Worse than things going bump in the night....

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I’ve been putting off this subject post for a long time now, seeing as how nightmares are a rather personal thing.  I feel that it is somewhat appropriate though that I post this today, seeing as this is my youngest sister Lucie’s birthday. 

Lucie is a fan of horror movies and I am not.  Luckily we have enough in common to compensate for this when we get together and want to watch something.  There are times, however, that she asks for something horror themed and I know that I am in for that creepy feeling as I walk to my car to head for home.  

You see, Lucie’s taste in horror is more along the lines of demons, ghosties and human possession rather than your average serial killer chopping up hitchhikers type of fare.  This is a bother for me in that I truly believe that there is more out there than what is easily seen, and I do believe that you can invite the wrong sort of feeling into your home when you embrace that kind of thing.

But I digress.  I wasn’t actually going to speak about horror movies today.

You would think that with my aversion to horror flicks that my nightmares would be tinted with ghouls and menacing figures, but most often they are not.  I rarely have nightmares, but when I do they are things that linger long afterwards.  You see my nightmares are of loss: the loss of my family, the loss of my friends… the loss of the people that matter most to me.

I know people will probably think heaps about my psyche and about how I have abandonment issues or some such garbage (I firmly do not believe in dream interpretation).  Rather, I believe it is because my family means everything to me, and it is precious.  It is something that I would fight to protect, so a dream where I am helpless to do anything is truly the worst horror that I can come up with.

Or so I thought...

So what does this have to do with my sister?  Well, I was 20 when she was born.  I watched my mom (who was in her 40’s at the time) struggle with health issues related to the pregnancy.  Mom had already lost a child in a previous pregnancy and there was of course that worry added to everything else.  The worst nightmares I ever had were during this period of time and one still haunts me even now, decades later.

In the dream I am faced by my mother and she is accusing me.  I am sobbing and trying in vain to apologize and find myself saying “it was an accident”.  In the dream I am responsible for the death of my brother, the child that in real life was stillborn (I won’t go into details because it isn’t important and also because it is very disturbing), but it was a highly detailed dream that carried over into the waking world, for when I awoke I was filled with the horror that I had actually committed murder.  

Needless to say I was up for the rest of the night….

I still find myself waking on occasion shaking and crying and filled with a conviction that I truly have killed someone; a feeling so real that I have to get up and walk away from the bed.  It takes time for reality to sink back in and allow me to calm down and reassure myself that it was only a dream and that I am not some horrible monster who has carelessly destroyed the life of an innocent baby and ripped a family apart in grief.

I have a good idea of what triggered this dream (something quite innocent actually) but it is something that I wish I could lose. To be haunted by something that has never happened is a terrible feeling. The fact that it has morphed over the years into something I wake up from only to find that I am still being accused (and realize upon waking for real that I only dreamt I had awoken) is just one more cruel twist of the knife.

Who knows, maybe it has served to make me a little more cautious than I would have been, but I can’t help but wonder if my mind could have come up with a nicer way of going about it.

Something involving prancing pastel ponies and orchards full of candy corn trees perhaps?