Today’s one-word prompt: Nightmare
Rare is the day I remember what I dreamed about, but even more rare is the day I have nightmares. I’m the kind of person that wakes up angry and disappointed from a dream or the rare nightmare, because I didn’t resolve anything. I especially hate when I have a nightmare that is so vivid, it may as well be happening right then and there, like the nightmare I’ve had many times about getting stung by bees. I just love the idea of waking up at 3 am screaming because I feel like I got stung in the back of my head by a bee.
For some strange reason, my mind likes to operate in sleep the way it does in wake – complex and unwilling to ease up a little. It’s actually surprising that I don’t have more nightmares knowing this.
One nightmare that I can remember a little too well involved my fourth grade CCD teacher, who was an older woman of the old school teaching kind. She slapped my wrist with her hand in class that year for “misbehaving.” I don’t remember doing more than asking a question. After that, I had recurring nightmares about this teacher being homicidal toward other kids. I was ten years old, and this was a pretty bizarre series of nightmares. Ironically, I was like the one character that always survived the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th movies with my life just barely intact.
I had another nightmare sometime in high school that involved me getting shot. I know this sounds crazy, but it was after the shootings at Columbine High School (I was in 10th grade at the time), and it was a product of worrying about the possibility of this happening at my school. I think I had the fear since the school was in a small town with the woods behind it. We also had people who pulled unplanned fire drills on a regular basis, and always after one of these shooting incidents – there was a similar problem the year before after the Jonesboro school shootings. My nightmares involved trying to escape a shooter whose face I couldn’t see, because it was obscured by shadow. Seriously, it could be light all around the person chasing me, and this individual (gender unknown) is shadowed and chasing me with a gun. Unlike the homicidal teacher nightmare from years earlier, I didn’t escape with my life intact.
Usually though, my nightmares, as I said, involve getting attacked by bees. These are likely the tamest of nightmares, aside from the pain response I’ve had the few times one of these nightmares occur.
Conversely, I did have a bizarre dream once, that involved a newscast (no, seriously, I never figured this one out either) and a newsanchor that said, “We interrupt this dream because you don’t have enough time to have it.” Then my alarm went off. That instant.
And I thought my nightmares were strange…
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