When I was sleeping
by Steph Auteri
Image by Huy Phan for Pexels
When I was young, I was afraid of my heartbeat. The whooshing sound it made as I lay there at night—my ear pressed against my pillow—sounded like an oncoming train, coming to run me down.
Perhaps that's why I was so susceptible to nightmares. Marinating in my own fear, when I did eventually drift off to sleep, I slipped easily into a dark hellscape, one with sentience, one that knew all of my darkest fears.
As I grew older, I stopped calling them nightmares. They were anxiety dreams, my inner turmoil made manifest.
In my 20s, while working a job I loathed in lower Manhattan, I began to have a recurring dream about getting lost in the snarl of streets downtown, unable to wend my way back to the ordered grid of midtown, to the Lincoln Tunnel…unable to find my way home.
As I settled into the ups and downs of marriage, afraid that I had not chosen wisely, I dreamed over and over of betrayal.
And when I became a mother, my fears naturally coalesced around my child. Yes, I still sometimes found myself lost in the dreamscape in my mind. But more often, I dreamed that I had lost my child, lost her to the vast darkness outside my car or outside our home.
But that's another kind of lost, too, I suppose. To have the thing that has come to define you so thoroughly be suddenly stripped from you, after the other pieces of you have already fallen away.
***
When I was 5, my Kindergarten teacher recommended that I be held back. I was pretty smart. That wasn't the problem. Rather, my teacher was worried I wasn't developing socially.
My parents pushed back against the recommendation, and I moved on to first grade with the rest of my class. But that didn't mean they weren't concerned.
Later in life, I found a folder filled with articles they'd clipped out of general interest magazines with titles like, ‘What to Do When Your Child Doesn't Speak’.
At the time, however, my parents didn't let on to me that they were worried. They allowed me to hide out in my bedroom, reading Bridge to Terabithia and The Neverending Story, books with protagonists who were isolated and lonely and just a little bit weird, books with protagonists who found solace in imaginary worlds.
Sometimes, they urged me out into the fresh air and sunlight, as parents do. I suppose they felt obligated.
But mostly, they let me be, their quiet child who sometimes withdrew so deeply into her own mind that she didn't always grasp what was going on around her.
By the time I hit junior high, I wasn't much chattier. I still remember the time my sixth-grade homeroom teacher called me up to her desk at the front of the room, leaning in to speak so my classmates wouldn't hear.
"Stephanie," she said in a low voice. "I need to see you reading less and talking more." She gestured around the classroom, where students sat in clusters, chatting and laughing and generally acting like functioning members of society.
"Yes, Mrs. Izzo," I murmured, my face burning with shame.
The walk back to my desk was an eternity and I spent it staring at my shoes, canvas sneakers bedecked with flowers. Despite the din, the sound of them squeaking along the linoleum felt deafening. Did my classmates hear? Were they watching?
When I finally reached my desk, my book was sitting there, waiting for me, a bookmark jutting out the top. As I slid into my seat, I let my hand caress the cover…slide longingly over the deckle-edged pages.
Thirty years later, I still remember that moment. I still feel the way my stomach churned as I imagined my classmates' eyes upon me. Often, I still feel the crush of others' expectations when I close my eyes at night.
***
Lists abound of the most common anxiety dreams people experience, and what each of them means. Some dreams involve tornadoes, earthquakes, and tidal waves. These natural disasters can speak to helplessness…a lack of agency. Some dreams include flooding, house fires, and car problems, the loss of things that matter to you, signifying the inability to take care of your property. And we've all heard of the dreams people have in which they appear naked in public, or in which they're running late, or they're falling. Some people even dream of their teeth falling out of their mouths, jagged, alabaster pebbles that slip past their lips to land in their outstretched palms.
Another common dream is that of being chased. I remember slipping out of a nightmare when I was young, one that faded from memory immediately upon waking, though residual adrenaline still had my heart beating rabbit-quick. I crept out of bed, across the hall, into my parents' bedroom, where my mother was a soft hump beneath the blankets, her hair a dark poof against her pillow.
"Mommy," I whispered, clutching at the edge of her bedspread, reaching for her shoulder. "I had a nightmare, Mommy." My hand brushed against the blue polyester of her nightgown.
My mother began to turn toward me, her blanket sliding down. As she faced me, pressing herself up to sit, swinging her legs out of the bed and placing her feet on the floor, I stumbled backwards.
In the center of my mother's forehead was one, enormous eye. I watched her blink, slowly, noticed the curve of her eyelashes against the bridge of her nose.
And then I turned and ran from the room, time slackening into slow motion as she followed.
I could hear her behind me, feet slapping against the hardwood floors as I ran down the hallway. I hurtled down the stairs, my hand grabbing the banister as I reached the living room, swinging myself around to the next set of steps that led to the front entryway.
She was getting closer. The sounds of our labored breathing tangled together in the air.
"Mommy!" I finally shouted, spinning around to face her, thrusting a hand into the air.
I blinked my eyes, hard.
I woke up in my bed.
Dreams of being chased can sometimes indicate social anxiety, or hint at the fact that there's something you've been avoiding.
But what does it mean when dreams and reality blend together?
What can you do if you can't even be sure you're awake or asleep?
***
I remained a nervous, withdrawn kid throughout high school and, though I blossomed a bit in college, there was something in me that feared rejection. And so, in certain situations, I hesitated to be too loud. To call attention to myself. My will bent toward making myself small.
Later, after college, it was like I was starting all over again. No matter where I went, I was a round peg in a square hole. Job after job, my entire world was comprised of my cubicle walls, where I sat hunched over my keyboard, certain that life was happening all around me, in a place I couldn't see, couldn't touch. At one place of employment, I remember the nails of the woman the next cubicle over, always highlighter orange or neon blue. I remember wishing I could talk to her about something other than spreadsheets or proposal reviews. Grab drinks after work. But I never did and, six months later, she was gone.
At around this time, I also began attending networking events, hopeful I would somehow connect with someone who could help me succeed professionally. My m.o. at the time was to make my way directly to the bar, purchase a massive glass of Pinot Grigio, and hide behind it in some shadowy corner, waiting for the networking to come to me. After a time, my skin would start to crawl, my breathing would become shallow, and I'd start to feel as if everyone was cutting their eyes at me, whispering about the weirdo who was all by herself. As these symptoms progressed, becoming so overwhelming as to eclipse all rational thought, I'd pretend to be preoccupied by something on my phone, drain my glass, and leave.
I'll do better next time, I'd tell myself.
But I never did.
"There's nothing wrong with using alcohol as a social lubricant," said my therapist.
"Do you smoke pot?" she asked. "That might help."
She eventually diagnosed me with both chronic depression and anxiety.
***
One time, I woke up and my house was floating in the middle of what seemed to be a vast sea. The house rocked and spun like it was Captain Nemo's Nautilus, caught up in a gigantic maelstrom, spinning down and around to its inevitable doom. The sky was just as dark. As I stood in the open front doorway, I felt impossibly small. Then I slipped and sank beneath the waves.
When I finally wrestled my way back to the surface, I found that the house and I had drifted apart. I watched it glide away from me, becoming smaller and smaller as panic clawed its way up my throat. I bobbed there, on my back, and willed my arms to move so I could swim back to my home. My arms remained frozen at my sides, floating on the surface of the water.
Years later, I would experience several panic attacks, and I would feel that same helplessness and dread, a flush that would creep over my body and then a chill, a sense that I was floating away from my body.
It is said that dreams in which one is drowning indicate panic, as if terror feels like a slow suffocation.
To me, it's always felt like a loss of control, those arms frozen at my sides, my mind frozen in fear. When I panic, the fear runs in a loop in my head, whispering to me all the things that are coming to swallow me whole.
***
I once bonded with a woman over the fact that we were both socially awkward at parties. But then she invited my husband and I to her cocktail party, thrown in her high-rise apartment. Aside from our hosts, I knew only one other person in attendance.
While there, I found myself disengaging from the people around me, my heart beating so hard I could feel its insistent thump against my rib cage. I was surrounded by people but felt disconnected from all of them. My husband, oblivious, stood on the balcony outside, sipping his drink and chatting easily with people he'd just met. Before anyone could notice the scared rabbit look in my eyes, I escaped to the bathroom, where I clutched the counter by the sink and glared at myself in the mirror. I whispered furiously at my reflection. "Get ahold of yourself. You cannot stay in the bathroom forever. It is a flipping one-bedroom apartment, and it is the only bathroom they have."
After swallowing a Xanax that never seemed to make a single dent in my abject terror, I made my way back through the small knots of people, trying not to let on that I was screaming inside. I grasped at the door to the balcony like a woman drowning, floating in and out of my body. I slipped outside and parked myself in a chair, pretending I was enjoying both the breeze and the expansive view of several highways that stretched out below us. The sound of cars passing drifted up, distant and removed.
"This is a gorgeous view you have," I said to the host, trying to act as if it wasn't at all weird to be sitting alone on the balcony as others socialized just two feet away. I stared out at the highway, trying to decide upon the best facial expression. Stoic? Pensive? Peaceful? Using strategic eye contact and eyebrow movements, I eventually conveyed to my husband that we had to get the hell out of there. Closing their door behind us, my shoulders finally softened, relaxed, and dropped back and down.
***
I am sitting in class, legs swinging beneath my desk, when the bell rings. We are released into the halls, lined with double-stacked lockers. The great mass of humanity swirls around me.
Every locker in this hallway looks the same. And every locker in the next hallway, too. And the next.
My heart stutters, suddenly unsure which locker is mine. Or, if I found it, which numbers I'd spin on the lock in order to open it.
My breathing goes shallow. I struggle to remember what's in my locker. If it's even important.
Or no, this happened 30 years ago.
Wait. No. It's happening now.
My mind scuttles around, grasping for the truth.
I am standing in the hallway, a great mass of humanity swirling around me.
I am lying in bed, my eyes juddering back and forth beneath my lids.
***
One piece of advice I've read when it comes to anxiety dreams is that you should write them down in detail and then reimagine them so that they are no longer nightmares. Rewrite your truth. Change the ending.
What about the lies I tell myself when I'm awake?
What is true? What is a terrible dream?
I was in my 20s when I was diagnosed with chronic depression and anxiety. When I received that diagnosis, I seized upon it. It was an answer to my parents' concerns. It was an answer to the question of why everything felt so hard. It was an answer to my dreams.
Or were they real?
It's funny how we grow to embody the labels others give us. How we let them shackle us for so long. And then, even when we have started to shake loose from that which has limited us, we still identify with that old, outdated image of ourselves.
***
I soon began making excuses for myself. The rain. The snow. My sinuses. My deadlines. My husband began attending social events by himself, a situation that frustrated him because he couldn't understand the intensity of my fear. It seemed impossible to him, a thing he was sure I was exaggerating.
I, meanwhile, made entries in my Google Calendar and then, the day of, let the book launch parties and ukulele jams quietly pass me by.
Every time I did this, adding events to my calendar months in advance, I would tell myself that this time it would be different. This time I would go. Sit in the audience. Strike up a conversation with a stranger. Shake that author's hand. Feel as if I were a part of something.
Instead, I would sit at my computer and allow the day to darken until, finally, it was too late to leave without being tardy. Only then would I push away from my desk, walk into the kitchen, and stretch my arms up into the air, leaning first to the left and then to the right. My side ribs would expand and my spine would crack as I shook the day out of my tightly coiled body, ignoring the sharp ache in my gut that signified the guilt I felt at allowing my own fear to smother me.
"What's for dinner tonight?" my husband would ask as he passed into the room, unaware that I had ever considered going out.
I'd pull a cookbook from its space on the counter, flip it open, and begin gathering ingredients.
***
The other night, I opened my eyes to find myself standing at the gaping mouth of the cul-de-sac across the street from my house.
It was night. Full dark, though a glowing light flared and flickered from around the corner, deeper into the dead-end street.
I felt an uneasiness and looked over my shoulder, up at my house, a beacon of safety in the quiet.
Then I turned back toward whatever might be coming for me, coming to swallow me up.
I felt lost, even though I was so close to home.
I stood there, unable to run.
Steph Auteri (she/her) is a journalist who has written for the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Pacific Standard, VICE, and elsewhere. Her more creative work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, under the gum tree, Poets & Writers, Southwest Review, and other publications. Steph is also the author of A Dirty Word.
Visit Steph’s website