Night Terrors

The nightmares are back. I used to have them as a child but all of a sudden they have returned. They always come deep in the night, late enough for there to be total silence in our little suburb but not early enough to be comforted by the rosy fingers of dawn. Sometimes it’s just an anxiety from the real world, my boss summoning me to her office to tell me how bad I am at my job or something similar. Other times it’s a proper gruesome death, like the many poisoned spears of an indigenous tribe piercing right into my chest. Or sometimes it’s just plain surreal, a figure with a plastic marionette face lurking outside an abandoned train carriage.

I don’t really know why my brain is doing this to me. It tricks itself, promising each night that there will be more terrible dreams and then not delivering on its promise. It gives itself a false sense of security. And when it least expects, it conjures up another horror and I find myself waking up in great fear or anxiety.

As a child, they were a very real part of my every day life. I’d go to sleep and know that more than likely the big black dog, the wolf, would visit me in my sleep. It would spring up from the mysterious world under the radiator and seek to devour me, time and time again. Eventually though I worked out how to beat it, I could imagine my way out of its clutches. At first my Father would appear and mutter some incomprehensible magic words and the wolf would retreat back from whence it came. Then I learnt to beat it myself- grab it by the tail, walk out into the back garden and throw it with my great dream-strength over the top of the house. Or simply turn the tables and devour the devourer.

This is pretty much the image that my childhood nightmares conjured.

These dreams stopped just before I became a teenager and I’ve not really had nightmares since then. But now they are back with a vengeance and I really don’t know why.

It’s not like my life is stressful or anything at the moment. Things aren’t exactly how I’d like them to be but in no way are they bad. You would have thought when my life was falling apart a year ago my nightmares would flair up but I think my imagination couldn’t actually come up with anything worse than the stress I was already dealing with.

The real-life anxiety ones at least make some sort of sense. It doesn’t take a psychologist to work out that having a dream where my boss tells me I am useless probably means I am insecure about being good at my job. I knew that anyway, without the dream. I am insecure about pretty much everything really. I am very much a person who is not happy with who I am and I feel that I have yet to find something I am actually talented at. There aren’t that many things I’m even competent at.

I can sort of see where the inspiration for the surreal ones come from. I’m a sci-fi fan and a lot of what I watch and read involves all kinds of aliens and monsters. The thing is though, I’m not someone who gets scared by them. I sit happily watching all sorts of horrors on screen and when it finishes I don’t really think about it. And my dreams don’t really use the events of TV shows or films. They usually only use the tiniest detail from them, in a completely different context which is for some reason personally terrifying to me. The only event my brain has copied in a dream is a zombie apocalypse and it can make it far more scary than anything The Walking Dead can manage. As my nightmares go, a zombie apocalypse on is not really very scary at all.

My only theory is these things are a sort of manifestation of my inner turmoil. It’s the anxiety, the insecurity and the feeling of edge brought to the fore and made worse in whatever bizarre way my brain can come up with to make them worse. When I wake up from one of my nightmares I feel like I am feeling the full emotion that my mind is supressing most of the time. The fear, the out of depth-ness. It’s how I seem to be living my life at the moment.

I’m a long way from comfortable. Sure, sat in my bedroom, my safe place I am definitely comfortable. To an extent I am anywhere at home. But once I step out into the world the unease pours into me. It’s a horrible feeling and I really don’t know how to get rid of it.

I think that was a very dramatic post. I wonder how insane it made me sound to someone else. I suppose only you can answer that. It is now time for me to go to bed and I suspect writing a blog post all about the nightmares I keep having isn’t really the best activity to do before bed…