Tag Archives: night terrors

Revenge of the Brain ©️

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There is a strange place the mind goes when sleep disappears. It isn’t drama. It isn’t madness. It’s something quieter and more mechanical, like an engine that keeps running because no one has turned the key off.

For four weeks the nights have been two hours long. Sometimes less. I lie down around nine or ten, like a responsible citizen of the circadian order, and the body does what it is supposed to do. It falls asleep. The machinery still works. But somewhere around one in the morning the system detonates. I wake up sweating, heart hammering, neck tight like a rope pulled through the back of the skull.

The dream is always intense, cinematic, impossible to ignore. Not the faint nonsense people usually mean when they say they had a dream. These are full productions. The brain staging a theatre of fear in the middle of the night.

And then it’s over.

The eyes open. The room returns. But the nervous system has already gone to war.

There is no slipping back into sleep after that. The adrenaline has already signed the papers.

This is the part no one explains when you quit two REM suppressors at once. Marijuana disappears. Zyprexa disappears. The brain suddenly realizes it has been underwater for years and rockets upward toward the surface.

REM sleep comes roaring back.

Dreams become violent in their intensity. Not necessarily violent in content, but in emotional force. The mind trying to process years of backlog in a few frantic weeks.

Sleep scientists call it REM rebound. A clinical phrase for something that feels far less clinical when it is happening inside your skull at 1:27 in the morning.

The strange thing is that the system itself is still functioning. I can fall asleep. The brain still knows how to enter sleep cycles. But somewhere in the second REM phase the dream world becomes too powerful, and the body ejects itself back into wakefulness like a pilot pulling the lever on a failing aircraft.

Then comes the headache. Always in the back of the head, where the neck meets the skull. The muscles locked tight from the sudden surge of adrenaline. The body believing, for a moment, that the dream was real.

This is what severe sleep fragmentation looks like. Not insomnia in the usual sense. Not lying awake all night staring at the ceiling. Instead the brain falls asleep, dreams too hard, and wakes itself up.

Repeat. Night after night.

Meanwhile the day continues. The schedule continues. The rebuild continues. Life does not politely pause while the nervous system recalibrates itself.

So the body runs on something else.

Not mania. Not energy. Something closer to inertia. Momentum carried forward because stopping would require a level of rest that simply isn’t available yet.

The strange irony is that this chaos is actually a form of repair. When REM sleep returns after years of suppression, the brain overshoots. It dreams too much. Too vividly. Too violently.

But overshoot is part of recalibration.

Eventually the system stabilizes. The dreams lose their cinematic intensity. The nights lengthen again. The body remembers what eight hours feels like.

Right now though, the night is short. Two hours of sleep. A nightmare at one. A pounding heart. A dark room returning. And the quiet understanding that the brain is still trying to find its way back to normal.

Elegy for a Goat ©️

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I wake just after dusk, throat dry like the desert wind, heart beating slow and deliberate—like a drum echoing across the empty canyons of time. I am not a man. I’m not quite a beast. I am… an idea. A whisper they tell around campfires when the tequila’s nearly gone and the fear starts to taste sweet.

They call me Chupacabra. They don’t know what that means. Not really.

I crawl out from under an abandoned trailer on the edge of nowhere—rusted, forgotten, beautiful in its ruin. The moon greets me like an old lover, cold and luminous. I crack my neck. I smile. I vanish into the mesquite and shadow.

I’ve got a thirst. Not just for blood—but for something pure. Something that pulses.

Goats tonight. Maybe. But I’m hoping for a taste of memory.

See, I don’t hunt like some rabid thing. I glide. I observe. There’s an art to it. The ranch down the hill is humming with tension. The animals are uneasy. The boy’s been drawing me in the dirt with a stick. Maybe he dreams me. Maybe I’m his imaginary friend. Or his warning.

The goat sees me. Doesn’t run. They never do. I whisper to her—soft, apologetic, like a gentleman at the gallows.

“Forgive me, darlin’. But you knew this was comin’.”

One bite. No pain. No mess. Just… relief. The soul surrenders. The blood sings. And for a moment, I remember… something human. A church bell. Laughter. The smell of peaches in a Georgia orchard.

Then it’s gone.

I disappear before the sun creeps back across the horizon like a nosy neighbor. Back to the dust. Back to the dreams of the fearful.

Tomorrow?

Tomorrow I might let them catch a glimpse. Just a flicker in the trees. A shadow on the fencepost. Enough to make ’em wonder if the legends are true.

Because I am the truth behind the legend.

And baby—I’m still very much alive.

Chapter One : Into the Void ©️

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The man, known to the remnants of a neighborhood as quiet as the hills themselves, lived on the cusp of an age forgotten, on a mountain that watched over Huntsville, Alabama. His house, tucked away like a secret, stood amidst the tall pines, a place where the echoes of her rebel past lingered with the ghosts of men who once bore the title of genius—those Nazi scientists who had found refuge in the arms of the South, their brilliance repurposed, their sins obscured by the smokescreen of victory.

He, unlike them, was not a man of war but of pixels and algorithms, a digital hermit whose obsession had drawn him into the glowing abyss of a computer screen. He spent his days manipulating the unreal, fashioning shapes and forms with a precision that could only be described as obsessive. He would lose himself in the layering of images, the melding of colors, the sculpting of shadows. The 3D feature of Photoshop became his playground, a digital chisel with which he carved out worlds.

But it was not enough to merely create. There was something in him, a yearning that could not be satisfied by this two-dimensional plane of existence. He sought depth in his digital art, and in his quest, he found the wormhole—a visual anomaly, a twist in the digital fabric that defied explanation. At first, it was just a trick of the eye, a shimmer that appeared when the layers overlapped in a certain way. But as he stared into it, day after day, night after night, he began to see something more. The wormhole became a portal, a doorway not just through space, but through time itself.

He did not know when the shift occurred, when the boundary between the digital and the real began to blur. Perhaps it was the countless hours spent staring into the screen, or the way he felt the wormhole tugging at the edges of his mind, pulling him into its vortex. And then, one day, it released him—flung him from the constraints of time, his psyche untethered, drifting through the currents of reality like a leaf caught in a storm.

He wandered the mountain, no longer just a man but a being unstuck in time. Around him, the air shimmered with the presence of others—figures that moved like wraiths, their forms indistinct, their faces hidden behind veils of light. They were the echoes of what had been, or perhaps what could be, or even what should never be. He did not know, and the not knowing gnawed at him like a hunger.

With this release came a burden, a burning desire that gripped him like a fever. He had seen beyond the veil, seen the fragility of the world, and he knew—he knew with the certainty of a prophet—that it was his duty to save it. The world was unraveling, its threads coming loose, and only he, with his knowledge of the wormhole, could stitch it back together and not for the sake of his fellow mankind. His desire was a selfish one.

He returned to his computer, his fingers moving with a speed that was almost inhuman, the images on the screen blurring as he worked. He was creating again, but this time it was not art—it was salvation, cups of repose for the fallen. The wormhole had shown him the way, and he would use it, manipulate it, to set things right.

But as he worked, the shimmers grew closer, their forms more distinct, until he could see them clearly. They were not human, not exactly, but something else, something born of the wormhole’s influence. They watched him, their eyes like dark mirrors reflecting his own obsessions back at him.

He ignored them, his focus unwavering. The wormhole had released him from time, and in that release, he had found his purpose. He would save the world if only for himself.

And so he worked, alone on his mountain, surrounded by the ghosts of a past that was not his, haunted by the shimmers of a future that he could not fully comprehend, driven by a desire that burned hotter than the Alabama sun.