INNER CITY STORIES

Ever have nights where you toss and turn, finding it hard to sleep? How about nights where you can sleep more than eight hours without a problem, but you're not really sleeping. You're living a horrible nightmare deep within your own conscience. Your worst fear is so real, and you can't wake up. You try so hard to get yourself out of the vivid scene, but it's all so surreal, it scares you to death. You can’t tell if you're reliving moments in your life, or if it's just a crazy dream. But finally you wake up, sweating, looking around in fear, confusion, and with slight relief to see you were really only dreaming, experiencing the most vivid nightmare you've ever had.

Now imagine going through this repeatedly. Not one night, not two, not even three nights, but for weeks at a time. Switching between not getting any sleep, and getting so much sleep that your nightmare becomes stronger and more vivid, even more terrorizing than the one before, seeming more real each time you fall asleep. You’re feeling mentally and physically drained, but you’ve just got to put those things to the side, there's more important issues you’ve got to focus on throughout the day; you feel so preoccupied that you can't just sit and think about what these nightmares are about, what's causing them, why they are occurring so often. All you can do is just push them aside until the next one comes around.  

As if it wasn't hard enough to sleep at night, but now when you want to sleep you can’t help wondering, what’s the next dream is going to be like? Is the next nightmare going to be worse than the last? Well, usually the answer to that is yes. Every nightmare involves an increasing level of fear. Just pure fear from the fact that these nightmares are combinations of past memories, and fear of things that you would never want to happen in your life. It's like taking your worst fears, and your worst memories, and combining them together to construct one of the worst creations your mind and subconscious could ever devise. It’s terrifying, and the worst part of it all is when you’re in the midst of the nightmare, you try so hard to wake up, you question how in the hell did you even end up in that position, you regret any and everything you did to put you in that position. Yet throughout the entire experience, you can't wake yourself up, you can’t piece anything together because it's not real; your mind can't make sense of the situation because it hasn't happened, but your mind starts to run wild with fear, unable to return to reality; you just keep dreaming until your body finally jumps out of the nightmare. You have to take a few moments to stop sweating, to catch onto reality again, and to let your anxiety drop back down so you can start up your day again after feeling like you just drained your body of all its energy trying to pull yourself back to reality, but failing so badly, for what seemed an eternity, just feeling, Sleepless.