My sleep is seldom restful. Freud does not have to tell me that dark, dangerous, primal forces rise to the surface.

Hypnagogic hallucinations! Are they hallucinations? "Come here, Will, we want to talk to you." Voices down the stairs. Crashes. Steps. Creaks. Settlings. Barely audible voices from the corner of the room, like a rogue radio frequency. Voices from outside my cranium, next to my ear. The sound of a woman screaming.

Insect intelligences scan my brain in a rote fashion, moving from one manipulative lever to another, mocking me without understanding the concept of human humor. Once I've rejected one ploy the drone moves to another.

Every night, only 20 minutes into sleep, I wake up in sheer panic. I don't know who I am or where I am and I cannot breathe. My throat has constricted. I gasp, groan, moan, whimper, and scream. Truly egoless I am nothing but the purest primal terror head to toe, nothing but pure animal fear.

Nightmares are easier. A gray alien will stare at me, stare me down, overpower me with its large, almond-shaped eyes. I'll wake up, uneasy but not as scared as I think I should be. Sometimes a presence will linger or a ball of white light, perhaps followed by the sound of crashing cymbals.

I will experience one or more of the above phenomena on a given night. Oftentimes I will not go to sleep until dawn. I will blare every lamp and light in the house and stand sentinel over myself and every corner. I telepathically make it clear that I will kill any intruder.

What if I turn around and she's there, the Virgin Mary with long, skeletal fingers and the face of a gray alien, the face of a big bug, or a human face with those black almond eyes? What if she's right behind me, or standing in the kitchen? What if I'm rushed from the side, grabbed by my arm, taken away? What if I look in the mirror and see the face on the cover of Whitley Strieber's "Communion" staring back at me? I remember my Grandfather's copy of "Communion" and how everyone thought of it as a "weird" book, a "scary" book. "Weird" and "scary" - how alien faces appear to the conscious mind. But those faces mean something to us. Almost everyone has a strong reaction to a picture of a female gray. At the very least it has a profound significance in our collective unconscious. What is even generally accepted reality? Perhaps reality is very far from everyday conditioned reality. Even if it isn't it is! Perhaps we are more at home in a bizarre, alien, serpent world - if we are not somehow there already.

All I know is that my fear and insomnia would not be so bad if I was not so lonely. I could camp in the New Mexican desert if I had close friends with me. Nothing is worse than sleeping along.

And that is why I do not sleep until dawn.