Chapter 17: Fear of Sleep

Spock went to his room, as the Doctor had ordered, but he did not sleep. He chose to meditate instead and he repeated this pattern for several days afterwards, not telling McCoy the true reason why he was afraid to lie down and allow himself to sleep.

The Vulcan was reluctant to confess to the human, even though a certain closeness now existed between them, that he did not wish to dream.

He had reasoned in his mind, with his cool logic, that dreams were nothing other than a violation. A mental rape that rarely could be avoided. In dreams you were forced to live in a world void of rationality. You were expected to exist, no matter how momentarily, in a place you could not control or in which you chanced reliving memories you chose to forget while you were awake and had the strength to try to deny them.

Spock did not know if all Vulcans dreamt or if it was only him, yet another quality he had unfortunately inherited from his mother's humanity. He had often studied his father as he slept, and others of his Vulcan relatives, trying to discover if something in their expressionless faces would give them away. He did not have the courage to ask them while they were awake incase he offered them yet one more reason to look at him with disdain.

For the small amount of time he had had with Amanda he remembered that it had only been her to comfort him when he had screamed himself awake with a nightmare. He could not remember Sarek at all, not by her side, neither lurking in the background. It had been his mother's warm arms that had embraced him as he wept. It had been her gentle tone that had told him that it was not real, that all he had faced had been fantasy.

She had been the one to convince him that all nightmares could be erased by the simple act of waking. Tha, however, had been before he had discovered that it was not that easy. When she had gone, those first few months, had been a terror he could not escape.

He was left alone to dream of her death. He had been abandoned.

It was the Vulcans who had been the ones to save him.

In the first few weeks without her he had been ignored except for the wound on his arm that needed immediate treatment. The assassination of the wife of Sarek had momentarily thrown the calm planet of Vulcan into disarray. Spock remembered the constant whispers that had coursed through the silent world he had previously known. He had rarely been noticed and often had found his way to his room where he wept unseen.

When the day came that his father had summoned him to his side Spock had felt strong terror and the desire to be ignored once more.

His father had not sat while he told him what was going to happen. It made a strong image in the Vulcan's mind. Forever imprinted and compared inevitably with similar men of power who had felt the need to sit and tell others their futures.

Sarek had cast an indifferent look at his son's arm, now healed. When Spock had met his father's eyes he had looked for sorrow there.

"You will stay here," Sarek had said. "It has been decided that since we did not take the precautions to prevent your mother's death that your health and future lies in our hands now. We will make sure you receive the best education and that your needs are well met. Do you agree to this?"

After a brief moment Spock had nodded his head, an action mirrored by his father soon after.

There had been no choice for him really. He could no more have adopted the ways of humans than he could have escaped the nightmare of his mother's death. His younger self believed in fact that he had found none of his needs truly met. He was fed. He learned but he was not told how to stop dreaming. He was not taught how to deal with the hole his mother's death had left in his human heart.

Soon he had discovered his mistake that all the while they had been teaching him. To deny any emotion even pleasure or joy meant that the pain would be erased as well. The discipline of nothing but logic and knowledge, the acknowledgement of the brain and its power and the inadequacies of the heart, was reassuring.

They had taught him how to place his focus instead on logic that if pain and fear was taken away to be replaced on logic and reasoning than it would be better.

Amanda was dead. His mother's body was sent back to Earth and now lay decaying. But that same fate waited for them all. He would also eventually die and what would his sorrow do to prevent it or bring his mother back? His sorrow would leave in time, even by the approach of death, so what was the logic on holding onto it? Better to let it fade and to pursue higher levels of consciousness and learning. Dreams also were not recorded or remembered and marked for all time in history. They were ephemeral.

It had been empowering for him.

He had come to look at his younger self as someone different, and it wasn't a lie. That boy, that child, had been silenced as soon as he had adopted the way of his father's people. It was only when he dreamt that he returned to that boy and was in empathy with him.

He marked the current return of the nightmare to the events on the Enterprise. The catalyst had been Chapel's departure of course. It had been only after she had gone that he let himself realize the similarity visually to Amanda. Her constant fretting over him and concern had not aided the matter. It was only her growing apathy that had stopped him from completely recognizing the problem. Her leaving, however, had brought back that feeling and the knowledge.

The assassination of Argyle had further compounded the problem. It had not been outside of Captain Kirk's behavior to murder and it had not been the first act of violence that he had witnessed since joining the Empire. However, the murder and its cause had some similarity to his mother's death the First Officer knew. Spock also knew that his reaction to it had not passed by McCoy unnoticed. It had taken more than he had ever expected to try to keep down the fear that he had felt and the urge to vomit into the pristine snow already marked with blood. Even the thought of it several days after would produce in him a terrible case of shaking that he had had to control.

It was a credit to his father's teaching that he had been successful at all.

Yet, when he thought of the event and was forced to relive Amanda's death and to be a child once more, Spock was afraid that if he had looked long enough into his father's eyes he would not see sorrow there, only relief.