Flashbang Sleep doesn’t fade. It detonates. One second I’m nowhere the next, I’m hit. A white blast behind my eyes, instant, total, violent, like a flashbang going off inside my spine. No warning. No ramp-up. Just pain at full volume. My body seizes mid-dream, locked in a position I didn’t choose, every nerve screaming contact, contact with no enemy to return fire on. I try to move. The thought alone ignites it. Fire races down my back, hooks into my hips, crushes my breath before it ever becomes a scream. But I scream anyway. It rips out of me raw, animal, uncontrolled. A sound I don’t recognize until I realize it’s mine. I cry for help not with dignity but with panic. With terror. With the kind of fear that only comes when your own body has you pinned. I call out. Again. Louder. My throat burns. My chest convulses. Tears flood my face without permission. I beg not for relief, not for answers just for someone to break the silence. But the room doesn’t answer. The walls don’t move. The night doesn’t care. And no matter how hard I scream, how loud I tear my voice apart, the only thing that comes back to me is my own echo distorted, useless, mocking. Pain keeps time perfectly. Each second hits on schedule. No mercy. No fatigue. I am awake in the worst way fully conscious, fully trapped, fully alone inside a body that has turned hostile. This isn’t a bad night. This is an ambush. Eventually the wave breaks not because I win, but because pain decides it has made its point. I lie there shaking, soaked in sweat and tears, afraid to move, afraid to breathe too deep, afraid that if I shift even an inch it will all come back. Morning will ask me to function. To stand. To perform. To explain. But the night knows the truth. It knows I screamed until there was nothing left. And the only one who heard me was me.