Prologue
Prologue
Sleep, a passive or dormant part of our daily lives, a state of rest and unconsciousness, where most of your voluntary activities are inhibited, yet your brain stays active. To most people, this is the end of their definition, this all they know sleep to be, this is all they are aware of, this all they have, but I am different. For me, sleep has a different meaning, when I close my eyes, my day doesn’t end there, that is just half of it, and the other part of my life begins. See what most people don’t know about me is that I live a double life. It’s not like what most people with double lives have where they are two different people at separate times, for me, two separate lives mean two separate existences, one when I am asleep and one when I am awake as you most people think of it. For me, when I am asleep in this existence, then I am awake in my sleep the other and vice versa. Most people don’t know of the state, they simply call it dreams, they can’t control it, and they can’t alter it, they just sit and watch it play out but double lifers such as myself, we learn to control it, we learn to alter it and we, therefore, are able to change what we refer to as nightmares the way we want them, but it’s not that easy, it takes time, it takes practice and most of us don’t even realize the difference in states, for double lifers, the dream world is as dangerous as the awake, if we are killed or injured in either state, both of our existences die, we die in both worlds, same goes for serious injuries. Because of the nature of our existence, we sleep almost as much and sometimes more than when we are awake and we are mostly diagnosed with several sleep disorders and often put under disability. Some of these disorders include restless leg syndrome, delayed sleep phase, sleep apnea and most especially narcolepsy(excessive daytime sleepiness). For all of us double lifers, narcolepsy is a state we all suffer, because sometimes in the middle of the day we realize that there is something we have to do in our other state, so we move on to do what we have to do and in order to do that, we tend to fall asleep in the middle of the day when we are supposed to be in the awake state. It is often hard to control this shift of state and sometimes, we fall asleep in seconds without any warning or physical knowledge and this becomes a danger to us. In case you haven’t noticed, we call people like us the double lifers and everyone else we call the sleepers. Some of us are born sleepers who develop to be double lifers, some of us born double lifers and some are born with the potential to be double lifers but we never quite develop it and we, therefore, stick to being sleepers till we die. For me, for most of my life, I was a sleeper and I wish I had stayed that way. My name is Dabraska Lynn and I am a double lifer and this is how my story began.
