Member-only story
My Childhood Nightmares
Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream? — Edgar Allen Poe
My childhood was one of fear, terror, and shame because of that my dreams were filled with horrific images.
In them, I was always running from people or trying to fly away. I would look down and somehow without realizing it I would fly too low to the ground, and he was a fingertip away from reaching my foot.
Other times I would try to protect my little sisters. Those dreams were bloody and violent. It was around that same time I started sleepwalking on top of already wetting the bed.
I had an older teenage babysitter who talked to me about lucid dreaming. She said that it might help me but that it wasn’t 100 percent, and I would still have bad dreams.
She told me that sometimes I would be able to tell when a dream was happening and change it or wake up. She told me to ask myself if it’s possible to ask myself if I am dreaming or not. She also asked me what my favorite superhero was, and I told her Spidergirl. She explained that when the monsters come to be Spidergirl.
Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t but in my 11-year-old mind, I finally had a way to fight back. For brief moments in my dreams, I could fight. It was something I could never do in my waking life.
That babysitter gave me a small measure of control. I wonder what happened to her.
SB
