Lyssa had been called many things in her life. Freak. Insomniac. Insane. People were kinder when she was a child, of course. Then they used phrases such as ‘a vivid dreamer’ or ‘highly imaginative’. No one thought it was anything out of the ordinary then. After all, why would they? Stuff like this just didn’t happen in real life. If it did, she wouldn’t be known as the freaky dreamer girl at school. She, personally, preferred ‘cursed’. There was no better way to describe it.

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    She had been dreaming as long as she could remember, and these dreams were full of colors and lights, and creatures beyond her wildest imagination. She’d seen purple oceans and forests made out of glass. She’d seen candy houses, floating castles, and skies with more moons than she could count each glowing like the bioluminescent algae she’d studied in science class. She’d made friends with fairies, swam with finned tigers, flown on griffins, and raced a bear with the head of a guinea pig across a frozen tundra of sugary snow.

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    She had been filled with such wonder and amazement that she had seen this as a gift; an opportunity to escape her ordinary life filled with school and homework and go on her own adventures in lands closer resembling the fairy tales her mother had told her. Every night was different and, every night, she would go to sleep in eager anticipation of what the coming night would bring.

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    But then, as she grew older, her dreams grew darker. At first, they weren’t much different than nightmares anyone else would have, so her parents didn’t think much of it. Being chased by an army of flying skeletal sharks was just a scarier version of the glowing flying eels she had seen the week before.

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    But her parents finally believed her when the finned tiger was replaced by mermaids who, while at first looked friendly, ended up dragging her kicking and screaming to the bottom of the sea to devour her. She had woken up spewing sea water and screaming, her skin covered in scratch marks from their nails.

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    The oceans were replaced by boiling water that burnt her skin. The glass forests were replaced by literal blades of grass that cut her feet. The candy houses caused sores in her mouth. The floating castles were haunted by screeching dragons with the body of snakes. Asteroids fell from the moons and released translucent worms that burrowed under her skin.

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    Her stories had told her that curses were put on innocent princesses by evil witches out of hatred and spite. Apparently, however, her evil witch must have hated her even before she was born.

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Since then, she couldn’t sleep, prominent bags appearing under her eyes no matter how much she tried to hide them under make up. Her life was a one-way ticket to misery and torment. She couldn’t focus in school with no sleep and she couldn’t sleep without being tortured by creatures and worlds that shouldn’t be real but somehow were.

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    Her extended family knew her as insane. Her doctors, an insomniac. Her classmates, a freak.

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All she knew is that she wanted sleep. A boring, dreamless sleep.