me back then. The nightmares would be scary, but the same way a horror movie was. It was safe. It was ... entertaining.

I'll probably delve into some of the nightmares I had when I was older at some point, but: all this is to say, my dreams have been getting worse. I wouldn't call them nightmares - they don't instill that same sort of fear - but I would call them 'dreadful'. Every night, in that old theatre (the staff had stopped coming, I had lost the ability to choose), foul mimicries of people I know and love dance across my vision, repeating every cruelty done to me. I wake in the morning and keep getting pulled back down into that place where 'love' is a myth designed to keep people complacent.

I'm so tired that sleep seems the only refuge. But there is no safe harbor there - and whatever comfort I find rests on fine, cracked ice. I could fall through into the fathomless beyond in an instant.

God this is melodramatic.