Nightmares R Us

Well!
My first blog post. This is truly a momentous occasion.
I feel like I should be performing a sort of celebratory dance or something. Perhaps a polka. But then again, I don't actually know how to polka. Right. That's not going to work, then.
This isn't going very well, is it?
I'm sorry, I'm a bit loopy at the moment. I've been up since a little before two in the morning because I was afraid to go back to sleep after the most recent nightmare.
Have you ever had one of those nightmares that's just terrifyingly, incandescently real? It's like you stub your toe in the dream and it hurts even when you're awake. Usually there's that little niggling thing that tells you that it isn't real, that you will wake up eventually, but my dreams have gotten so intense that until I see that one little thing, I honestly believe that it's real.
Take the nightmare I woke up from this morning. It basically consisted of me being hunted down and killed by people I consider to be close friends. As has been happening more and more often recently, I could see the murder weapon (in this case a pure white knife about twelve inches long altogether) being drenched in my blood before the actual wound occurred. In the dream, it feels like things just sort of freeze when I stare at it, and then there's a red spot that grows and grows and grows until there's red everywhere, coating the person's hand, dripping on the floor with a sickeningly fluid sound, making everything slick and disgusting. I always snap out of it just in time to see the business end fire or stab or whatever that night's instrument of murder is attack.
Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it doesn't. There are times when I'm just vaguely aware of chilled metal entering my body. There are other times when I could swear every nerve in my dream body is twice as sensitive and I wake up crying so hard I have red eyes for the rest of the day.
And even though I do eventually wake up, it's so real that unless I find that thing that's just wrong, I'm honest to goodness convinced that I am about to die.
It's always something easily overlookable. Last night it was the colour of my Converse. Once it was the page I had bookmarked in Macbeth. The side of my deodorant facing the room. The order of the books on my desk. The year on the coin I have a habit of fiddling with. In the most subtle case, the brown spot in one of my eyes was reversed so it was on the other side of the pupil. That one was beyond scary - I kept looking and looking for something to prove that it wasn't real, and I couldn't find anything until I was thrown through a mirror and I got a very up-close and personal view of my face before smashing through it.
Yeah. Sleeping hasn't been happening much lately.
And I'm used to it, I honestly am - a whole life full of nightmares does that to you - but it's been particularly bad recently and my headaches are getting worse as well.
I'm so exhausted, and my head hurts, and yet I'm absolutely terrified to sleep and the only way to get rid of one of my migraines is to sleep it off, helpfully enough.
Yes, well.
Great inaugural post, huh?
Have a nice day.