My Nightmare
By: Charles Kiyuna

The hull of the ship was torn open from the explosion just before I entered into the back cabins. I was thrown into the narrow hallway walls. I grabbed for the gray metal ladder that was welded to the wall to stay upright but I still went down tearing open my arm on the very thing I was trying to use to stabilize me. Reaching for the ladder to pull my self from the floor I felt my head begin to throb. I must have hit it against the wall but couldn’t recall it. There wasn’t any time to worry about it and considering I wasn’t bleeding from it, I moved on. I opened the door to the rear sleeping quarters to see a hole about the size of a twin mattress torn into the hull that let the morning sun shine right in. It was then that I began to weigh my options.

I knew we were not getting out of that cove. The water was too narrow to swing the ship. We would not be able to get our guns turned around and the tree line blocked our view of everything west of us. We were in their sights, perfectly positioned to be strafed without repercussion. It may not have been possible for the ship to sink entirely in the cove’s shallow blue water, but it was not impossible for it to blow up. Shaking off the throbbing in my head I went to my locker to secure some necessary gear for the next steps that I would take to survive. I grabbed my assault pack and began stuffing it: extra socks, bootlaces, snacks accumulated from the chow hall, water bladder, compass, field knife and other miscellaneous or necessary items. I already had my side arm as I was in charge of the armory today. For some reason I took the time to actually close my locker back when all that was remaining in it was an extra uniform, extra boots, some hygiene items and a notebook.

I turned to see the jets once again returning for another pass. I dropped my pack and went back out to the hallway so I could use the steel entry door as cover from the next round of strafing. With the jets now over the forest I recovered my pack and headed for the hole in the hull.

It was a drop of only twenty-five to thirty feet, but the crystal clear water made the cove look shallower than what it was. I took a breath more for reassurance than for air and jumped. I knew I would never touch bottom, but just being able to see it made me second guess myself, something I didn’t really have time to do. When I came up out of the water I recovered my pack that I threw out ahead of me and began my swim inland. Having lept from the starboard side, I wasn’t sure if any of the men made it off the ship. All the drop boats were on the other side.

I made it almost to shore in about thirty-five minutes. With the tide coming in it was a lot easier. When I got to about four feet of water the waves slammed me into a palm that had been taken down from the fighting. I knew it wasn’t bad because it didn’t affect my breathing, but you could be sure that it was going to leave a few bruised ribs. Staying low, I made my way to the tree line near the beach. Quickly I hid my pack and laced up my field knife onto my load bearing equipment. After a quick drink from the water bladder I started to make my way inland so I could circle the ship to see if I could rendezvous with another squad.

Approximately half a click into the woods I noticed a clearing about twenty yards ahead. They had cleared the land with excavation equipment. It was the perfect spot for an ambush. I slid down a nearby embankment where my bruised ribs met with a rock. That was definitely not helping my situation much. I muffled my burst of pain and proceeded up the other embankment as if coming out of a streambed.

When I peered over the hill I caught the glimpse of sunlight reflecting off of a scope – snipers! Quickly I ducked back down and weighed my options. The beach left me too exposed. Just inside the tree line I would be susceptible to strafing fire from the jets. Too far in – I was on my own against who knows what.

That was the nightmare that Michael had. I awoke from his dream with the bruised ribs and a cut on my arm. Sweat was beginning to bead on my forehead. I couldn’t understand it as I did not really understand my disorder. I had been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder about eighteen months earlier. The dream made several things very clear to me: one was that my disorders were very real and two – they were very embedded.

About seven years ago, two years before the dream, I spent a lot of time in several different hospitals. Well, let’s go back to when I was fourteen. I started having episodes when I was fourteen that resembled seizures. For many years I had convulsive episodes which all centered around stress. All the doctors I went to see continued to diagnose me as epileptic. That diagnosis did not fit, I thought, because I would sometimes go years without any symptoms – even without medication.

As time went on, the seizures came closer together, my time in the hospitals would get longer and I started remembering less and less. I started blacking out or losing time. There would be days that I would not have any recollection of my day until evening fell. I would “wake up” at seven or eight o’clock in the evening when I had been at work all day. I’ve spent five days in a hospital that my last memory was feeling the preemptive surge before a seizure and the next memory was getting out of a car at home and wondering where my truck went.

A few short months later I lost time in our new apartment. It would be the first time my alters or “the others” would make themselves known to anyone. There were seven of them other than myself. That’s right, come to find out years later that who everyone has known as “Chuck” is just one of many identities that occupy this body. Each one of “the others” wrote right handed. The first day they didn’t speak. They just wrote, identifying themselves one at a time. I don’t remember a lot of the incident because I wasn’t there. A whole new world was about to unravel for my wife and me.

As time went on one other personality emerged to count a total of eight on the inside. Michael, as you can tell, has a very militant personality. He is very structured and concise. Then there is Gerard, who is the latest addition, Terry, who is English, Mary, James and George who seems to be autistic, Lexi and Ryson. Those who have dissociative identity disorder will typically create some structure that “the others” live in or around.

Much has happened since they first manifested. In addition to Dissociative Identity Disorder, I have been diagnosed with PTSD or post traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder and conversion disorder. Conversion disorder is a disorder in which your anxiety manifests itself with physical symptoms.

The physical symptoms are where my seizures came from and I am actually not epileptic. Some of the other more frequent symptoms that occur include my left side which will start shutting down to where I will start losing gross motor skills and have frequent headaches. Some more serious effects have been the seizures, memory loss and becoming mute.

Although this has made things a little difficult and what I’ve described are actually the less serious aspects of my disorder, I have made the choice to not quit living. Currently I am in the middle of going to school, trying to start my own business, a father of two, and a husband to a very strong wife who still manages to stick by me