Once, you were 121 hours into sleeplessness, just a hair over five days. Your body felt frail and decrepit, and your mind seemed full of a noxious gas. Laying down only made things worse, because stilling your eyes brought awful hallucinations, murderous scenes with screams so painful they would’ve kept Francis Bacon (the painter) up at night. You had to keep moving. You paced the halls, did pushups, and worked, waiting for your body’s operations to time out.

You tried meditation, melatonin, magnesium, glycine, valerian root, lemon balm, lavender oil, chamomile, Sleepytime tea, warm milk, hot baths, foot massages, eye masks, weighted blankets, masturbation, exercise, blue light glasses, tai chi, tryptophan, ginkgo biloba, L-theanine, hypnosis, acupuncture, aromatherapy, and cutting back on caffeine. But the only thing that works is Ambien.

The insomnia came from your job. As a content moderator for Facebook, you see terrible, terrible things. Gore, incest, beheadings, confessional suicides, racist manifestos, and child porn are all on the daily menu. You don’t even want to think about the specials. For some depraved and probably narcissistic reason, humanity wants to cast its darkest shadow on Facebook. Your job is to stop it. You are the light.

But it’s not like you got into it for noble reasons. You just needed a job. When lockdowns took your old one, you rode the dole for a while like everyone else, but then that ended, and you either had to find a job quickly or give up your taste for food. You chose to find a job. The one that was always available. Facebook never stops hiring content moderators, because Facebook never stops losing content moderators.

You used to brag to friends that you could do it, before you did it. You had already surfed the most intimidating waves of the web. How bad could it be?

After one day on the job, you quit bragging. Eventually, you even quit talking to your friends, because whenever you tried, you would inevitably bring up some video you saw at work, and everyone would get quiet and avoid your eyes. You were a pestilence for vibes.

But you were getting paid. And even though the pay was shit, you could work as much as you wanted. You started to save. You bought better food, a bigger TV, new sheets, and all those at-home sleep remedies, since sleep was becoming an issue. You also bought your favorite hat, your talisman, a black Carhartt baseball cap. You wear it every time you work. It keeps your brain from ejecting out of your cranium when you have to watch some neckbeard eat his pets. But you only wear it for work, to compartmentalize. Your mental states must be kept separate.

The irony was not lost on you. You were pouring your new job’s income into healing from your new job. But it was only temporary. Once you found the hack for your insomnia, you’d be thriving.

You found it on the Dark Web. From a vendor on the Silk Road 5.0 named lucid_squeams. It came by mail in two days, taped to the inside of an Arthur Russell CD case. Zolpidem 10 mg, generic version of Ambien, a tiny pink pill with an entire legal defense named after it. 15 minutes after popping one, you were out cold.

And the best part was, no dreams. Dreaming was agony. All the horrors you witnessed by day would come back to you in your sleep, except worse—you were the one carrying them out. In your dreams, you were the personification of evil. You tortured dolls, drowned birds, and set fire to people’s trailers. Your dreams were the reason you couldn’t sleep. But Ambien suffocated those dreams. Ambien was the perfect off switch.

In days, your focus improved. Your mood. Your powers of observation. You noticed new things, things that took you out of the world wide web and back into the world in front of you: the fractals in the wood grains on your coffee table, the lyrics to songs you’d heard a thousand times, the excitable movements of clouds. You ate more, and felt strong. You bought new clothes, more Carhartt. And you worked—faster and better.

For 27 days you slept soundly, dream-free. On the 28^th day—today—you have your first dream.

You’re in a 7/11 talking to Dawn, the cashier, about cognitive behavioral therapy.

“If you recreate the trauma with a milder stimulus,” she says. “You can train your body to fight off the flashbacks. It’s like a vaccine. Inoculation.” She takes a bite of a sausage Tornado. Neon-orange stars shimmer in her mouth.

“But the flashbacks are in my mind,” you say. “Not my body.”

“The mind is the body’s shadow,” Dawn says. She levitates and does a backwards somersault in the air, brimming with glee. Before she became a store clerk, she was a therapist. Before that she was a neurosurgeon.

You go to the rotisserie rack and liberate an endlessly rotating hot dog from its Ancient Greek fate. Your mother calls. You tell her you already ate, but you’ll go over anyway. You enter through the back door. Your mother screams. She hates when you let the cold air in. You tell her you want to be a seahorse again, a horse of the sea, you say. She pushes you away. You grab her and hold tight. Why does she push you away?

The cops come and take you to jail.

That wasn’t your mother. You have no words. A million things to say but no words.

“Goddamnit,” says one of the cops, whose hair is a nest of vipers. “He’s been sleepwalking.”

They let you out the next day. A lawyer tells you you’ll be fine, the Ambien Defense is impenetrable.

This was not good, but it could have been worse. Because worse than an unconscious B&E with no criminal charges are the dreams. Wicked, insidious dreams, dreams that last a fortnight in perceived time, supplanting your waking life with a reality that’s even more inescapable and dire. You would rather be in a coma.

You start to sleep with the Ambien bottle under your pillow. Tonight, you take two.

And it’s tomorrow. You breathe a sigh of relief, stand up, and put a pod in your Keurig. It’s a calm, sunny morning. When the coffee’s ready you take it to your backyard, don your Carhartt hat, and open your laptop.

You like to work outside, it mitigates the horror of your job. You start the day’s first video, a boy in his late teens confessing to sexual fantasies about his sister, and yawn. The Ambien has not quite worn off. Moving your eyes blurs the trees in the background. Images take a few seconds to render.

You wonder why so many of the videos you moderate are confessions. Why do people want to put their shit on Facebook, why not just put it on a priest? Your eyes wander from the computer screen to an odd pile of leaves by your back fence. They look burnt. As the image comes into focus you realize they aren’t leaves, they’re more irregular in shape, and hairier. You go closer and what you find drops your stomach into the dirt. Cats. Five of them. Dead and charred. One even looks mutilated. You grab your laptop and run into the house, locking the doors. Whoever did this is probably close by. They might even be in the house! You run through the halls and open every closet. No one. You’re alone.

But who on Earth would do this to you?

A dark possibility stirs within you. Like a forgotten dream revived by the following day’s events, a memory forms. The trap, smelling of catnip, the lighter fluid, the cries. And no one around to moderate you.

You have to get rid of the evidence, physically and psychologically. Only that will erase what you’ve done. You’re not even sure you did it, really. It’s only a suspicion. All you need to erase is a suspicion.

You bury the remains and pop another Ambien. Work will have to wait. What matters now is wiping your memory, starting fresh, resetting the paradigm to—

You open your eyes on the couch. It’s dark and the moonlight casts elongated shadows on your living room floor—black tendrils from the narrow leaves of your sole housemate, a snake plant you’ve managed not to kill. A cat leaps up to the window. You swallow a scream. It gazes through the glass at you, its shadow climbing up your walls, then leaves.

You check your phone. It’s 8:06 PM. You haven’t called or texted anyone today, a welcome sight after Ambien. Online, you read some strange accounts of the drug’s effects. A man who drove his car through his ex-wife’s wall, a woman who kept calling 911 asking for cold water, someone who slept-walked 30 miles.

You draw a bath and light some candles, hoping to reach a detente with your guilt. But, when the sun finally pokes through your blinds, lacerating the wood floor at the foot of your bed, you are still awake, your head swimming with images of burnt fur and contorted limbs.

You don your Carhartt cap, skip the Keurig, and go straight to work. You open a dozen tabs for games and news stories. If you can keep your mind from alighting on any one thing, maybe the day’s pain will be duller. At the very least, it will be over sooner.

At night, you take a few Ambiens and return to the 7/11.

“I’m surprised you’re back,” Dawn says, lighting a cigarette with her fingertip. The smoke shines a pale shade of blue. “After last time.”

“I thought I was dreaming,” you say. “So they couldn’t punish me.”

Dawn blows a smoke ring that turns into a noose, wrapping around her neck. “Thought?” she says.

“And now? Am I—?”

She takes a slow drag of her cigarette. Her face swirls between pleasure and disgust, two planes of emotion superimposed in a psychedelic haze. You want to squash it, to end the ambiguity.

“Maybe,” she says.

“I do things in my dreams. Bad things. If this is a dream you’re in danger.”

Dawn leans in close, blue smoke spilling out of her red red lips and into your eyes. “I love danger,” she says, drawing out the word love like she means to lock you inside its four-lettered prison.

You notice, for the first time, how much lipstick she’s wearing. You hate it. You want to smear it across her mangled corpse, but you are also outside this want, watching it, watching yourself like an unmoderated video, dispassionate.

“Then you’ll love me,” you say. You reach into your pocket and touch the cool steel of a surgical knife. You hold it to her cheek, watching the pleasure drain from her face. Now it’s only disgust.

She whispers into your ear. “You are not your thoughts. You are the force that exercises control over them.”

Your mouth quivers. Your head is a bucket of contradictory wants that lash at one another like agitated crabs. If it weren’t for your Carhartt hat, you would implode. You hear a click. The door to the 7/11 opens. You shove the knife in your pocket and back away. A man in his 20s stands in the doorway, staring at you. Your neck tightens.

You gasp. The pillow feels hot and wet under your face. You reach beneath it for the cylindrical shape of the Ambien bottle. It’s there. All you recall are Dawn’s haunting green eyes, electrified by the terror she saw in you.

And what a shame, because the man in the doorway was I, the architect of your dreams. And I wanted you to remember me.

Tentative, you step outside and examine the yard. Nothing appears out of place. You check your phone. No new texts, photos, calls. One by one, you inspect the rooms of your house. Nothing. So all you did was sleep. Good.

Back to work.

Near the end of your shift, a video grabs your attention. It’s posted by someone named Dawn. Dawn Matine, a young woman with hallucinatory green eyes and bright red lipstick. The content of the video is unremarkable—she burns herself with cigarettes and wax—but her resemblance with the Dawn from the 7/11 is uncanny. And her occupation on Facebook says cashier.

You can’t be certain it’s her though, because her face is so full of tears, her green eyes puffed up and clouded with red. She seems to be crying more from the shame than the pain, because the tears flow hardest right before the burns.

The nearest 7/11 is four and a half miles away. Could you really have walked there in your sleep? From the stories you’ve read about Ambien, it’s possible. But it seems much more likely you dreamt the whole encounter with Dawn. Maybe you dreamt the first night too, the break-and-enter and the jail time and all of it. The fact that nothing came of it, it probably never even happened.

Or maybe your dreams are realer than you thought.

In the middle of the night, you drive to the 7/11 with the bottle of Ambien in your pocket, feeling more secure with it on your body.

When you pull into the parking lot, you catch a glimpse of Dawn through the window. Her eyes are just as they appeared in the video, a desperate, volatile green. She sees you and makes an abrupt move for the door, then locks it, shaking her head. You knock on the glass and plead to no avail. She scurries back to the counter to watch the security feed.

To watch you. You center yourself in front of the security camera, emboldened by the weight in your pocket and the intoxicating effects of Sleep Deficiency Syndrome. Gazing into the lens, your surroundings dim like the background of a stage. In this fluorescent-lit parking lot you will finally deliver your soliloquy.

“Dawn,” you begin. “I know that we’ve met, but I can’t for the life of me remember how our last meeting went. It looks like, not good. I’m sorry. Can you forgive me? I was not in my right mind. You of all people know this about me. I can be erratic, out of fear. I get scared that I’m incapable of love. I can’t sleep, I can’t talk, I can’t think. Everyone looks flat. When I try to picture my future, all I see is a black smudge. The days are a blur, warped by my fear of night. I notice myself tense up, but I can’t relax. Why would anyone want to be with me, when I can’t be with myself? I don’t mean you harm. Honestly, I need you. I know that you carry a heavy burden too. And I can help. We can help each other. Just give me a chance to talk to you.”

She almost certainly cannot hear you. How many gas station security feeds have audio? But something in your body must have moved her, because she’s walking to the door. She unlocks it, and you step inside.

“You threatened to cut me,” she says.

“I was asleep,” you say. “I didn’t know what I was doing. Maybe I thought I was shaving…”

She ignores your puerile attempt at levity. She just shakes her head again, verging on pity but refusing to embrace it. “You need to learn boundaries,” she says.

You lean over the counter and grab her pack of cigarettes from beneath the register. Somehow you knew it would be there. You light one and take a drag, the smoke a sharp cerulean under the fluorescents. You offer it to Dawn.

“I’m good,” she mumbles. She is not levitating, or smiling, or doing anything magical. She is not like she was in your dreams, if that’s what they’re called.

“Would you rather I put it out on your chest?” you say.

She winces. “I don’t know you,” she says.

Then no one does, you realize. And the reason is suddenly so obvious. You came to admit your wrongs, ask for forgiveness, and be saved. But it turns out you can only be vulnerable without sound, looking into the eye of a camera. Now that you’re looking into human eyes, your conviction has sunk into the sea of your desperation, and all that’s left to hide behind is false bravado.

“You will by the end of the night,” you say.

Dawn sighs. “I recognize this is a cry for help, but I’m not going to answer it. You need real help. Professional help.”

“No, I need you.”

Dawn looks at her phone, then glances at the parking lot.

You take her phone and lock the door. “I want you to fix my head,” you say. “If you won’t do it with words, then there’s only one way.”

She stands rigid behind the counter, shaking ever-so-slightly.

Your voice is unexpectedly firm as you show her the surgical knife. “Take out my temporal lobe.”

“What?” she says.

“I want a lobectomy. You know what it is. It will make me forget.”

You saw it in a video. Removing the temporal lobe purges the brain of its visual memories. A clean wipe for your mental hard drive.

“It’s only done for epilepsy. And even then it’s unreliable,” she says.

“That’s why you have to do it. I can’t go to the doctor.”

“Therapy is better. I can get you help.”

“Please,” you whisper. “The pain is too much to bear. I’m dangerous.”

Dawn, trembling, takes the knife, her gaze fixed on your temples. “We don’t have anesthesia,” she says.

“Forget it,” you say, downing a handful of Ambien. You lay on the counter and rest your head on a family-size bag of Orville Redenbacher’s. Out of the corner of your eye you can see the security feed. On screen, a man in a black Carhartt cap is splayed out like a fish for cleaning, while a young woman holds the knife.

Dawn burns the blade with her lighter, then waits for it to cool, breathing slowly. You watch her press it to your forehead. The heat soothes you. On screen, your head glows like the coals of a dying fire. In minutes, you will be looking at your brain. You will meet your cruel master in the open.

“What are you waiting for?” you say.

“The pills,” she says.

“I want to feel it.”

The man on screen starts to cry. The woman pushes the blade into his temple. It flashes white, then a burst of red pours down its sides.

The man smiles. His tears are tears of joy. This is what he always wanted: to moderate his own content, to be the eye that sees itself. As the blood and tears run down his face, and the woman digs a tunnel to his memories, he is overwhelmed by a feeling of triumph, because for once, he is taking a good look at himself and running towards what he sees, penetrating ever-deeper into the core of his being.

But just before it all goes dark, a thought. What if you wake up?

‍