The Girl in the Painting
I’ve had night terrors for as long as I can remember. Ever since I could dream, I’ve woken up screaming, my mom running to me. I can’t recall what most of my dreams held, only the fear that shook my bones. Every night, I’d be terrified of sleeping in fear that one of the monsters inside my brain would escape and take over.
My parents took me to a sleep study when I was 12, I wasn’t afraid of sleeping around strangers, but I was petrified that these strangers would see what played in my head. The doctors would find my brain was something to be afraid of, they’d tell my parents and forever after my parents would look at me differently. As we drove up to the doctor’s office, I was shaking. My mom held my hand, she told me something about how they were only trying to help. I wanted to tell her to turn back, that it was a waste of money, that I was never going to be fixed. But as we took the first step in the office, I started to wonder if maybe I was wrong.
I slept for two nights alongside these strangers. The first night I didn’t have any night terrors, in fact I didn’t have any dreams at all. The monsters were hiding, as if they knew they would be extracted if found. My parents insisted on a second night of study, but this time they suggested we do it at our house. Doctor Jane was her name; I started to look at her as more of a friend than a stranger. She was the only one that studied me that night, and to my horror, I had night terrors. When I awoke screaming, both my parents and Doctor Jane were there, looking at me as if I was unrecognizable.
Jane wouldn’t tell my parents about most of my dreams, saying she didn’t want to restate what she saw. I didn’t know why, this was the whole point, and they weren’t that bad, right?
One dream Jane not only told, but showed my parents, through some device she had used to go in my brain and record them. In this dream I was in my house, and as I lay down to go to sleep, I looked over and found a body near my bed. I screamed, but suddenly a memory hit me, I was the one who killed this woman, I was a serial killer, and she was my latest victim. I walked over and inspected her, how had I killed her? And all my memories of the others, how had that happened? I screamed NO! For I couldn’t have been a murderer, that wasn’t me, I was a good person, wasn’t I? That’s when I woke up, the recording stopped.
This was the mildest of my dreams, but my parents still looked over at each other in horror. My mom didn’t look at me for multiple hours, as we sat down to dinner that night, she
uttered, barely loud enough for me to hear, “We’re putting you in therapy. Is that okay?” I almost giggled but stopped myself, “Um, sure mom.”
I was in therapy for years after that but to no avail, I still woke up almost every night to nightmares. When my therapist realized I wasn’t going to stop having them, she started having me paint them. At first, I was annoyed, how was this going to help? But then I realized I was actually quite good. Sure, the things I was painting were grizzly, but it didn’t stop the paintings from being works of art. As time went on, I began painting in my free time. At first, I tried to paint things that were light but those weren’t as good, so I continued painting dark stuff. At some moments I would let the monsters take over and unleash whatever they wanted, it gave them space to live outside my mind.
One day, I was 18, one of my monsters painted a beautiful picture of a girl. I was baffled by this, my monsters never painted anything that didn’t have the slightest hue of horror. But this girl was sitting in bed with her arms wrapped around her legs, her face hidden. She didn’t look scared, she looked comfortable. The weirdest part about this was that every day after this painting my monsters would paint the same girl. But slowly, a bit more of her face would be revealed.
After a month of painting the same picture, I began to see her whole face and recognize her. It was Jane, but in the body of a little girl. In my body, Jane’s face on my 12-year-old body. I stepped back and gasped. Jane was smiling at me with a devilish grin.
Suddenly my monster had me paint a second painting; this time it was my therapist’s face placed on my young self. Soon I had painted the same picture with switched out faces of everyone I knew. I began to tremble at the memory of a dreamless sleep, the second night of that sleep study, I hadn’t dreamed, had I? The body in that recording was Jane, wasn’t it?
My monsters had been crying to escape ever since that first night of terror, Jane was the first one that did. She was my biggest monster; she led me to my therapist who told me to paint my monsters. They’d been dying to escape, and in every form around me, they had. My mom was the one that put me in therapy, every person was a monster leading me to this moment. As I stared at all the paintings lingering around me, they began to move. The monsters tore out of the canvases, I tried to scream, tried to fight, wanting to paint them all back in my head. No amount of screaming could bring my mom to my bedside, for this time, I couldn’t wake up.
