I've always had nightmares, pretty frequently, as far back as I can visualize. Four years old?
Three or four nights a week, I did and do remember them, anyway. My girlfriend tells me I wake up screaming pretty much every other night. When I was a little kid, it was usually dying by atomic annihilation. Why the bombs were falling on Little Falls, NY pop 4500 at the edge of the Adirondack Mountains... well... I guess I was a kid and kids don't think that part through.
I was able to read at an early high school level at five but... just because I understood the sentences and words and such part by part, didn't mean I had the emotional maturity or worldliness to fully comprehend the concepts I was reading in the New York Times to try and prove I was as smart as the adults. I don't think a little kid was supposed to be doing that and it may have screwed me up.
As I got older, they became mainly about getting chased briefly by a man with a shotgun and then being shot at short range in the head and... waking up screaming. The click, the flash of powder and... the screaming.
Occasionally, the nightmare would be that I was on one of those enclosed waterslides that's a pipe? And... when I get to the bottom, it's plugged up and... the water keeps filling up and the people keep coming and crushing me more and more and... eventually, I drown, pinned down by fifteen or twenty people.
Occasionally, I'd be forcibly absorbed into a cybernetic collective consciousness such as the Borg or the Phalnax or so on.
But usually the gun thing. Still happens. A little less frequently, lately.
This isn't to say that I don't have... non-nightmares, though. I can't say dreams, exactly, because dream suggests a nearcomplete positivity at least from time to time. Most of my non-nightmare dreams I'm... wandering through landscapes, semi-interacting with the world, semi-not.
I'll win a scratch-ticket lottery every few weeks in my dreams and... realize it's a dream and I'm not actually extricated from my worries by wealth and... I'll just wake up depressed. My childhood pets will show up a lot... except each of them cloned ten or fifteen times over. Just an army of my childhood pets.
When things completely outrageous like that happen, my dad shows up in my dream and tells me that these things are impossible, so I must be dreaming and... so I wake up, kinda depressed at the thought that magic cannot actually happen.
But the usual setting for my non-nightmares is... this conglomeration of the malls I would go to as a child, the malls of... Utica and... Syracuse and Albany. All kind of layered over each other, smushed together. And I just wander around in the places I did as a child, sort of unnoticed by the shoppers and the workers, like I'm the ghost instead of them...
Over my lifetime, the mall has kept changing slowly. Deteriorating. The good stores are replaced by... Dollar Stores or... flea markets or... nothing at all. The second floor, the middle has actually crumbled out and you have to use little catwalks and boards to get from store to store to... not fall through into a pretzel stand or the children's play area with all the gumball machines.
And I still dream it sometimes. Wandering through the second-rate replacements of the stores and halls I walked as a child, to get a comic book or a Smashing Pumpkins album, for hours a night unnoticed by the spirits and... then I wake up. Though the gun nightmare is the more prevalent.
Yeah, I don't enjoy sleeping much, I guess.
...I wrote a lot more than I intended to.
My point is... not remembering your dreams may not have been the curse you thought it was. If I remembered them less, I'd probably be able to fall asleep before two in the morning without taking a double-dose of diphenhydramine.
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Topic: Random comic button added (Read 6822 times)