I grew up in a small town in the south, I won’t tell you exactly where because I want you to be able to picture it in your own head. Build my scene the way you want.
I have one sister just a few years older, along with mom and dad who provided for us in a regular middle class home in a regular neighborhood. My earliest memories go back to this house, with a big tree in the front yard and a big fenced in back yard.
As a kid, everything seemed alright to me and to this day I still believe it was, nothing really out of the ordinary. My earliest memories are of dad and I playing catch in the back yard. Like any other dad I assume, he wished that I’d become the next great lefty in the MLB. Meanwhile, I was sitting in right field kicking over ant hills, so much for that. Like any kid my age though, I played in most every little league style game there was. Baseball, basketball, soccer, flag-football, tennis (for about five minutes), and even fencing at one point. But I was never much of an athlete. I was a sporadic little kid who was more distracted by my ability to build with legos or making waterslides with a garden hose to care about sports. In the moment I did what was interesting to me and I loved it, as I think anyone would.
From those early times though, early 2000’s to be more specific, there are certain memories that stick out more than others. One for instance was my sister and the random games she’d come up with. Many of which ended in her favor… Weird how they always worked out in her favor. She’s always been an assertive person, a go-getter and will rarely take no as an answer when she wants to do something. Thats why she’s been good at most everything she’s ever done. But don’t get it twisted, I am beyond proud of my sister in what she’s done in her life and how she’s worked to do it.
As far back as I can remember I always seemed to find a way under her wing. Wether it was during my kid days playing made-up games, or in middle school while I wondered what teachers or peers I should or shouldn’t like. Or through high school, wanting to be as popular as her, trying to fit in with the cooler, younger siblings of her friends. I always seemed to find a way, by choice, under her wing.
So from our kid days, she was the loud fun one and I was the quiet and ever so subtly less fun one. And frankly, it worked out pretty well for us. I liked it that way. And looking back, I think that had a lot to do with my imagination as I was growing up.
I’ve always been a dreamer. And I don’t mean that in a sense of ambitions or goals, though that is also true, I mean it in a sense of actual dreams. Wether it was daydreaming or actual dreams at night, whatever it is, I tend to remember those times more than my actual childhood. One of my favorites was the superman dream. It’s kind of self explanatory but in the dream I’d have the powers of Superman and I’d spend the whole dream flying. None of that fighting crime nonsense, just flying. I always loved that. The feeling of waking up after a good dream just wishing I could go back. But that’s what makes a dream, right? I remember consistently getting in trouble in school or with mom and dad because I’d be daydreaming and not paying attention. But being the dreamer boy didn’t come without its downsides. From what I remember, the nightmares were just as frequent. And it’s the nightmares I remember the most.
It’s those nightmares we all have, falling in our sleep or not being able to run from whatever is chasing us, the things we commonly think of when we say, “nightmare.” But I assume that there’s a few of you that have other specific nightmares in mind. The ones that became repetitive, they got names, they got timelines and they stuck with you. I want to tell you some of mine.
For now I’m only going to talk about two of them, for the third one holds a little more value for a later time. And let it be known that I have no timeline as to when I first started having these nightmares. As far as I’m concerned I might as well have been 4 or 5 years old when they started. But anyway, let’s get to it.
The first one is a little on the short side. It always started with me in front of a crowd of people. I never in the dream know who they were but they were always quiet. I’d be standing about chest deep in a skinny pool, about the width of a swimmers lane and not much longer than the checkout at a grocery store. With the people watching and myself elevated almost above them in this small pool, the water would get deeper and deeper until I had to tread on my own. Unable to grab the sides of a wall, as there were none, I’d feel someones hand push the back of my head, putting my face under the water. I’d fight and fight but could never help myself. And at the point of me drowning, the hand would pull me up but I’d still be unable the breathe. This is when I’d wake up.
The second is one that I still fear having today. This being more frequent than the first, scared me the most, and in some cases it would even find its way into my daydreams. There was really no beginning or end to the dream, it’s just there. but it opens with me being small. Much smaller than you’d probably expect, smaller than an ant and each time I’d have the feeling of being totally powerless. Frequently changing locations, the nightmare had be seeing cracks in the floor as caverns, basketballs and baseballs as gargantuan boulder-like structures just waiting to crush me.
The scenarios were always strange to me. They always had someone I knew closely but feared at the same time. Sometimes it was my youth pastor from church, maybe a teacher, a friend and even my dad. But whoever it was they’d always try to crush me. Their feet, large as skyscrapers, had me running for cover in the cracks of the floor and the channels and caverns of the treads in their shoes. I’d always try to run, but then came the fists. Giant fists that hit the ground like asteroids, never effecting the ground around them but always finding a landing place near me.
Eventually I’d be caught, pinned between the fingers, smaller than an ant and only fearing the size of who was before me. Then came the yelling, it shook everything. At some points I feel like I could see the sound itself. But the words were always the same. They were angry at me for being too small and helpless. They knew all my wrongdoing and were there to crush me. I would be unable to speak throughout the nightmare, wether that was to cry for help or to say sorry. And I’d always wake up when I’d be thrown to the ground, looking up helplessly to see a foot coming to crush me.
And then I’d wake up.