Hypnic Jerks

By Vivien Stanton

Hypnic Jerks follows seven years in the life of Sans Kingtrem, a young woman who lives with anxiety. After a failed attempt at university, Sans decides to become an English teacher in South Korea. Whilst there, Sans meets Sandman, a normal American boy, who helps Sans to control her anxiety and lead a somewhat normal life. When Max leaves, Sans’ anxiety returns and plunges her into a deep depression which leads her to kidnapping one of her elementary students from the school she works in.

These events are clouded by the opinions of Sans’ dead baby (Annie), Sans constant facts about the world, the taste buds in her vagina, and her inability to detach herself from her monthly periods.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781326326746

Book preview

Hypnic Jerks

Hypnic Jerks

Vivien Stanton

Copyright © 2015 by Vivien Stanton

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2015

ISBN <978-1-326-32674-6>

Published by Lulu Publishing.

Chapter One

This book contains bad language. By this I mean both profanity and incorrect grammar.

You know that feeling when you’re falling asleep, but then you suddenly imagine that you’re physically falling, so your body suddenly jerks you awake? Of course you do, but did you know that this feeling is called a ‘hypnic jerk’?

At moments when I get a shock in real life, I feel like it’s a hypnic jerk. Shock wakes me up, reminds me who I am, and tosses me back into reality.

I have spent my life enviously watching all the peaceful ‘sleeping people’ around me, whilst I am stuck awake, unable to ever permanently fall asleep. I feel like everyone I know is sleeping in the same bed: the big bed of normality. The winners are the people who are fast asleep. They are getting on with their lives and not wasting their time with the kind of shit I have to spend my life worrying about. The weirdos are the people who are ‘stirring’ in their sleep and keep waking up. This is through no fault of their own, it is just the way they are. The weirdos frequently suffer from hypnic jerks. They can’t sleep, so they can’t ever be normal people.

This is me. I am a stirring weirdo. I have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep. I keep getting hypnic jerks. My hypnic jerks stop me from sleeping with the normal people.

Whenever I feel like I am starting to fall asleep and becoming part of normal society, Annie wakes me up. Annie is my own personal hypnic jerk. Her favourite time to get vocal is on a Tuesday morning at around 3am.

I desperately want to lead a normal life, but I just keep getting jerked away from it. The only people crazier than me are the insomniacs. Insomniacs find it impossible to sleep, and therefore can never be part of normal society. Being normal is being asleep.

Biology fact #1

In the average human female ovaries there are around 500,000 eggs. However, only about 400 of these eggs will ever have the chance to become a baby, and even then most of them won’t. The eggs that don’t get released will never leave the ovaries. They stay with the female for life, from the day she’s born, until the day she dies, and then on.

I often think about the eggs inside my ovaries.

I am female. I was born with my ovaries and my eggs. I am also a human. I was born with my hands, nose, eyes, and so on. However, the hands that I have now are not the same hands that I was born with because my cells have regenerated since my birth. The physical person that I was ten years ago is not the same physical person that I am today. This raises the question: do the eggs in a woman’s ovaries regenerate? Or do they stay the same throughout her life?

Since the age of sixteen, I’ve been naming the eggs that I lose each month. They are my unfertilised babies. They could have been human, but I didn’t let them be.

Men make around ten million new sperm babies every day. I’m glad that I am not a man, naming all of those babies would take me a long time. Luckily I only have to lose, and name, one baby a month. That’s emotional enough for me. Eggs are biologically expensive, sperm is not. Hence ‘eggs’ are a countable noun, ‘sperm’ is not. Anything too small is uncountable. My dead babies are important to me, but probably wouldn’t be if I had ten million a day. Ten million a day would be annoying and inconvenient.

This book is my story. It’s not a pretty story, or an inspiring story. I apologise for that.

It is just a story. Everyone has a story, even you.

Life fact #1

Feeling aroused is as natural as hunger, but hunger is a socially-acceptable feeling, arousal is not.

I should warn you now that there is a little bit of locking in this story. Not as much as I’d like, but still a decent amount of it.

Locking is as natural as eating and sleeping, yet for some reason it’s much more disgusting and shameful. In my life I have found that it is perfectly acceptable to say, I’m tired, or, I’m hungry, yet saying, I’m horny, in a normal situation is not okay. Saying I’m horny, in the supermarket is vulgar, crude, and disgusting. This is not my opinion, more the general consensus I have come to in all my years of being human.

My name is Sans Kingtrem. I’m 25 years old and I have written up the past seven years of my life. I think the past seven years of my life have been pretty unusual as far as life experiences go.

My story, or rather my life up to this point, begins at 18. I should tell you now that I am not a particularly likeable character and I am certainly not the heroine of this tale. However there isn’t really a heroine or hero in this tale. There are only three main characters: myself, Sandman, and Annie.

I don’t want to spoil it, but there is no happily ever after with this story, at least not yet.

Chapter Two

My story begins at the age of eighteen. I had just moved to Nottingham to study dance and English at Nottingham Parkway University. It was a fairly new university that had only opened two years before. I wasn’t smart enough to go to a real university. I wanted to just study dance, but my parents insisted that I pick a ‘real’ subject, so I studied English as well just to keep them happy and quiet.

I was nervous about moving away from home, but excited to start my compulsory adult life. I’m from Sunderland, which is in the north of England. However, my accent is southern English because I went to a private school. I should clarify: I went to a private school, but my family is not rich. My Dad worked for an oil company when I was young, and one of his company benefits was free private schooling for all dependents. Me and my sisters were the poorest kids at that school. The only good thing it gave me was a nice English accent, which came in handy later in life. I went to a state college though, just to balance things out.

In my first year at university I lived in a shared dormitory room with a girl called Lucie. Our dormitory was expensive because it was in Nottingham city centre. If I wanted a room to myself then I would have had to pay double the price, or live on the outskirts of the city. I got on okay with Lucie. We might still be in touch if we had met in other circumstances. I would describe Lucie as fallen money. Her family used to be rich, but they lost it, and she liked to believe that she still had it. This was why she spelled her name ‘Lucie’, rather than ‘Lucy’. She liked me on first impressions. I think she thought I would be useful because I had gone to a private school, and people from British private schools are usually rich. If I had to describe Lucie as a food, I would say that she was a British strawberry. She was very British, sweet, almost everyone liked her, and she would always be in season. I could walk onto the British high street right now and pick out the outfit which she’s probably wearing at this very moment, even though I haven’t seen her in eight years or so. She was predictable.

For the first week, me and Lucie got on great. We would eat in the canteen together, go to the student’s union at night, and generally just have fun in the way that 18-year-olds naturally do. I had not had much social interaction at college and had very few friends in Sunderland. I had been craving a normal social life for a while. However, our relationship slowly dwindled with the more time we spent together. Lucie quickly realised that I was weird. She was asleep and I was not. I never actually found out what happened to her. Unfortunately she deleted and blocked me on Facebook, so I can’t keep in touch with her anymore. At a guess, I would say that she is probably married, has a decent job, and maybe a kid or two. This guess is based on general statistics and Lucie’s appearance when I last saw her.

Lucie isn’t important to my story, but I do think about her a lot. At the age of eighteen, me and Lucie were the same, as in we had the same chances in life. We are not the same anymore, but I could have had her life, and she could have had mine. That probably terrifies her.

Life fact #2

University is a lot more fun to remember than to experience.

My first year at university was a whirlwind of alcohol, cigarettes, short-lived friendships, course dramas, and every other classic university aspect you could think of, except for good locking.

At eighteen I had a very different view on what men wanted from women. Actually, I had a very different view of men altogether. I believed that men wanted to date virgins with tight vaginas. I got this belief from several years of reading about locking, and what men wanted, on the internet. So when I was eighteen and locking with men, I would pretend to be a virgin, and claim that locking hurt. Only one man liked this, the rest thought it was a bit weird. I didn’t see most of these men again. The truth was that locking did hurt me. At eighteen I had never been in a proper locking relationship. As in I had never had regular, frequent, locking with the same man. I had never really had a boyfriend either. All of my locking experiences by nineteen had been random and temporary. I had only lost my virginity because all of my friends had. I don’t even see any of these friends anymore. They had been my temporary college friends, and I had been theirs. By the time I reached nineteen, I had locked five different men, yet I had only had locked nine times. At an estimate, I had locked for a total of thirty minutes, and this was spread over two years. My vagina was still very tight. I only masturbated with my clitoris and I would never put anything inside of myself. I didn’t like the taste of dildos. I still don’t.

During my first year at university I always felt like I was searching for my university experience. I realise now that I should have let the experience find me. I felt like all of the other students were so much happier and more relaxed than I was. Everyone else was fast asleep as I tossed and turned. The only thing I had to save me was my half-decent appearance. I wasn’t bad looking at eighteen. I wasn’t beautiful or sexy, but I was okay, and for me that will do. I had long naturally brown hair, big blue eyes, a slim (vegetarian) figure, no tits, a passable arse, a kooky (charity shop) dress sense, and a face that looked gorgeous on my sisters, and okay on me. I should mention however, that I did, and still do, have very bad teeth. They’re not that bad. I don’t need false teeth or veneers, but they definitely do not look good. On the plus side, I did have a very nice bum. I like to walk. Walking gives you a very nice behind. I missed walking when I was in prison.

What was very surprising to me was how much I enjoyed the English side of my university course, and how much I disliked the dance side of my course. My dance idol was, and still is, Kate Bush. I’ve even been told that I look like her, although I don’t believe that this was a compliment from the person who said it. The other girls on my dance course, and they were all girls, were very cliquey and classics of their stereotype. They were 80% bleach blonde, skinny, 60% bitchy, 40% slutty, and 90% not into me. I would say that collectively, they were a box of mid-range-priced chocolates. I can afford mid-range-priced chocolates, but I will always buy the cheaper ones because I’m careful with money. Now, I am sure that these girls they would tell you a different story, and that’s fair enough, but this is my story and my version of events.

To me, dance should be respectful. You may not like the dance, but if it is artistically good then you should treat it respectfully. There was one particularly difficult moment during a solo dance module where we had to do a peer assessment of each other. I chose to dance to the Velvet Underground’s Femme Fatale. I chose that song because I liked it, and nobody else would choose to dance to it. I like to be original with my art. The twenty-two other girls in that module watched me dance with disgust, and I could see them whispering whilst I was dancing. I found that rude. At the end of the song, the girls had to give me feedback.

Stacy Rosetrip, who would be some kind of rose-flavoured chocolate, began with, That song and that dance just did not work. I liked them both individually, but together it was just not right.

Prudence, a dark chocolate pistachio, continued, You’re such a sweet girl, you really are. That’s all I have to say.

Georgie, a lemon mouse chocolate, finished with, That dance was two steps behind everyone else’s dance. I’m sorry but it was.

I got 51% for my dance, which was a low pass. Stacy and Pru got around 68% and Georgie, of course, scored a first with 75%. The whole thing was just a popularity contest really. Maybe I should have just done a Britney Spears song? You may have guessed that I am still a bit bitter about my first attempt at university. The other girls could have said much worse things, and they did, but behind my back. I just didn’t have the attitude or proper appearance to fit in. To be fair, that isn’t their fault, but it’s not really mine either. I probably would have liked those girls, if they had liked me. My story would probably be very different if I hadn’t been the weirdo of my university course.

Biology fact #2

Biologists have only studied about 1% of life that exists, and has ever existed. A huge amount of species have been, gone, and left no trace of who, or what, they were. Out of the 1% of species that biologists have studied, they have found some pretty weird things, like the shoebill and the yeti crab. They are definitely worth a Google. They are much more interesting than me.

Despite this amazing fact, humans seem more fascinated by the apparent weirdness and abnormalities of other humans. Some celebrity dyes her hair red and the tabloids will scream, POPSTAR X is firing off the rails! However, what about the critically endangered kakapo bird? The kakapo bird is far more interesting than any pop star’s love life.

The problem is that humans love to criticise their own species for the most natural of things. I’m used to getting criticised a lot, and I am used to criticising others. Our culture encourages criticism. I am criticising Pru, Stacey, and Georgie for criticising me. They, in turn, will probably criticise this book and me as a writer. It will never end. We still criticise the things that Biblical people did, and probably will until the end of human existence.

As I said, I really enjoyed the English side of my course. I studied three English modules: ‘Critical Thinking’, ‘Introduction to Poetry’, and ‘Writing Short Stories’.

‘Critical Thinking’ was difficult, but probably my favourite module to study. Mainly because I could academically discuss my vegetarian diet, something which I hadn’t been able to do up to this point, and have never really got to do since.

‘Introduction to Poetry’ was probably my least favourite of the English modules, mainly because it was the most time consuming. I had never studied poetry before, so I had to do a lot of additional reading. One of the main things I remember from poetry class was that I thought Tennessee Williams was very attractive. Of course I never said this in class. My fellow students already thought I was a little bit weird.

‘Writing Short stories’ was very enjoyable, although it was where I achieved the lowest mark of all my English modules. I really was not too bothered about this because I really enjoyed the class, and I might have even learnt something. I wrote a short story about a teenage girl who becomes convinced that she holds the spirit of Edgar Allen Poe in a locket that she buys in a charity shop. She becomes consumed by a split personality, kind of like William Wilson, or the guy from Fight Club. The story ends with her selling the locket and making a lot of money, which she spends on plastic surgery as she is unable to look at herself ever again. The story is a lot better than I am making it sound. I might include it later in this novel so you can have a read for yourself.

Surprisingly I passed all my first year modules, something which I was very proud of, and I still am to this day. I think I would like to go back to university at some point, although not to complete this course. I think if I was to start university again now, I would study business or economics. I always said that if I ever ended up in prison for a long period of time, then I would do a university degree. I did go to prison a few years later, but I didn’t manage to complete, or even start, a degree.

During the summer after my first year at university, I worked in a supermarket in Sunderland city. I worked mainly on the tills, which I didn’t mind. People always criticise that kind of unskilled work, but I truly think that there are much worse ways to make a living. In total I managed to save up about £2000 over the summer, something which I was very proud of. I was staying with my parents over the summer, so I had no rent or bills to pay. I probably spent around £200 of my earnings during the summer and so I had £1800 to go back to university with. I bought myself an Ipod, not a good one, just a shuffle. I also let myself have a nice dance outfit and some nice ‘party’ clothes, although I did get all the party clothes from charity shops. I get all