Under the Blanket

I awoke slowly, wrested from the familiar discomfort of my nightmares into the inescapable dread of the day. I found myself, at some point during the night, buried completely under my blanket. It was still dark when I opened my eyes, but I could feel the heat of the sun through my bedroom window. It was too hot under the blanket; I was sweating and the air was stagnant, but I lay still all the same. I was still too drowsy to remember what I had to do today, only that I did not want to do it. In fact, I would have rather lain in bed until I drowned in my own piss than wake up to my duties.

I stretched my limbs and felt the weight of the blanket over all my extremities. That was a little strange, as normally my blanket was too short to completely cover me. When I wanted to bury my head, I had to leave my feet cold or go fetal, but now my blanket enveloped me even as I sprawled. Though I have little money, I bought the largest bed I could--so that I could lay in the center without my limbs hanging over the side, which was something that caused me great dread. Even still, during many a nightmare, I had fallen out of it and awakened sweating on the floor, staring at the dark space under my bed, usually petrified in that post-sleep panic when your mind is not yet ready to distinguish between your dreams and reality--in that moment, you are sure that the beasts of your nightmares are there in your room ready to pounce on you.

The sun was warming up quickly and the heat was becoming unbearable. I was sweating and it was getting harder to breathe. Even in the open air I often worried

that the carbon dioxide from my exhalations would so corrupt the air in front of me that I would asphyxiate if I didn't move--so I knew I wouldn't last long under the blanket. I grabbed a fistful and yanked it away but found only more blanket still over my head. That was strange. I pulled again and though the blanket moved considerably, I was still underneath it.

Had I managed to wrap myself in it? But no, I had only my mattress cover beneath me. Perhaps the sheet was tucked in. I never tucked my sheets, but I often did strange things during my nightmares. Once, I had awakened crouched against the back wall of my closet, clutching a knife I could have only gotten from the kitchen, so it wasn't unthinkable that I might also tuck my sheets in. I started feeling around for the edge of the bed. I tried to scoot but somehow had become entangled in the blanket. It took some minutes to even move myself, and in the process, I made such a mess of the blanket that I thought surely I should have found an opening. But no, I was still completely engulfed.

I lay still for a moment to think out the matter. It seemed to me this needed a bit of a head on approach. I stuck out my arm again and felt for where the blanket tightened against the edge of the bed and pulled. I brought several more feet of blanket over my head but still I felt the tightness against the edge. I pulled again. And some more. And some more. Every time I came up with armloads of blanket, enough fabric to warm all the world's cold but still I was smothered, still there was no end to it.

I started pulling from above my head and felt only

swathes of fabric layering down on me with no edge to be found. From the bottom. From the other side. And then I slapped at the layers of blanket above me and as it fluttered back down, felt that there was only a single layer upon me again. What was going on here?

I was breathing faster, filling the space under the blanket with carbon dioxide. I would asphyxiate if I didn't get out. I had to get out.

I thrashed at my blanket, pulling in every direction, trying to find an edge to grasp onto, to poke my head back out into cool breathable air, but my hands only found more blanket, more blanket, more blanket.

Was this another nightmare? On occasion, I became aware of my nightmares as I was dreaming them. Someone once told me that if you became conscious of a nightmare, you could take control of it, but when I finally made it happen, I learned that wasn't exactly true. What I learned instead was disturbing--when you become aware of your nightmares, they become more logical. The first time it ever happened, I dreamed I was in a house with many staircases snaking through it, often built in defiance of the laws of physics, and somewhere a dead woman was crawling around. I kept catching glimpses of her on other staircases--the putrefying holes in her skin were growing teeth that were becoming larger and sharper with every glance. When the dreaded moment finally arrived--when I found myself standing in front of her with nowhere to run--her mouth opened and she screamed spiders at me, thousands of them flying in my face while the putrefied mouths on her body clacked their pointed teeth at me.

In the horror of the moment, I became aware I was dreaming and thought this meant that I was freed from the horror--that I could then take charge and slay this demon. But instead, it only meant that the spiders flittered away into the shadows and the mouths formed of her putrefied holes retreated, leaving only the dead woman, skin dripping off her bones, to smile and lunge at me. That should have been where the nightmare ended but because I had become conscious of the nightmare, I had to endure the sensation of her teeth ripping out my throat, of crashing to the ground in system shock, the heat of my blood spilling down the sides of my neck and onto the floor while she, in her hunger, started feeding on my innards before I expired.

The nightmare didn't even end when I died. Death in the nightmare only meant that I could no longer move as she ate me piece by piece--still I could feel the pieces of me sliding down her rotted esophagus and collecting in her gas-bloated belly. No, the nightmare only ended when my alarm went off and I awoke screaming and shivering, grasping at my gut to feel for the chunks that she had torn from me.

This was why I dreaded becoming aware of my nightmares, but if this new predicament was a nightmare, then at least something would now happen. I let the blanket settle down on me, magically just one layer again, and I waited. Nothing happened. The blanket stayed the same and it was still hot and it was still far too difficult to breathe.

Had I finally taken control of one of my nightmares? Truly taken control of it? I willed the blanket to come

off my head. I yanked at it again and found another length of it settling down over me. I tried making my way to the edge of the bed again, only to find myself inexplicably entangled again. That seemed to be the blanket's trick for keeping me from escaping. I untangled myself again and tried standing up. The blanket then tightened to the point that I could not do anything more than lay supine as though I were praying. So there were rules at least. There was a crazy sort of logic to my situation, but this logic had not materialized upon my revelation that I was having a nightmare.

I had to fight back the creeping legs of panic making their way up my nerves. A moment of calm. Just a moment of calm, and then I could panic again. Was I dead? Why does that thought always occur to us in strange situations? As though any illogical situation could be explained away by the illogical thought that you are dead but still capable of thought and movement. I listened to my heartbeat and my breathing - the only two sounds under the blanket. No, I was alive and, what's worse, I was awake. Some other machination was at work: aliens, ghosts, some vile scientific experiment or, perhaps, after a lifetime of stalking me, decades of biding his time, the boogieman had finally chosen this moment to strike.

I began to tear at the blanket, grabbing a clump in each hand and trying to pull it apart. If I worked at it long enough it was only a matter of time before I made a hole. I didn't care that it was my only blanket. I ripped at it with my teeth. The dryness and the texture stung at my mouth but I could feel strands coming away.

And then I stopped. I had become aware of the subtlest of disturbances, the faintest vibrato in the air, much how the mere presence of a predator in the meadow stills all life in it. I had been so focused on my imprisonment under the blanket that only now had I become aware that there was something in my room. I had not actually heard it but I felt its presence, it was there as surely as I was and, under the darkness of the blanket, I had no way of knowing what menace it posed--what manner of teeth or claws or worse did it have?

I lay still. The blanket settled around me, adhering to my form. I thought of how my feet pointed up, and I flattened them to the sides. It was painful to lie that way but I couldn't give the creature any obvious target. But the blanket was so thin, at least where teeth and claws were concerned. How many times as children did we retreat under our blankets in fear of the monsters in our room? How foolish we were to think that something so thin and flimsy could have protected us from the terrors of the world? There was no question on the matter--the only thing that had kept the monster in my room from disemboweling or decapitating me is that it had simply decided not to yet.

What a clever beast to imprison me with the very thing that was supposed to give me comfort and security. I felt panic creeping into my nerves again. I was aware of my powerlessness to stop the beast from descending upon me. It didn't matter if I thrashed--it didn't matter if I lay still--the beast had weapons that could slice through blanket and bone alike.

In my head, I heard my mother's prodding words. She

was determined to see me go outside to play, though I had no desire to do so. I could not see any fun to be had outside, only things that would hurt me. "There are things inside that will hurt you too," she'd said, "there's no place you can go where there will be nothing to hurt you."

She intended to reassure me, but it only served to deepen my anxiety. My mother had no idea how much those words twisted my subconscious. Where before I had seen our house as the one place of safety in the world, now I saw the forms of demons in the shadows--ghosts lurked where my vision stopped, and every sound I couldn't directly source carried a secret menace.

That was when my nightmares began to take on new intensity. Where before I had dreamt of bears stalking me in the forest, I dreamt instead of demons lurking in my closet, devilish creatures whose icy skin froze the carpets as they walked, who towered over me as I cowered beneath the blankets, icy-hot hand reaching for my throat...

I would always awake screaming from the nightmares, huddled beneath my blankets in tears. It was so hard to breathe - the air beneath a blanket is so hot and stagnant - but often I was afraid to even lift the edge of the blanket up just enough to let the cooler air in, the air I could breathe.

And then always I would feel a hand on the outside of the blanket, feeling for my cheek and pressing against it. I jumped the first time I felt it, but it was too gentle for a demon. My mother. She came to see me out of my

nightmare. Always I could count on her to guide me out, to stand over me and drive the demons back. When I knew she was there, I would reach a hand out from under the blanket and she would take it, and that was when I knew it was safe to come out.

What a joy it was to pull my head out and breathe cool air again, to see my smiling mother standing over me. "It was just a bad dream sweetie," she would say, "everything is okay now."

How I wish there could be a hand on the other side of the blanket to guide me out of the waking nightmare I had found myself in. But there was no hand for me outside the blanket that I could trust, even if I could escape from under it. Even if my arm could stretch out of my bedroom, out of my apartment, down the hallways and out the building, snaking through the street amongst the strangers who never made eye contact with me, nobody would be there to take my hand and rescue me. My neighbors did not know my name and we rarely ever spoke--my colleagues largely ignored me and my family members were all either distant or dead.

I had never felt more alone than I did at that moment. Trapped beneath my blanket, I could feel how large the world beyond it was, all those thousands of miles of land and water, lengths of roads, and the weight of the cities, and all the people drumming upon the earth--all the world outside and I was cut off by an expanse of cloth-- nobody knew where I was, and no scream would alert anyone to me. There was only the demon in the room, who with one swipe of its claws could set me free, but would only do so to devour me whole.

I tried not to cry, because I knew I would not be able to cry silently, and the noise of my cries would call the demon to me. I cried all the same, biting down on my hand to keep from making a sound, but a scream kept building, crashing against the dam of my throat, the pressure mounting against the inside of my face until I was sure it would explode. And then the long, humiliating squeal of the cry came, a childish, undignified wail that seemed to bounce off the walls of the blanket and cocoon me in its echo long after I had settled back down into silent tears.

Under the reverberations of my wail, I detected the sub audible frequencies of the demon on the move, stepping toward my bed. I froze. The demon had fallen silent again, but I could detect its movements in my gut. It hovered above me, scanning my form beneath the blanket. The blanket lay tight on me, even seeming to mold around my fingers. The whole of my silhouette was plainly visible. I dared not move.

I could feel its eyes scanning me, my body as naked as an X-ray. I could sense its clawed hand reaching for me, perhaps to stroke my cheek with the backs of its cold fingers as mom had always done, but there would be only malice in its touch - the deathly chill of its devil- skin freezing my blood, even through the heat of the blanket. Maybe its death freeze would at least bring some cool air to me. Even the frozen depths of hell would be a welcome relief from the stagnant heat I had to breathe.

The hand came closer. The air grew hotter. My lungs were burning--oxygen turning to CO2--I couldn't

breathe--I needed to breathe. The frozen backs of the demon's fingers were inches from my face.

I screamed again, this time in terror. I thrashed at my blanket, pulling with arms and legs from every side, heaping reams of cloth onto me, parachuting the blanket out, only to have it fall far too quickly back down on my head, the thinning air around me doing little to slow its fall. Miles of blanket passed through my hands. I pulled for I don't know how long, pulled until my fingers were cramping from the grip. No end came-- ever and always the folds of the blanket settled down upon me in a single, smooth expanse.

But then I saw, almost too late before it disappeared in a fold of cloth, a flash of light. A hole. I had found a hole in the blanket.

A little finger of light shone through it, making it possible, for the first time since I had awoken, to see myself under my blanket. Though it was only in patches of muddled glow, it allowed me to see that my body was still there, and so I at least had flesh--knowing that made it much more plausible that I was alive. I examined the skin of my hand, dry and flaking, then cast the light over the shirt I slept in, although the light wouldn't reach very deeply into the shadows towards my legs.

I had gotten so absorbed in the vision the light brought to me that I had momentarily forgotten I was still being watched. I could sense the demon there by my bed, studying the movements of the blanket as I manipulated the light the hole let in--hesitant to strike, no doubt, out of a menaced desire to prolong my panicked torment.

I lay flat again, but left one hand near the hole. I wanted to stick my finger through the hole, try to rip my blanket open, but I was sure if I did the demon would swoop in and take my finger off. Any appendage I stuck through the hole would be lost.

But I could look through the hole, look out at my room, and look to see what was out there. My hands were trembling. Many people say that what remains unseen is more terrifying than what you can see, but I disagree. The demon in my room was only hypothetical as things stood, but to lay eyes on it...then I would know what twisted emergence from the shadows had come into my room--I would know just how terrible its claws, its teeth, its eyes were. But, more than that, it wasn't just seeing it that I feared. I feared even more what turn my situation would take if the demon saw me see it. If, through the veil of my blanket, our eyes met, if even for a moment.

But I had to know. I had to confront this thing one way or another. I edged the hole slowly to my eye, only able to see a vague white blur until my eye was pressed right up against it. Then my room came into view. To my left were shelves stacked to the ceiling with books, magazines, newspaper clippings, documents printed off the internet, and other writings I'd found important to save. Next to them I could see the blinds of my window, which I always kept closed. I scanned upward across my plain white ceiling and then to the right side of my room, where my dresser and door were, but stopped. I could just make out, through the fibers of the blanket, which in the peripheral of my vision loomed as large as trees, a shape that blended with them, rippling almost

imperceptibly. If I moved any further, the demon would be there in full view and now, for the first time, I understood that to actually look at the demon unobstructed was something my sanity would never survive.

I pulled my eye away from the hole. What now? Even if I could flee from under my blanket, the demon would only be there to take my sanity first and my life second. To stay lying here also meant death, if not by the demon's hand then by asphyxiation or dehydration, whichever took me first.

Was this the end? Was this all there would be to my life--a few short years of being haunted by all the terrors of the world only to die under my blanket, the shield that kept my childhood terrors away?

No. Whether this was a nightmare of the sleeping or waking world, I would take charge of it. I would make this situation mine. For the first time, I would face the demon beyond the blanket--if I lost my life, at least I would die fighting for it.

I grabbed the fabric around the hole between my thumbs and fingers, still not wanting to stick any appendage through the hole, and pulled. The sound of a tear and the hole grew ever so slightly. This would work. I pulled again, and again the hole grew ever so slightly larger. I now had more fabric to grip. I pulled again and the hole grew to three inches, and then to six. I yanked as hard as I could and with a long rip, the hole grew larger than my chest.

I let the hole settle on my chest and over my mouth. The air was cold. It hurt my lungs, but I could breathe it. Whatever creature awaited me on the other side, I no longer cared. I stretched a hand out into the far too frigid air of the room and held it there, waiting for the demon to take it. Adam Breckenridge