In these years, my dreams started to play on me again and horrify me. Always from childhood, I had had regular nightmares, tossing and turning in the sheets and sobbing out […]
However, one particular recurring dream motif pushed to the surface around my 18th year (although I had nightmares involving it one and off rarely since at least the age of eight). By one point in my ‘home year’, it had come to me almost every time I slept. I would just be drifting off, and, suddenly, in black and white, and with internal sound, huge, spined, skeletal slugs would push into my vision out of the perceptual blackness, often coming from the right of my view, circling in front of me, all feelers and demonic faces of jutting bone and bloody teeth, but still basically giant black slugs beneath the macabre inventiveness. They were an almost infinite array of them […] tugging off chunks of skin […] engulfed in hellish molluscs, in a cold spray of my blood.
After what felt like long minutes of this, I would wake in horrified agony, leaping up out of bed screaming. I would often urinate in fear or otherwise scrabble back and forth […] Having the light on as I slept, as I had been accustomed to doing my whole life, made no tangible difference. Every single night, for days on end, I would be left run down and exhausted, terrified to return to sleep, a pronounced somniphobia and artificial insomnia developing in me […]
Over the years, I have tried many times to assuage this fear and shift the dreams by taking them out into the waking reality, drawing these devilish alien slugs, or designing them with computer art programs.
The abstract beginning of a slug dream
One of the slugs preparing to bite me
Bony slugs clambering into my vision
More demonic slugs emerge
A terrifying toothed slug gets up close to my face
Eight months after my return from Brookside, my nightmares started to get to me, no doubt aided by Dad’s continuing stress-inducing rows and an inability to relax at any moment when awake, conscious only that my door would be flung back, and Dad would storm into my room to find some new, insignificant, niggling excuse to wear me down.
Editor’s interpolated note: To escape the living nightmare, Benjamin attempted suicide at the age of eighteen.
I awoke partially in the ambulance and again on a hospital gurney, feeling the sharp scratch of a needle on my inner arm and hearing voices around me […] I had first been given a 5-pint emergency blood transfusion in the evening. […]
I had been taking both of my tablets [psychiatric meds - Ed.] for over a year now. Why was I feeling like this? I had long decided that that was a foolish question. These tablets were a sham. […]
Past all these faded symbolic worries, there was always Dad. I approached each new conversation with the hope of warmth and basic human respect, but that was rarely, if ever, the case. I realised one thing, at least. I loved him, but I was afraid of him. As for my mother […] at least she did not mock me.