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From The Quiet Room – Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennett

Sounds echoed through my head like thunder.  There was a hailstorm in my brain, with tornado winds knocking down telephone poles and trees.  I heard bomber planes overhead and braced myself against their destructive roar.  I was overwhelmed by every sound I heard around me.  I couldn't tune out any noise; each one pounded my head with equal intensity...... 

But the worst torment these days was not the things I heard, but rather the things I saw.  I saw fire, lightning, coloured bolts of light.  I saw people hanging in the window, and body parts hanging from the trees.  I saw fire around people and walls and faces.  Sometimes I felt I had projector eyeballs, shooting things and shapes and colours straight ahead of me.  Sometimes I saw things as if they were movies floating before my eyes.  Sometimes I saw things that looked as real as my bed or my lamp or my tennis shoes.

I couldn't sleep at night because of the creatures in my bed.  I sat at my desk writing in my journal one night because I was afraid to go near my bed.  'There are four of them sitting on my bed' I wrote.

Usually I saw creatures with faces that were like the scariest Halloween mask ever made or creatures with big blubbery, hairy slippery green faces.  But sometimes I saw people I recognised.  I saw the face of my parents' friend Dr Arnie Maerov melt into a caricature.  Why him?  Was it simply because he was a psychiatrist, or because he was a friend of my parents?  I saw my seventh-grade science teacher Fred Zaltas.  I had had a crush on him when I was thirteen, but I hadn't thought of him in ten years.