1:53 am - 11.01.2009
Scary Stuff
(Re-copied from an earlier entry)

When I was very young, I remember hearing something about a "red skeleton show".

And at five or six years old, that sounded really scary.

But The Red Skelton Show, the show people were actually talking about?

Not scary at all, it turned out.

And on the door of my bedroom, I had a life-size poster of Bela Lugosi as "Dracula".

With eyes that glowed in the dark.

Scared the crap out of me.

I'm in my house, being chased by a robber, who has already killed my foster mother and older brother (Back then, my nightmares always involved someone - or some thing - chasing me).

We're on the second floor, and I run to the stairs.

But then, instead of running down the stairs, I leap from the top of the staircase.

And the stairs - which were a straight flight of stairs in real life - start twisting and turning, seeming to go on forever.

...until, suddenly, they don't, and I end up in a crumpled heap at the bottom.

I can't move, I can't even scream (Another common feature of my nightmares back then); all I can do is look up...and see the robber at the top of the stairs.

Coming for me.

Cut to a more recent nightmare (More of a "nightmare fragment", really):

I'm sitting on top of a man, my switchblade at his throat.

My other hand is around his wrist, trying to keep him from shooting me with his very large gun.

As we struggle, I keep screaming at him, "Drop the gun, or I'm gonna kill you...!", but he doesn't listen, even as my knife breaks his skin, and a thin trickle of blood starts running down his neck.

He just keeps pushing against my wrist, trying to aim his gun at my head...and he's just a little bit stronger than I am, so slowly but surely, he's winning the struggle.

I won't be able to stop him without killing him.

And then I wake up.

I don't typically have violent dreams - not that I remember, anyway (Most of the time, my dreams involve me wondering around lost backstage, when I'm supposed to be onstage in a play) - but in another dream I had around the same time as my struggle with the gunman, I dreamed I was torturing a man, trying to make him tell me something (I don't know what).

I had broken one of his fingers, but he still wouldn't tell me whatever-it-was I wanted to know, so I told him "Now I'm going to rip out one of your eyeballs..." (Happily, I woke up before I could make good on my promise).

I'm on my bike, my child strapped into a seat behind me, when suddenly, we're hit by a car, that plows into us and just keeps going.

I'm lying in the road, broken and bleeding, barely conscious.

Dying.

I can see the crumpled bike, and the baby's seat, but I can't see the baby...and I don't hear any noise.

I can't move - I'm paralyzed.

And the baby isn't crying.

I hear sirens in the distance.

As everything...goes...black.

Don't know if the guy wanted my bike, my wallet, or both...but happily, he got neither.

Afterward, it frightened me to think, "What if he'd had a knife or a gun? He could have killed me". I imagined myself bleeding to death on the sidewalk, alone, all for the 20 year old bike I was riding and a couple of singles in my wallet.

Then I thought about how, during the actual incident, I kind of ended up with the upper hand, and I started thinking a stranger, and in a way, even scarier thought - "What if I'd ended up killing him?".

What if I'd choked him to death, or smashed his skull on the sidewalk? What if I'd bought my switchblade before this happened, instead of after, and in my terror and panic during the attack, had stabbed him blindly till he stopped struggling with me?

What if, instead of being the victim of a crime, I had become a murderer, all for a twenty-year-old bike and a couple of singles in my wallet?

And the real terror doesn't lie in fantasy scenarios about robbers, or dead babies, or accidentally killing an attacker, but about being alone, about not being able to go forward, but having nothing to go back to, about a meaningless life capped off by a painful, lonely death.

The world can be a scary place.

But it's got nothing on the world inside my head.

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