The character belongs to Aaron Sorkin, John Wells Productions, Warner Bros., & NBC. The title's from an R.E.M. song. Standard disclaimers apply. Please send feedback.
I Don't Sleep, I Dream
Violet
She works long hours for lousy pay, a modicum of prestige and just enough power to let her know she doesn't want more. She works long hours and she loves what she does, and that only makes it harder. She works long hours, and sometimes the day gets its teeth into her and sucks her dry.
She goes home to an apartment that's barely lived in; though she tries, she hasn't had the time or energy to make it into a home like the house in Los Angeles. Only a few scattered touches like the Chinese paper hanging over her desk and the candles on the bathroom windowsill save it from being a bachelor pad. She goes home and drops her coat on the back of the couch, sheds shoes and stockings and the rest on the way to the bedroom. She goes home, and it's late, and it's dark, and she's empty, and she throws herself onto her bed.
She wants to close her eyes and be swallowed by the darkness. She wants to black out, because she knows she's got just a few hours before she needs to be awake, alert, and in control again. She wants to lose herself, to let go, to sleep and nothing more.
She doesn't always get what she wants, because she dreams.
She dreams about herself as a little girl. She remembers what it is like to be petite, to look up at giants, to have most of the world outside her reach. Her hands are tiny. Her eyes are huge, and drink in the entire universe. Her brothers tease her for wearing socks with tiny ruffles. Her mother brushes her hair, tugging it a little, making her cry out. "You have to suffer to be beautiful," her mother says, and the slumbering adult inside the remembered child knows that it is true.
She dreams of ordinary things, like sitting at her desk in the middle of the afternoon. Sometimes she is frustrated, climbing a mountain of paper, swimming in a sea of tiny print. Or she is good, so good, solving everything that's wrong with the country and with herself. She has all the answers. When she wakes up, she knows exactly what steps to take to save the world. A few seconds later, she has forgotten, and all she has left is an unsettling feeling of loss, which follows her to the first cup of coffee.
She dreams restlessly about trying to fall asleep and a phone that won't stop ringing. Sometimes, when she wakes up, the phone is actually ringing. Other times it was only in her head.
She dreams about coming home and finding that everything she owns has been stolen, or walking into her Briefing Room and not recognizing a single face. She dreams about tripping over her own feet and landing on her face in front of cameras. In front of diplomats and monarchs. In front of her friends.
She dreams that she's sitting in a bar, under perfect lighting, wearing a perfect dress. Robert DeNiro, perfectly young, lights her cigarette and makes her a perfect martini, touches her between the shoulder blades and calls her Claude. Nervously, she wonders how she can tell him that's not her name, and still wind up in his perfect arms.
She dreams about playing touch football with her brothers on a clear and freezing afternoon, and losing by a dramatic margin every time, and wakes up still hearing her own laughter.
She dreams about sex. She dreams of a man who holds her down, tastes her from her forehead to her ankles, treats her like an object, treats her like a work of art. He whispers her name, growls her name, yells her name, sobs her name. He never wants to let her go. Sometimes he is anonymous. Sometimes he is everyone she's ever had, even the ones she's tried to make herself forget. Sometimes he is one very specific, very real person, and those are the times when she comes awake with tears on her face.
She dreams about flying, and it's very simple, she just steps up into the air and is gone. At the end she drops back into her body, and wakes with an intense awareness of her surroundings, an intense awareness of her flightless human frame.
She dreams she got married at twenty-five or thirty, and it's a perfect fairy tale. Or she's a divorced, depressed woman washing dishes while her children -- always a boy and a girl -- plot in the next room to reunite her with their father, and she doesn't know how to tell them that sometimes there are no right choices.
She dreams and dreams and dreams of work, and isn't always sure that she isn't awake.
She dreams about falling, or running, or throwing herself violently forward, hitting concrete, hitting glass, bleeding, breaking open. She's watching herself collapse, hearing gunfire and squealing metal and the screams of the people she loves. It's her; it's Josh; it's the President; it's a stranger. It's all of them. It's death and it's everywhere and it's breathing on her skin. She wakes up drenched in sweat and panic and shame and hate, and she stands in the shower for a very long time before her breathing is regular again.
She dreams about things that Freud would say were sexual symbols, but she's ready to argue that, because she believes that dream really was about taking a cross-country train trip. That dream really was about spelunking. That dream really was about burying herself in the snow.
She wakes up when the alarm goes off, when the sunlight pricks her eyelids, when the man beside her nibbles her collarbone, when her internal clock kicks in. She wakes up scared, lost, and trembling, or she wakes up warm, nostalgic, feeling loved. She wakes up and gives herself a few seconds before she pushes the covers away and starts her life again.
She wakes up and she goes on.
She works long hours for lousy pay, high stress, and hope. She goes home to a place that's barely a home, but her office usually makes up for the rest. She wants to find peace. She doesn't always get what she wants.
She dreams. Sometimes, she finds herself.
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