I was a really anxious little kid, who suffered from frequent panic attacks that would come out of the blue and have me go from being perfectly fine one minute to violently throwing up/dry-retching at any time of the day - most commonly, at night. So many weird things scared me, and as these things often do, they showed up in my dreams.
For example, as a really little kid (like 5 or so) I had a vivid dream of being tickled by scarecrows after they cornered me in my bedroom closet. They didn't kill me or try to hurt me in any other way - they just tickled me in the exact place I hated being tickled: my neck. I do recall that this dream happened sometime around Halloween, which might explain the scarecrows (I think I went to a corn maze or something around this time that had a few of them as decoration). What all the rest of the stuff meant, I have no idea. But the memory still sticks with me, vividly, almost 20 years later.
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| so terrifying |
Looking back on that, I am both a bit amused by and sad about that dream, because compared to Real Stuff that happened later, and other certain nightmares I have had (which we will get to in a sec), it was really innocent and not actually all that scary at all. I mean, I distinctly remember these scarecrows not actually wishing me any kind of ill will - they just wanted to tickle me. But I think my terror at being tickled (specifically, on my neck) came from a fear of having my space violated and having no control over what happened to me, no matter how hard I tried to hide. I wasn't ever molested or abused or anything (for which I am incredibly thankful), but I think at this time I was really scared of people doing bad things to me - what bad things, I don't know, just bad things. I think this was a combination of common childhood frustration of having no say over what happens to you and some paranoia from my anxiety. It was a very "adult" kind of fear, being processed by the mind of a little kid.
I remember going to my mom and telling her about this dream, and she told me to imagine myself just floating up into the air and away from the scary stuff, going so far up and up until the scarecrows and everything that was bugging me became small and tiny. Looking back on that, writing about it, I am just now realizing just how creative and deeply empathetic that answer actually was. My mom experiences strong anxiety as well (she often jokes that I "came by it honestly"), and she knew how I felt. Just because I was a little kid, it didn't mean that my fears weren't valid. I mean, my anxiety wasn't really grounded in reality, but it was messing with my brain in a very real way, and the best way to address it was to remember that I was actually in control - not my fear.
Of course, I didn't actually understand this until much, much, muuuuuuch later, as a young adult. And by that point, I had both Real Life Stuff and more nightmares happen to me. And the one that I remember the most distinctly - the one that still sends chills down my spine and makes me sleep with the light on at night, as a 24-year-old college almost-graduate - came sometime early in my high school career, during either my freshman or sophomore year.
So, way past the tickling scarecrows in my closet.
At the time, I had moved into my own room after sharing with my little sister for the first 14 years of my life. The room I got was the one my older brother (JOHN) had lived in before leaving on his mission. He had definitely put his own stamp on it, the most noteworthy of which were the CDs he glued to the ceiling for some reason and the words painted on the wall in eerie green glow-in-the-dark paint. I have absolutely no idea what was going through his head when he did that, but after a few days of being really creeped out by the word "GONE" painted in gigantic letters on the wall right across from my bed, I covered them up with posters.
In addition to...that....there were two other things about this room that creeped me out: 1) the closet, which had sliding mirror doors that always left the closet at least half-covered, thus providing the perfect hiding spot for any psychotic ax-wielding intruders that wanted to murder me, and also freaking me out when I had to get up to go to the bathroom at night and mistaking my reflection for another person in the room; and 2) the window. I was on the ground floor, and it overlooked the front yard. There were these gigantic wind chimes right by the front door, that would chime alarmingly at the slightest breeze, and bang against the wall during particularly large squalls. Additionally, there were coyotes that would sometimes come and howl right outside my window, and a gigantic rosemary bush that would tap on the glass whenever there was wind.
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| Why would someone invent this |
To top it all off, this was the darkest room in the whole house (apart from the guest room/my younger sisters' bedroom, which has stories of its own that I might save for another blog post), and I could hear even the quietest steps whenever someone approached the front door.
With all this going on, I wasn't even the least bit scared of the spiders living in my bedside lamp.
In short, it was the perfect room to have nightmares in. Even after sleeping in there for five years, I still kept a light on at night, and had a fan going full blast to drown out any creepy noises. At the beginning of my time there, my mom often said that I could move back to sharing a room with my sister if I wanted, but I was really stubborn and did not want to admit defeat. I will say this for my teenage self: I may have had an anxiety disorder, but I was no wuss.
And I'd like to think that, over time, I made the room enough of my own that it wasn't so scary. Despite all of the nightmare-inducing noises and shadows and ghostly glowing letters, I really came to love that room.
Of course, that didn't mean it didn't give me nightmares, which is what we're talking about.
The nightmare in question actually had two parts. I was in a room that was very similar to my bedroom, very dimly lit, at night. The closet mirror doors were there, and I could see my reflection in them. There were other people in the room with me. Well, "people". They were actually aliens. But they were invisible. I think. It's hard to remember. Anyway, I was in there with them, and they were all walking around and talking about...something. I don't know. I still remember what these aliens looked like: they were tall, with back-bent animal legs, slimy-looking, semi-translucent light green skin, tall spines growing down their head and back like a Mohawk, and long tails. I can't remember what their faces looked like, only that they were vaguely human-like.
(Actually, they looked pretty similar to the xenomorphs from the Alien series. But somehow way creepier.)
What I was doing in that room with these aliens, I have no idea. I just knew that they scared me and I did not want to be with them. But then I turned around and looked in the mirror, and saw one of them looking back at me. Plot twist, I had turned into one of them somehow.
(no, I have never seen District 9, stop asking)
When I saw that reflection, I was filled with this deep terror, such as I had never ever felt before in my life, or since. I have no idea where this reaction came from, or why I only felt it then. But ever since then, I've had a deep-seated fear of gigantic eyes.
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| STOP LOOKING AT ME |
Despite the intense terror I was feeling, I did not wake up. Instead, the dream transitioned to another scene, where I was back to being human and sitting in my bedroom. Again, it was nighttime, and the room was dimly lit. I was on my bed, able to turn my head but unable to otherwise move. I was aware of another presence in my room, an invisible one. I didn't know what it was, exactly, but I knew that it was evil and that it wanted to hurt me. It was toying with me first, though. It went around the room, turning on my CD player, rattling the mirrors, messing with my lamp - small things, to let me know it was still there, and that I couldn't get away.
I woke up before it did anything to me, but I was absolutely terrified. It took me a while to realize that the dream wasn't real. There was no way that I was going to sleep for the rest of the night, and I hardly slept at all for the next few days. I got up, shaking, and like a little kid I went and knocked on my parents' door. My dad answered, sleepy and not happy, and in an embarrassed, shaky voice I told him that I'd had a nightmare and couldn't sleep. I couldn't say for sure why I went to my mom and dad for comfort in the middle of the night - I guess, for a few minutes, I was back to being a little kid again, hoping for someone to stay up with me when I had panic attacks at night.
My dad took a different approach, though (he had work early in the morning and needed his sleep), and told me that dreams are just dreams, and that they aren't reality. I was safe, no one was trying to hurt me, and things would feel better by morning. I agreed unhappily. With that, I went back to my room. And then to the bathroom. Where I sat for the rest of the night. With the light on.
(the bathroom was my safe place, in case you were wondering. It was small, brightly lit, and had no hidden spaces or windows. Perfect for panic recovery.)
This nightmare was different from all others that I had had in that it actually kind of changed me. I was going through a really difficult time back then, and was battling severe depression. I hated school, didn't have many friends, and was worried about my future. In a weird way, I was scared of my anxiety - I was scared that it was going to hold me back, that I would never be able to live on my own or hold down a job or even go to college, that I would die alone, that people would think I was crazy, that I really was nothing more than some stupid, slow kid who couldn't handle real life. Back then, it was a malevolent presence in my mind, about to gobble me up at any second. It became my own personal boogeyman, that followed me around every day.
I can't say for sure if that's really the definitive source for this really scary dream I had, or if it really was just my brain making up crap, but....that was oddly specific crap. And it is crap I haven't been able to completely forget, a little over a decade later.
Whatever it was, I changed a little bit after that. I mean, I still hated school, still didn't have a lot of friends (apart from my best friends Elizabeth and Ellie whom I will love and cherish forever for sticking with me despite my weirdness), and I was still afraid of what might happen in the future. But after this dream, I think something started turning in my brain, slowly going forward until it gained momentum. I continued grimly through high school, had a few more episodes with panic and depression, and began to look at my options after graduation. With the feeling of jumping into thin air with absolutely no guarantee of a safe landing, I signed up to go to Russia as a volunteer English teacher right after I graduated, not knowing anyone else who was going and or even a tiny bit of Russian. I determinedly applied only to out-of-state colleges, with the intention of getting an art degree. I think my goal at the time was to get myself as far outside of my comfort zone as I could possibly get, put myself in a situation so terrifying that I'd never be scared or anxious again after experiencing it.
It kind of worked.
I mean, I'm sitting here now, in Idaho, a few hundred miles from home, about to graduate with a degree in Illustration, after being an English teacher in Russia and a full-time missionary in Arizona. So something went right.
I still have panic attacks from time to time, of course. But they're small ones. I don't throw up anymore. Which is nice.
Since then, I've come to realize that there isn't a boogeyman in my head that wants to eat me. The boogeyman is (to put it pretentiously) me. It is a part of me.. It is not a separate entity that is trying to hurt me. And while I have no control over anyone else or what they do, I have control over me.
That's the moral here, I guess. Which I did NOT intend to be writing about when I started this post. I began writing this because I watched a video on BuzzFeed about nightmare interpretation and remembered this fun little nugget from my past. So I thought it'd be interesting to revisit this and then ask other people what life-changing sorts of nightmares they've had. Or maybe just weird nightmares. We've already talked about tickling scarecrows, so there's really no limit to weirdness here.
