The Cerebral Maze

She was experiencing the nightmares again. It seemed now, to be occurring nightly on a regular basis. Restlessly, she moved to a different position on her firm army bed. Nothing seemed to help. She just couldn’t fall asleep. Stress, fatigue or something deeper . . . Disturbing thoughts seemed to be overflowing through her mind. Shivering, she pulled up the thick, green blanket. It was such a coarse material, not comfortable in the least. Rotating around once more, she nudged her pillow off her cot. Her army cot was basically just a small collapsible bed. Reaching down, she picked up the pillow and shoved it back under her head. Glancing upwards, she tried to pierce to darkness of the tent, but was unable to. Her sleeping and working area wasn’t one of any magnitude. There was barely enough room to sleep in, let alone work in. The tiny work area consisted of a brown folding wooden table and a torn leather chair. Located on top of the table as a Hewlett Packard laptop computer, an HP printer and a pile of rolled up geological maps and documents? With her work space so limited, she often used her army cot as an extra work area to prepare her maps and reports for her clients. They were starting to prove to be quite hostile people to work for. Preparing herself for an emergency escape, she continually backed up all her results into her powerful laptop computer. She was a guest in a large and powerful country. Now she was starting to regret her invitation to work for these people. To hell with his payment for the job, she thought, the results intended just weren’t showing up. If she did have to leave quickly, she intended to better analyze the results elsewhere. She wanted somewhere safe, where she could prepare the final report without getting her neck slit while she slept. She would send them all the results later; it didn’t pay to make enemies with these people. Really cold in here, she thought. Normally temperatures, hot and cold, didn’t bother her. Since she had started working here, she had been experiencing occurring nightmares. Like a cold winter wave splashing against a rough shoreline, she experienced icy droplets of sweat dripping down her forehead upon wakening up The dream was always the same, but lately it seemed to be intensified. It was severely jarring her mind. Rising up from the cot, her body reacted with a tremor like effect. Dreams flowed through her mind about a dangerous area of frozen glaciers, icebergs and a steep mountainous terrain. She experienced visions of cold, constantly blowing winds blasting through days that consisted of no darkness. As she woke up in the cold room, the temperature around her seemed to stimulate her in ways she hadn’t felt before. Was it the cold, or the fact that she had no memories of her youth . . . ? It had been years ago, but clinically she had been declared brain dead for almost a minute . . . The doctors had resurrected her, and later she had revived after suffering a six month coma. Upon awakening in the strange hospital room, at the age of seventeen, she found that life had now changed for her. Her right eye was heavily bandaged, and her memories of her past were gone. This was why the nightly dreams caused her concern. Was it just a nightmare, or were memories of her youth starting to come back to her? She could remember everything from the age of seventeen. Anything before that time period was a blur The day had been long and tedious, definitely not one of her better exploration projects. Every morning, she was always up before sunrise. She didn’t want her clients to catch her sleeping’s the people who respected the darkness before sunrise, had worked the long, hard hours outdoors all day. Following supper came more hours of taking her clients work results and plotting them down on various maps. Then came the studying of what her results meant. Each report had to be hand written, as to her recommendations for the next days work. She was careful to add all of the results, along with her daily journal onto her laptop. Exhaustion was setting in. Work had continued on like this for a month straight with no breaks. Slowly, the tossing around on the bed stopped. She started to nod off. The raised cot felt more comfortable now. She slept until early morning, when the nightmare began again. This time it was much more unsettling. Blackness overcame her. She was now experiencing the outer limits of her mind, as she penetrated through the freezing icy cold winds, entering a dark log cabin, and encountering someone called the Female Suffrage.