The Veil

I have nightmares. I don't know where the line between nightmare and night terror is, but I think my experiences lie somewhere in the middle.

I will wake up, sometimes just 20 minutes after I've fallen asleep, and I will be haunted by some image I saw in the twilight kingdom. I will see, with my waking eyes, some phantom, some demon that existed only in dream. The fact that I can carry that horror from my dream state to my waking life reminds me how thin is the veil between dreams and reality.
Sometimes I will awake in a panic, imagining I'm covered in spiders or that something is standing over the bed, watching me with dead, lidless eyes. In those moments, the horror is real. I awake and there's already a backstory in my mind. My reality is completely consumed with the creature reaching out to squeeze the life from my body. I will sometimes throw back the covers, leap out of bed, and turn on the light. I will look around my room and at some point, reality returns. My own, personal narrative is restored and I remember who I am, where I am, and what is real and what is not. Like a crane dropping a cargo container full of memories onto a train, I become me again. I calm down, maybe even laugh a little, and go, fairly quickly, back to sleep. The next day, the memory of the event will wrapped in gauze. Distant, hazy, and laughable. Like a dream that fades upon waking, so does the memory of the abject terror.

But as hard as I try to forget entirely, the event always leaves a little fishhook in my brain. And sometimes, during the day, something pulls on the line connected to that fishhook. Something whispers, what if? What if that crane malfunctions and the cargo container gets stuck? What if, standing in that moment of confusion and horror, nothing comes to fill the amnesia? Then I would be a raw nerve, a freshly drilled tooth, existing in pain forever. I would run into the lonely maw of night, chased by a demon whose continued existence is just as much of a surprise to him.