Dreaming

One night I had one of those weird dreams. The ones that pop back into your head at the most random moments. I went to bed as normal, tucked up and toasty. Next thing I know, it's freezing and completely dark apart from the small lines of light around the edge of my door. I dived off the end of my bed and retrieved the duvet from its place of rejection on the carpet. I rolled up, squishing my toes into the duvet, trying to rescue them from the onset of frostbite. I shut my eyes tight, but there’s that niggling noise that tells me I didn’t lock my door last night. When it’s unlocked it vibrates in the frame and squeaks. Normally I don’t hear it, but the middle of the night is awful quiet, and any sound is magnified a thousand-fold. I made the heroic dash from the bed to the door and back, and then resumed my foetal position within the duvet cocoon. The next three times I wake up during the night, there’s no obvious reason. I’m perfectly warm, it’s totally silent. But I kept having that feeling as if I’d forgotten something, something scarily important. It was that feeling of being paralysed with fear, when you feel your heart literally skipping a beat. Utter gut-wrenching fear.  

When I willed myself back to sleep for the final time, convincing myself that the shadows in my room where exactly that, just shadows, I dreamt in lurid technicolour. All my senses were alive. The room was awash with smells - peppermint, chocolate cake, citrus, lavender - and I could hear the noises of rain falling outside, and yet also cheerful birdsong. This didn't seem odd at all, everything felt perfectly normal. And that was the bizarre thing, because it was the middle of the day and I was getting ready for bed. Brilliant sunshine streamed in from all sides, even though I have only one smallish window. I laid back against a mountain of pillows and shut my eyes, everything switched off. Not just the colour, but the smell and the sounds. It was all darkness.

I was sleeping, but aware that I was sleeping. I could feel a baby curled up next to me. It didn’t move or make any noise, but I instinctively knew it was my baby. It belonged to me, it was mine. Then all of a sudden I was rolling on top of it, I could feel myself doing it, but I couldn’t stop. I was suffocating my own baby and it was terrifying. I managed to pull it out from under me, only to reveal that it wasn’t alive. It was fake, a doll. As I rocked its squishy body back and forth in the half-light, its eyes opened and closed, plastic eyelids closing over plastic eyes in a plastic face. As its eyes opened for the last time, they rolled in their sockets and focused in on me, staring me down. Then I woke up.