I AWAKE IN A COLD SWEAT. I’M SO DISORIENTED that I don’t even know where I am for the first few seconds, and then I realize . . . I was just dreaming. I raise my arm to check my tattoo—my go-to for immediate comfort—but I can’t see anything. It’s pitch-dark in my room. I reach for my bedside lamp and then realize I’m standing.
My eyes are open and I am in complete darkness. What. The. Hell.
I listen for the typical nighttime noises: the splashing of the swimming pool fountain, the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway, the various vehicle and animal sounds that compose the sound track to my life in the Connecticut suburbs. But it’s dead silent.
Am I still dreaming? I squeeze my arm, pinching the flesh between my fingertips. It feels totally real.
And then the strangeness of my nightmare comes back to me. It was my lobotomy dream—the one that starts with my father telling me what a failure I am and that he’s scheduled me for brain surgery, and ends with him saying he’s going to do it himself and chasing me with an ice pick. Not terribly original, I know. I’ve watched way too many horror movies. But this dream has stuck in my psyche and now plays on regular repeat.
Except this time weird shit was happening that never had before. I fell and twisted my ankle, and Dad actually caught up with me and stabbed me in the shoulder. And it hurt like hell. I touched it, and my fingers came back dripping with warm blood. Like so hyperrealistic I could practically smell it. And I had to push myself up and run for my life to get away from him, limping awkwardly because my ankle was blazing with red-hot pain.
Then there was this flash of light, everything froze, and when it unfroze I had a window into all of these other places. In one of them, I saw this girl running away from a monster.
I hesitate, feeling a tug of déjà vu. I could swear I’ve seen her before. But that thought quickly evaporates as I remember what came next.
This black wall appeared in front of me—like a curtain stretching from the ground up so high it met the sky. I looked back: my father was still chasing me, ice pick raised, eyes rolled back into his head. I turned and ran for the darkness—plunged straight into it—and woke up here.
That was the most lifelike dream I have ever had, and I’ve had some vivid ones, especially if you count the hallucinations that come as a bonus prize with my narcolepsy. I force myself to switch channels from What the Hell Was That About? to Where Am I Now? Fighting the mounting fear that something is very wrong (Stay calm, Fergus), I shuffle blindly forward, groping in the darkness to feel out the room I’m in, but there is nothing to touch. I crouch down and place my hands near my feet. Even the ground is unreadable: not cold, not warm, just hard and smooth, like glass.
I’m no longer in my lobotomy dream. I’m not in my home. Where am I? Did I spend the night somewhere else? I try to think back to what I did last night before going to bed. My mind is blank. I can’t remember anything before the nightmare. I mean, I remember my mom and dad, of course. The fact that I’m in my first year of college. The fight I had with them about wanting to live away from home and Dr. Patterson taking their side, saying it was “too dangerous” for someone with my “condition.”
My condition. This must have something to do with the narcolepsy. I must have passed out somewhere and hit my head hard enough to knock myself unconscious. It’s happened before, but it’s never given me amnesia—at least those times I remembered how I got there. But where could I be?
Something moves in the darkness. A slow, slithering sound. I freeze, a coil of fear twisting in my stomach. I’m torn between calling out and staying silent, and opt for the latter—whatever it was, it didn’t sound human.
Then, from another direction comes a rhythmic tapping noise: tap tap tap tap, long pause, tap tap tap tap, long pause. My face turns ice-cold. Don’t freak out, I think, wishing I could see my tattoo. It’s just the hallucinations signaling you’re about to fall asleep again. The tapping continues, and I leap away from it, plunging blindly into the darkness.
From somewhere close comes a girl’s voice. “Hello?” It’s barely a squeak—she sounds terrified.
“Who’s there?” I ask.
There is a pause, then the voice responds, “Cata.” I whip around and grope in the direction it came from. Nothing. A bodiless voice. You’re hallucinating. Dread creeps a slimy path up my back. And then something brushes my arm.
I jump, and whatever it is shrieks, “What is that?” It’s a girl’s voice, but not the same as the first. This voice is lower, and comes between sobs. “Oh my God, where am I?”
And then a light flickers on in front of me. Not one light, but several. Four glowing blue lines in the shape of a door, floating in the void. I glance around to see if anything else is illuminated by its glow, and notice the faint outline of two girls, one on either side of me, a few feet away.
Suddenly, a loud, hollow knock comes from somewhere above. Then another. And, as the door creaks open, I feel my stomach drop. I hear screams from the girls as a third and final knock sweeps me off my feet and high into the air, spinning me inside an invisible vortex and through the door. In a blinding flash of light, we are gone.