Two nights ago I woke up smashing my head 3 times into the pillow and shouting "NO!" I so scared myself with this outburst that I could have suffocated from burying my face in the pillow.

I can honestly say that waking up like that feels truly, truly terrible.

For the last few weeks I've frequently woken up screaming "NO!" The dreams are simple and, as far as I'm concerned, routine.

Someone breaks into this apartment and I shoot them dead. Some nights the whole scene plays itself out: Me forced to "WAKE THE FUCK UP," getting the gun from under the mattress and skillfully shooting past the intruder. The intruder lunges into the hallway, I leap from bed like a commando. The intruder hides in the living room until I jump out, and at that instant I'm amazed at how easy it was to get into this frame of mind. In which now I'm going to kill this person because he won't leave.

And I do, and the next thing is I'm on 911 and then telling all this to the cops who, like me, want to know why in the hell anyone would break into this place.

The worst part of it all is not the dreams themselves. They are terrifying when they happen, but in the daylight I suspect that this type of anxiety is pretty generic.

The worst part of waking up screaming is hearing the sound of my own voice. I can not really describe it, but it sounds like I've been starved to the point of helplessness and then dropped into a giant pit, thinking only about what it will feel like to hit the bottom and having only enough strength to scream in horror.

The scream is that of a child, helpless and frozen solid -- for that instant I can feel how the whole body goes stiff while dreaming, and my neck will not turn.

Most mornings (until recently) I can not get my voice to rise at all. Most nights when I wake up from bad dreams (except for the past several weeks) I wake with a constricted throat and an inability to make even a hissing noise. Nothing comes out. It's dry heaves of fear.

When this first started happening it felt fantastic. Like a kind of orgasm. I was finally able to scream. I woke up feeling charged and wanting to hurry back to sleep so I could try it again.

Now, I'm not sure what is happening here, or if it matters. I wake up feeling squashed and almost blind, and since Wednesday I'm not remembering the dreams at all. It's just very expensive to wake up angry, whatever the cause.