Killing To Sleep
insomnia, fantasy, and the zombie apocalypse
I’ve had insomnia for a long time. I used to joke that being in a coma really messed up my sleep schedule. Which was funny for about a year or two, but still wasn’t that funny. For fifteen years, bedtime tortured me. Insomnia haunted me like I’d murdered it personally and its thirst for revenge would never be quenched. I would go about my days as usual, but the reality that soon night would fall and I’d have to surrender my weapons and get into bed stalked me. It was a silent predator lurking in all the corners of my life. It followed me everywhere. My peripheral vision would catch the slightest movement in the next room, and I’d feel a rush of cold sweat, a wave of nausea and anxiety. The specter of sleep, or the threat of sleeplessness, trailed me everywhere I went, making me doubt my own eyes, reminding me that at some point I’d have no choice but to close them.
Every night, I’d get into bed, utterly exhausted, but my body would tense, and my mind would race. Pulling the blanket over myself felt like strapping into a rollercoaster, locking that heavy plastic seat belt over my head and bracing for the ride. I wouldn’t call what I did for all those years “falling asleep.” I would say that I “panicked silently with a white-knuckle grip on the comforter until my consciousness wore itself out and accepted oblivion.” I tried everything. And I mean everything. Essential oils, no screens three hours before bed, every prescription and over the counter sleeping pill on the market, acupuncture, ketamine infusions, listening to soothing audiobooks of classic literature, quitting coffee, exercising excessively. I pivoted to sleeping on the couch, then I pivoted to sleeping on the floor, then I pivoted to never sleeping alone (That’s the worst one. Seriously don’t do that one.) Some of it helped, though it never stuck. I still go to bed with a Lunesta and a very high dose of anticonvulsants in my system. I have epilepsy and the most critical part of preventing seizures is sleep, which then intensifies the pressure I put on myself to fall asleep, of course resulting in me not sleeping at all.
But this isn’t entirely about insomnia. I can’t say that I’ve solved it. Weed helps me relax, making bedtime feel less menacing. We have blackout curtains, a white noise machine that sounds like a forest in the summertime, and a mattress that after years of payments, will end up costing as much as my boyfriend’s car. These things all helped, but fantasy saved me. I stumbled into this solution completely by accident.
It started when I got Covid in the summer of 2022. Honestly, I was all-in on the pandemic. I mean, I’m disabled. I wanted them to close everything, forever. I had no plans of ever leaving the house again. Every news source kept telling me that I was going to die, and then the next news story would tell me about all of the people who didn’t care that I was going to die because they really, really wanted to go to Target. I got my vaccines, my boosters. We maintained our social-distancing and quarantine way after things had opened up. We were beyond careful for literal years. So when I got an email from Ticketmaster, I weighed my options. I had received emails like this in the past, but this time they were serious: the concert was happening. August 2022.
In 2019, I bought two tickets to My Chemical Romance. They had cost something significant, like $200 each. I don’t really splurge on things like that. The concert got pushed nearly a dozen times. The first few times they rescheduled, I’d log in and check on my tickets like they were fragile eggs under a heat lamp, making sure they were safe. Then, at some point, I stopped caring about things like concert tickets because the word “plague” suddenly became more literal in everyone’s day-to-day. I knew that if I went, I’d probably get Covid. I had to either accept it before I left or not bother. I figured that I was bound to get it sooner or later, so why not… get it over with? Sort of? I’m just saying, if I’m gonna get it, I might as well get infected at the reunion tour of my favorite band. Two birds and all that. My best friend drove us to Philadelphia. We went to the My Chemical Romance concert. I brought home my emo Covid.
It hit me incredibly hard. I wasn’t sure if I should go to the hospital. I wasn’t sure if I was lucid enough to even make that decision. But my lungs kept working and my boyfriend kept an incredibly close watch. I was decimated for the first month, spending all day alone in a silent bedroom, curtains drawn, the room pitch black. Those weeks were those of fever dreams and outright physical misery. I felt so lucky when sleep would find me, sometimes for a single hour, sometimes for seventeen. After a few weeks of complete and total nothingness, I was feeling well enough to be bored, which is always the first step in my recovery from anything. Boredom is good! It means you’re still alive! My boyfriend brought in a long-forgotten iPad and propped it up on pillows in the dark. For whatever reason, I reached back into a show that I hadn’t seen in years but have always loved.
It’s about the world after the zombie apocalypse. Most of its plot-lines center on violence, power, holding onto our better nature, yadda yadda, but in between are moments that are just completely dull, totally mundane, and these are the moments that have always pulled me in. Siphoning gas, hot-wiring cars, searching for toothpaste, combing the countryside for unexpired canned goods. Entire episodes with B-plots devoted to whether wheat, soy, or sorghum is a better long term, high yield crop. I love that crap. Give me the minutiae. Give me the trivialities, the specifics, the technicalities!
And then, there are the zombie kills. Sometimes it’s the massive scenes where gore flies in liquid ribbons of scarlet and skulls are sliced open like watermelons, but other times it’s done as if it’s a chore. It isn’t always a feat of blood-soaked glory, sometimes it’s an absentminded puncture to the temporal lobe, and our characters move on to finding powdered baby formula or whatever other random household item they need to scavenge from an abandoned building.
My foggy covid brain became fixated. Not on any specific character or plot really, but the world itself. I was completely alone with my thoughts all day and I started thinking about it when I was suspended in that space between wakefulness and sleep. It was something for me to chew on while I laid in bed. I’d imagine myself getting out of the city where I lived, going into more rural towns, finding some makeshift weapon, looking for water or something. Rummaging through houses, finding somewhere secure to rest. I’d imagine looting pharmacies when I needed to, how undeniably satisfying it would be to finally hop that fucking white counter and handle things myself. My day-to-day revolves around a lot of medical red tape and insurance hoopla to get my basic needs met. Nothing too wild is happening to me anymore, health-wise. I’m dealing with the same smorgasbord of disorders, syndromes, and recurring infections and injuries that I’ve had since 2008 and that I will probably have forever, so I’m generally capable of diagnosing myself. I’m still jumping through hoops with these dysfunctional systems, these byzantine mazes of authorization and paperwork that seem designed to make you feel like you’re in an experiment on the limitations of human patience. I don’t know what’s more frustrating: trying to use an online patient portal or that I’m often still relying on a fax machine. But in this new fantasy, this new circumstance where my mind could wander and stretch its legs a bit, I didn’t have those barriers.
This new nightly ritual of playing out the end of the world didn’t come easily to me. I’ve never been one to fantasize, even as a child. My twin sister would have elaborate conversations with fairies, she made new friends everywhere she went, and she changed her name at summer camp. She had an imaginary pony, named Blaze, who she brought to the grocery store. She’d imagine and dream up her lovely games, but I just wasn’t like that. As a little girl, frankly, I was neurotic as hell. And a bit of an asshole. I was just so anxious and that anxiety made me mean. The world was too big, and I was too small. I never understood what my sister was doing, my brain just didn’t work how hers did. My mother would wait outside of the store, pretending to hold the rope attached to my sister’s invisible pony, and I’d be frustrated at the silliness of it.
Since I’d always been shackled to reality, when I began to dabble in fantasy as an adult, I kept my real-life circumstances in play. Even in my new zombie laden imagination, a situation so stupid, so wild, so catastrophically unreal, I kept myself the same. In these early iterations of what would become a nightly practice, I never survived for long. Something would take me out, usually based on a health issue I have. I work with what I’ve got, even when it’s just me in my head. (Jesus, talk to an imaginary pony and call it day. Your sister had the right idea.)
I was in the total privacy and safety of my own mind, and even then, I was weak, sick, and then? Dead.
I thought about this a little.
And then I thought about it a lot.
How sad is that? How pathetic? That my self-worth was so low that I killed myself off, even in my own fantasies?
If I can’t even conceive of myself being strong in the most hidden, secret parts of my imagination, what does that mean for me in real life? This question troubled me. I try very hard to keep my self-esteem and the state of my health separate. This allows me to (sometimes) have good days even when I feel horrible. (Emotions ≠ Physical Health.) I just get nervous about the idea of those parts of my life touching, even though they’re bound to collide sometimes. I had to actually tell myself: it’s my imagination and I can do whatever I want.
So, I got to work. Every night before bed, I’d return mentally to that world, to that place, and I’d try to find a way to imagine myself strong. It started slow. I would sift through myself, knowledge or skills I had, anything that could translate to survival. After half a lifetime of being the patient on the table, I’ve learned a lot about basic medicine. I know infections, how to gauge the depth and severity. I know how to sew stitches in, how to take them out. How to clean and dress a wound. I can put in a drainage wick. I know which antibiotics and medications work for specific types of infections and viruses. I have a thousand home remedies that I use when I can’t get into a doctor’s office. Plus, being a burn victim goes a long way if you want to desensitize yourself to disgusting bodily horrors. (I’m allowed to say that: my body = my horrors.)
My fantasies evolved along with me figuring out that maybe, just maybe, I had some basic skills. I’d get in bed and immediately retreat mentally to a decimated, apocalyptic landscape. I was always alone. With repetition and giving myself permission to consider myself strong, the fantasy fleshed out and changed. Instead of a swift death due to having a seizure that attracts the walking dead, I’d imagine stockpiling my epilepsy medication. Breaking into neurologist’s offices, hospitals, pharmacies. The mundanity of searching, rifling through shelves of medications, listening for the shuffling footsteps of corpses, my eyes scanning labels. Nothing heroic, nothing astounding. I’d just run through the basics. I usually wouldn’t even conjure up anything gruesome.
The world was just... empty. Except for me. And then I would drift off to sleep.
It's been three years of me doing this every night. For the first year or so, I was deeply embarrassed by it. Is this what those cringe, obsessive teens do when they start getting into fanfiction? Is this how that starts? Am I using this fantasy as a crutch, and will that crutch eventually break, leaving me back where I started: sleepless and desperate? The shame of obsession and the fear that this method would stop working fought each other in my mind for months. I had to accept that neither thing was in my control. If it stopped working, it stopped working, and I was lucky it had ever worked at all.
I realized, after having such success falling asleep while thinking of the end of the world, that what I had accidentally constructed was a meditation practice. I had tried meditation so many different times over the years, at the urging of therapists, neurologists, the internet, my mother. They always tell you how it’s all about finding a practice that works for you. I’d always thought that meant like… what time of day you meditate or what room in your house you designate for it, but now I see that my interpretation was wrong. And it would’ve been cool if I could’ve realized this before I’d spent twenty-eight years on this planet, but we learn things when we learn them! I’ve finally found a practice that works for me, it just so happens that it's apocalyptic.
Why this scenario? I tried all the things they tell you to: *soothing mediation voice* “Imagine an empty beach with the tide slowly rolling in and out. Breath innn and ouuuut with the tide. Picture a clear, blue sky. Every cloud that drifts by is an unwanted thought. Exhale as you gently blow each cloud, each thought, away.” Nothing ever relaxed me. It just so happens that the only thing that truly quiets my mind is a hyper-specific scenario that combines total isolation with a complete focus on monotonous tasks and, occasionally, violence against reanimated corpses. I’m not perfect.
Fantasy provides us with an escape, with something we’ve never had access to in our day-to-day lives. Living as a disabled person for seventeen years, I’ve never felt physically capable or useful, but here I generated a safe way to get that feeling. I don’t know if I could’ve figured this out if Covid hadn’t melted my jagged, unforgiving neural pathways enough to let myself indulge mentally. My guard was completely down, in every way, and my subconscious stepped in. My body felt like the world was ending, so my psyche ended the world.
After about a year of this nightly routine, I decided to tell my boyfriend. If throughout this whole essay you’ve been picturing me tossing and turning, now imagine my handsome silver-haired boyfriend sleeping like a newborn kitten beside me. I was so worried that he would think I’d lost touch with reality, that I was delusional, obsessive.
But he didn’t. He got on board, and it became a game we played together, a thought experiment we discussed daily. We started commenting when we’d see a particularly sharp or sturdy fence, something that would hold up against a sea of the walking dead. We started noticing things in our day to day, clocking large Walmart distribution centers, buildings constructed like fortresses, anything that would prove valuable if the world ever turned into a wasteland. You start to notice RV dealerships and Patient First clinics you’ve never seen before. I talked to him about what this meant, how it took me months and months of mental work to even imagine about myself as being a strong, useful person.
He didn’t say I was crazy. He didn’t tell me to stop. He helped me dig deeper.
We aren’t sketching out plans to build a bunker. We aren’t hoarding canned goods and diesel for generators. It’s all hypothetical. But this private mental exercise revealed some things to me about myself, not just shaping my perceptions of my own strength, but other things too. There are other reasons this fictional circumstance is the one that stuck.
I’d say by modern standards, my boyfriend and I could be considered aspiring luddites. We read a lot, always physical books. We have a ten pound binder of DVD’s and CD’s because we don’t trust the technological oligarchs (does the system of having a dozen streaming services feel like a house of cards to anyone else?) and we know that one day, they could decide to take all our favorite works of media, our cherished pieces of art away, either putting them behind ever steeper paywalls or just taking them down to save their own bottomline. We have entirely too much fun when the power goes out. We have one laptop; it’s for writing and I guess like… taxes? I don’t know, he’s only used it a few times but I feel like it’s generally in April.
The thing is, we dislike technology. We don’t trust it. It’s eroding away what makes us human. It also simply doesn’t work a lot of the time. Tech is always promising us more ease and convenience, but it feels like moving through the world is as challenging and dysfunctional as ever. I hate the cognitive dissonance, the planned obsolescence. We all know none of this is good for anyone. But you can’t escape it, especially not when you’re disabled and your boyfriend needs to earn a living wage. Especially not when you want to write and have it be read by someone, anyone. We fight for our analog compromises, but society has made it impossible to opt out completely. We’ve watched these past few years as friends and family fall deeper and deeper into the feedback loops of their own algorithms, their reality becoming distorted, their tolerance for the daily frictions and discomforts of the physical world plummeting, making them irritable, frustrated, and desperate to retreat back to the safety of a screen. Filters and fillers; body dysmorphia and self-optimization; crypto and “wellness.” Please don’t make me think about the Stanley Cup situation (I really thought everyone was talking about hockey.) The same older generation that shamed us for texting T9 style on our humble flip phones are now hooked up to Facebook like it’s a life-support system, never questioning the validity or value of what they’re consuming, because if it’s on the internet, it must be legit.
That was the final piece for me. I understood how my health played a role, and then I realized that I was also conjuring a world free of technology. A world that couldn’t be manipulated by billionaires; one where money doesn’t matter. A world where I can bash my way into an urgent care and handle it myself when I have another routine MRSA infection, without being churned through our current medical system at a glacial pace. A world where people are forced to get their hands dirty and fucking feel something and not be ashamed when it’s messy and imperfect, because that’s the point. Feel it all and slow down and learn how to do something, anything, instead of just fumbling aimlessly through life, missing all of the wretched, stunning details of it because your eyes are permanently cast downward. Maybe I use my imagination and meditation skills in a way that seems macabre. I can’t really tell anymore. I’ve been running through the zombie apocalypse nightly for three years. I doubt this desolate, gruesome narrative will carry anyone else gently to sleep the way it does for me, but it’s just so liberating to finally find what works! I can actually relax and enjoy my days instead waiting in terror for when they’re over. After years of lying awake, I’ve finally found peace. My peace may be bloody and a little bit insane, but dammit, it’s mine.