Nightmares

As a teenager, a friend of mine – let’s call her Amanda Amaretto – had repetitive nightmares of running from an unseen assailant. Always she would be just a few steps ahead of him, and as she ran she dreamed that he was stabbing her in the back. She would wake with a violent pain in her spine.

I’ve never had running nightmares. Or falling nightmares. I’ve had shouting nightmares. Nightmares where I’m the subject of an accusation, and I scream and scream that I’m innocent, but no one is listening to me.

Sometimes I have nightmares about corpses. I dream that I am lying or sleeping in bed. And that beneath the bed or in the room below there is a decaying human corpse. I try to get rid of the corpse. But I can’t. It comes back or there is another one, or someone forces me to put it back to hide it. And I have to sleep above it. There is nowhere else to sleep, and I am sleeping in my bed above a decaying corpse.

As a child I used to have a reoccurring nightmare about a big spider that spoke to me and told me he was going to get me and no one could stop him. The first time I met this spider in a dream, he was swinging arrogantly on the stirrup of my rocking horse.

What would childhood be without fear? My over-enthusiastic grandfather was partially to blame, impressing arachnid ferocity upon my sister and I with the dreaded chant; “I am a great big spider and I am going to come and EAT YOU UP!” My mother didn’t help either. Watching a grown adult cringe from a tiny eight-legged insect, urging my father to kill it with a rolled up newspaper, well, that’s enough to teach the impressionable a lesson, have the lesson leech into the subconscious and emerge on the inner side of the night.

I invented The Dream Catalogue to get rid of the spider. I remember The Dream Catalogue distinctly. I would think about it when I had just woken up or I was just about to sleep. The Dream Catalogue was a yellow catalogue with little windows to all of my favourite dreams. It was there that I could fight off potential spider nightmares. If I didn’t want to have that nightmare, I didn’t have to choose it from The Dream Catalogue.

Today I hardly dream at all. I sleep on my front. For some reason that seems to stop me dreaming. I still have nightmares, a few filter through. Often they are disturbing and surreal, and often I wake decidedly undisturbed.

I read horror. I write it too. I suppose I’m fairly acclimatised to nightmares now. And since my dreams are rarely lucid anymore, even in the moment between sleeping and waking, I know when one reality begins and the other ends.