It always begins in my rest, such intimate cruelty, I wake to a shift in the air. Something in the stillness moving faintly as if heavy dust creeps around my room. I do not move. I listen. I watch, and the air feels like it is folding inward on itself.
Before I can sit up, I am no longer touching the bed. A heavy force, a grip with no fingers. It hooks around my feet and pulls. My body slams against the ceiling with a crack, my arms splayed out, the plaster cold against my face. My breath stolen from me.
I try to scream but it stays locked in my throat. The walls lean in. They press. The room shrinks until the air is a fist in my lungs. My chest burns. I thrash but I am weightless and held at once. I call for my family. I call for God. I call for help like a child who still believes a door will burst open and light will flood the dark.
Nothing comes. Only quiet laughter. Close. Amused.
It knows I’m alone.
I burn with fear. It spreads through my body like fire poured through my veins. My heart beats wildly as a trapped animal. I am thrown again — wall to wall, ceiling to floor — a rag doll in a room I know better than my own skin.

And then —
I am dropped.

The mattress catches me.
My eyes snap open into the same dark. The door closed. The room unchanged.  The air is lighter but my peace has been invaded. My body is shaking as if it remembers a war.
This happens again and again. Some nights back to back. Some after weeks of quiet, just when I begin to believe they have moved on.
Each time, I am a little less blind, a little less frozen.
The first dreams were pure terror with no thoughts but survival.
But terror is exhausting. And something in me grew tired of being thrown.
So I began to push back. I learned the changes in the air, I sensed their coming and I did not hide, I began to brace.
When the grip found my shoulders, I pushed into it instead of away. When it hurled me upward, I twisted. When it pressed the walls inward, I pressed back.
The attacks grew less violent. Less certain.
It stalled.
That was new.
The last time, I knew before it touched me. I was already rising, my body ready before my mind could catch up.
Something in me stood up inside the dream before my body left the bed. The fear was there, yes, but it did not flood me. It burned clean instead of wild.
When the force came for my shoulders, I saw it. Not clearly. Not fully. But I knew.
No longer blind. No longer pretending I didn’t recognise the face of the thing holding me.
It was hers. Her demon.
It tried to throw me against the wall. The old script. The old violence.
But I knew.
I knew.
It held me for a moment, flickering and frozen.
And something inside me almost laughed.
I leant into it, whispered my knowing and pushed back.
It faltered, it fled.
I ran out of the room — something I had never done before — and the dream fractured.
I woke. Still in my bed. But different. The air was clear.
And I knew that whatever fed on my fear had lost its footing.
They no longer come.

She did not beat me.
She did not break me.
I know what she hides in the dark.