My Looming Threat

I'd feel better admitting to my girlfriend that I piss myself daily than to tell her what my dreams are actually like.

I mean come on, who wants to admit they're such a video-game-addicted loser to the point of dreaming about them daily?

And yet here I am, having gone cold turkey for months and still subconsciously obsessing over them.

I dream of a landscape of bits and boops, of walking through cheerful yet endless terrain. The flowers smile at me, but they're the only attraction here.

I endlessly wander from one mountain to the next, the area's lack of landmarks and diversity feeding the gnawing doubts in my mind that I'll die here having not even made a single step towards freedom.

At the end of it all, when days have passed and I've finally fallen to my knees, the voice changes into iterating a plethora of smug remarks, "I've won" repeated in as many synonyms and similar phrases a dictionary has until the remaining few organs I have left shut down.

I wake up. Not in my bed, but in the hands of a behemoth. I cannot see his face, but I feel the rigid texture of his hands.

Every time these dreams play out the exact same except for at the end, where in each experience my chest is held ever more tightly and my gasps for air having longer, more painstaking, pauses in between.

What used to be the cause of a morning annoyance ailed by coffee has led to the padded walls and medicine cabinet's worth of pills that now occupy my room. I maximize my time awake to minimize the nightmares I have.

I've tried everything, from prescriptions to diet changes to biweekly visits to the doctor's and psychologist's office. All of them laugh, none of them work.

"It's a feeling of inadequacy"

"Make sure to take your meds"

"Don't let your dreams fool you"

Well they sure have.