He didn’t sleep often. It was hard to switch off the millions of thoughts that raced around his mind all day. Finding that island of tranquility amongst his subconscious was harder than finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. When he did sleep, he was tortured by violent or surreal dreams that woke him up soaked in sweat every other hour. The word sleep became synonymous with anxiety and paralysing fear.
Days weren’t that bad. A constant high-pitched ringing followed his ears everywhere he went; it drowned out the white noise and he could focus in on menial tasks and mundane social interactions with those around. It was easy to think he was there, but in truth he was never there. Days flew by him as he watched from beyond his body, detached from it by the mere banality of everyday life. Evenings brought dread. He was reconnected with his body and the noise became agony. Voices, faces, epiphanies of violence, visions of unimaginable trauma, unfinished basslines and tense harmonies: the cacophony was resounding and all-consuming. What he was able to drown out during the day, he paid for dearly by suffering it at night. Hours and hours of random thoughts, their afterthoughts, and their after-afterthoughts, all sewn together in a horrifying lineup of semi-lucid goalless thought and terrorising dreams. Drowning out the noise with substance sometimes helped to calm the storm that kept him from sleeping every night, although he’d long since recognised the temporary and volatile nature of that solution.
But the deafening echo of his existence was nothing compared to the spiders.
Sometimes he’d hear them behind his head, their spindly limbs creaking as they stalked the perimeter of his consciousness. Other times, he’d wake in terror having seen something fall from the ceiling or heard the soft thud of a body land on his chest. Sometimes they were fat, black, hairy spiders that chased him out of his dreams to cast him back onto a soaked mattress, gasping for air. Mostly though, he never saw them. But the signs that they continued to hang around his mind were painfully constant – their webs veiled the questions spinning in his head, the sounds of their scuttling legs always ran away from him as he turned corners or opened doors within his dreams. Long shadows wrapped themselves around his eyes and around his tongue, keeping watch over his subconscious while he restlessly slept.
He didn’t fear spiders generally speaking. Seeing them in daytime barely triggered a response from him. But at night they would come again to crawl over his thoughts, and the terror of falling asleep would keep him up until the sun rose and his mind could take no more. The mundanity would kick in again and the day would begin, his swirling mind detached once again from his tired body until the cruel softness of the mattress swallowed him up and punished his mind with everything and anything he could possibly think about.
As he drifts away for the sixth time that night, the mattress wraps its eight legs around his body and spins its web of paranoia around the depths of his mind.
Humanposting 