Deleted Scenes 2 – 11
(Historical Notes: Looking back, it’s something of a oddity to see Layla sleeping at all, now that it’s established what happens when she does. Also, to continue what I was saying about the art on these things, if I’d tried to polish up the art on this page to regular comic standards, that wire Layla monstrosity would ABSOLUTELY have turned out a million times less effective the second time around. That’s the sort of horrible magic that only works out once.)
I remember pointing out this scene when it was mentioned in the comic that Layla doesn’t sleep.
Of course, it could be that she did sleep a few times on the ship, but stopped again because the nightmares came back.
Being completely occupied with something can help prevent nightmares, and then suddenly having some free time because your life just got upended can cause them to begin again.
…of course, avoiding stuff with distractions like that is not a healthy way of dealing with things.
That, and/or the stress of everything that’s happened up to this point finally caught up with her and the moment things calmed down a bit, she just completely passed out.
It’s also possible that minor little disruptions in life like nearly being killed by rampaging robots while the planet you’re on is about to be destroyed, or nearly being killed by a fight between Stilez and rampaging robots at an arms dealer convention, or nearly being killed by your ship having all its energy sucked by a holomonstrosity, etc. (which would lead to being separated from Trigger, if either got killed, obviously) might retrigger a bit of trauma once you were starting to get over it – I figure Layla gets one night of sleep right before each next traumatic disaster happens to her. So, there’s distractions that distract you from your trauma, like Alphonse visiting now, and distractions that retraumatize you even worse.
Although, realistically, it’s The Future, there’s probably a dream-away pill you can take so that you don’t dream when you sleep, and she forgets to take it, or doesn’t get to take it when she just falls asleep on the couch or whatever, so those are the nights with the nightmares, and the ones where she gets sleep she remembered to take the anti-dreaming pill.
Oh man, dream pills. Now there’s an idea to play around with…
Ichabod has a veeeeery long rambling story he can tell you about the time he was hired to nitpick the Dream Pill manufacturing labs and had to try one of each variety….