An: I love SSA Dr. Spencer Reid. However, sadly, I don't own him, or Criminal Minds for that matter.

"...And all I can do is read a book to stay awake, and it rips my life away but it's a great escape..." - "No Rain" Blind Melon

Nowadays the nightmares keep me from getting much sleep. They are always one variation of the same dream. They both start out with people dying left and right, but even with all the clues we can't figure out just who the UnSub is. No one is suspicious enough to raise any alarm. In one I suddenly end up back at Marshall. Tobias hovers over me injecting me with dilaudid again and again. His father beats me and Raphael continues to kill families of 'sinners'. In the second I stand naked, tied to the goal post. The entire BAU team stands among the crowd of students and they look on with cold, unfeeling eyes. In both, time stretches on for eternity, until I wake in a cold sweat.

Eventually, after I manage to pull myself together, I grab a book to read. I have actually stopped reading books, except when the nightmares hit. If there's a book of interest I buy it and let it sit on the shelf until I have another sleepless night. I sit in my bed and watch as the shadows cover the floor, and as the candlelight dances across the walls and the pages of the book, I immerse myself in the story. One might wonder why I read by candlelight...the answer is simple:

When I was a child my mother used to read to me. At night, after a long day of trying to get along without my father to support us, mother would read to me by candlelight. "It sets the mood," she would tell me. Honestly it didn't matter what she read to me. Whether it was a horror-filled murder mystery where the victims are trapped in a mansion on an island; a young count mourning his precious Hero by the grave; a boy running from an escaped convict; or a romantic dinner by the very candlelight with which she read to me; any, and all, of it worked with the shadows provided by the candles she had set up around the room.

I suppose one could say the shadows and the darkness create their own safe place inside my mind. Their watery, slow dance calms my thoughts and reading becomes a pleasure instead of a necessary task. As wonderful as it is to be able to read 2,000 words per minute, reading at a normal pace, absorbing every word, every sentence, every deeper meaning, is a pleasure I don't get to indulge in too often. Well, until recently that is, because the nightmares occur much more frequently now than they ever have before.

The dilaudid pulls at my veins, it begs me to use it, but with the CHEIF's one-year medal in my pocket, resisting that pull becomes easier. I sharpen my focus, narrow my thought process to only that of the words that are splayed on the page. I wonder sometimes what a particular author was thinking when he wrote a specific scene, and then I remember that I am a profiler and I could probably come up with an educated guess with enough research. Getting into the heads of the crazies is what I do, right?

However, some nights when the sleeplessness hits, I can't indulge in my (by now almost nightly) ritual. After all, I don't think my roommate (whoever it is that night) would appreciate it if I lit candles to read by while they were trying to sleep. These nights are harder to deal with; I know if I don't read I'll fall back into the nightmare world. So instead I calm my thoughts. I imagine I'm sitting in my room with the candles lit for another read. I pull up the image of a good book I have read, and word for word, page for page, quietly recite it to myself.

Ah the wonders of having an Eidetic memory.

"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you get what you need." - "You can't always get what you want" Rolling Stones