I Witnessed A Friend Go Insane; The Dream

It had been six years since I spoke to Leo. Regardless, I still tried to contact him. I apologized time and time again for the harsh things I had said. Over the years, Facebook showed that he read the messages, but no reply.

January 2017, I had three dreams of Leo. In the dreams we had sex and hung out, like old times. The last dream I had, however, ended differently. He was fat again and we were walking down his street and into his driveway. We stop at my car and he turns to me and says “Becky, I’m not well right now”. When he said this, I got a dreaded feeling and thought the words “mental illness” and “suicide”. Then I woke up.

For the first couple days, I ignored the dream. Or at least I tried to. However, I kept getting a nagging feeling. So finally, I reached out to his best friend, Gary.

“Are you still in contact with Leo?” I asked.

“No, I have spoken to him in six years. Why?”

“Oh nothing…I just had a dream about him and it made me wonder how he’s doing.”

“Was it one of THOSE dreams?” I had previously told Gary that I was plagued by dreams that seemed to come true.

“Oh no, it was just a dream. Probably repressed guilt or something…” I left it at that. I’m not sure if I was trying to convince him or myself. However, just in case, I sent Leo a Facebook message.

“Hey.” Read. No response.

A few weeks later I sent him another message. “Hey”. Again, read and no response. So I said “Well, your reading my messages so obviously you’re alive!” A few weeks later I give it another attempt,

“I had a dream about you and it made me realize that I miss you.” Read. No response.So I gave up. Went on with my life and figured that I would never hear from Leo again.

My doctor decided to take me off the antidepressant Effexor and the next couple months of my life ended up pure hell. I did okay for the first month. Just some anxiety in the morning and at night. Then one day a feeling of absolute TERROR hit me like a train. For the next two months I was being treated for “unknown anxiety” in a partial hospitalization program. I cannot even describe the terror that I felt. I had up to twenty panic attacks a day, every single day. Sometimes, I experienced this feeling of “nothingness”. I remember not being able to feel emotions what-so-ever. I would look at my cat, or my family and I couldn’t even feel love. Rationally, I knew I loved them but I didn’t feel it. I just felt absolute terror, and not being able to feel love or any other emotion scared me even more.

The hospital reinstated my antidepressant, prescribed me some benzos and told me I needed six months of cognitive behavioral therapy. I tried to get my doctors to understand that what I went through wasn’t normal and that it was caused by coming off of Effexor XR. They treated me like I was crazy, so I even went on the internet and found others with the same exact experience. Still….no one believed me. This would be the start of a long and exhausting treatment of my own.

In April, I was laying on my bed watching YouTube videos on my laptop when a Facebook message popped up. It was Leo. “Hey”, he said. I stared at my computer in shock. We spoke for about an hour and sent each other pictures. I sent him a picture of me and my cat, Bastet. I said “I look like crap but she’s cute though.”.

He responded, “Nah, that’s no true. You look good”, then I got a picture from him. “I look tired”.

“You look good”. He did look tired, but it was that familiar face I adored. With a beard.

He told me that he had gained weight there for a while, but lost it again. I congratulated him and commented about my own weight, and he never replied. I shrugged it off and figured that he fell asleep. Wow though, I heard from him again and it absolutely made my night.