Waking Nightmare

Mystril awoke to the desolate groan of a building’s organs. The air conditioner rattling like sickly heaving lungs. She opened her eyes, only to see through a stranger’s. An unfamiliar ceiling of commercial tile and harsh fluorescence greeted her. Her arms felt detached, and unfeeling. An elephant sat on her chest pinning her down to the bed. Where was she, and why did everything feel so cold? Her tongue weakly traced her mouth; there was a saccharine taste that wasn't hers. She followed the backs of teeth she didn't know wondering if she was caught in a nightmare.

The last thing she remembered before that seemingly everlasting dream was the reception area. She had been scrubbed down, and jokingly asked if she could have ice-cream after the doctor removed her tonsils. This was meant to be a joke coming from a grown woman. Veronica found that funny at least. Either that or Mystril's friend had given her a laugh out of pity for having come down with tonsillitis a week before her 21st birthday.

She remembered that all vividly. Like it had happened yesterday. She could still smell the disinfectant. The feeling of the cheap vinyl that made the covering of her bed. The way the yellowed plastic housing of the fluorescent lights filled the room with a contradictory warmth. Everything she experienced now was marred by a stranger clarity. It wasn't quite unreal, but so alien it didn't seem like it could be true. She took a breath though and concentrated, like a lucid dreamer trying to strain illusion from the material. Could she tell the time, could she move her toes? Did the writing on the walls make sense? Were the dots on the ceiling tiles shifting?

Her mind was racing. She had never experienced sleep paralysis, but she had read about it. She fought against her unresponsive limbs, then managed to wiggle just one toe. Everything slammed into her at once. The hunger, her thirst. The way her skin stuck to the material underneath her. The strange pressure she felt on her arm. Her heart raced and her foot shifted. Then finally she found life in her right leg. It was as if that had dispelled the hex on her. Mystril's entire body rocketed up in a spin of vertigo. She wasn't dreaming. She was ****. It felt like Mystril was drunk, or stoned. Her eyes struggled to focus like she was on the verge of giving into exhaustion but her heart was thundering. She scanned the room. Regular blue tinted walls with white trim. They were lit moodily by only the emergency lights. Various pamphlets, vaguely educational posters showing anatomy in blown out colorful fields.

In her haze she only vaguely registered that something was terribly wrong. This was a doctor's office or at least a room one might work in. She felt a small twinge of pain from her right arm, and only then the constant beep of the cardiograph beside her registered in her mind. She rubbed the inside of her elbow, feeling blood. A pinprick had been widened into an actual wound with her forceful jerking against an unseen IV. She eyed the crimson spot on her index finger, and then clumsily rolled out of the bed. At once the steady rhythm of the EKG became a sine wave.

Her eyes flashed around the room again, growing clearer by the second. It was an impersonal, and sterile environment. The windowless walls were lit sparsely by white florescence. The room was moody, but the emergency lights of course stayed on to provide a stage for the audience of shadows to watch. The only thing on Mystril's mind was water. Her mouth was so dry, and she was so hungry. Her ankles ached from the fall, and her legs were unsteady beneath her. The room felt wrong, like it was too large. The linoleum was cold against her bare soles.