Let’s talk for a moment about nightmares. I haven't had a proper nightmare in many years. Not since the night I went to the place of the elves in my dreams and learned how to fight back in them. That of course, did not happen until I was already an adult so we will talk about nightmares as they have to do with my childhood and one of the early causes of my struggles with sleep as well as mental illness.

            I could not say what my first nightmare was. I remember when they started. I was still very young, too young yet to have started kindergarten. One night all of the shadows were darker and more scary. Perhaps my brother had told me of the boogeyman or perhaps it was when we started going to church and learned about demons but in any event, there came a day where direct fear for my existence came into my life.

            At this time the long naps that led into tomorrow disappeared and so too did my ability to find sleep easily and sleep through the night. Now, every time the lights when dark the monsters would come out. Still hiding just on the outer edge of my vision.

            Some time passed and I learned some “facts” about the world from my family. Things like witches are evil worshipers of the devil who sell their souls and the like and now you have the setting for my most memorable nightmare.

            It began with me, just barely seven or eight years old on the playground at my elementary school. It must have been around the time that the Pokémon franchise was just becoming popular because in the dream I was wearing the hat and gloves of the main character, but my starter was a squirtle.

            I recall seeing a tall adult woman dressed in a black dress standing on the blacktop next to the playground. As if drawn in by a magnet I found myself approaching where she was standing. Upon seeing that I had pokeballs she exclaimed that since I was a trainer, I could not refuse a duel and began to smile.

          “Squirtle! I choose you!” I called out and threw forward the pokeball. There was a flash of light and a squirtle appeared. When the woman threw her pokeball an adult male human came out of it.

            It was at that moment that I realized that something was horribly wrong. Pokeballs were meant to hold pokemon not people and at that time things started to drastically change around me. I found myself trapped under a dome climber, which didn’t previously exist on the playground and then she and three men who all came out of pokeball all started climbing on the outside, meanwhile the sky was darkening and the world taking on that so noticeable nightmare tinge where you know fear all the way through your bones.

            The next thing I knew I was falling through the floor and I encountered a change of location. When the landscape around me had once again settled I found myself in a peculiar sort of swamp where the ground was made of quilts in their entirety. There were also a great many gnarled old trees and vines as well. The ground was all sorts of dips and hills and because of the composition of the ground, quilts, it was very difficult to walk or run.

            Out of the fog I saw figures coming towards me. As they got closer, I recognized the woman from before as well as her three manservants for lack of a better word. As soon as they saw me, they began to chase me and so I ran.

            It was hard to run, and I constantly felt like I was not getting anywhere but after a while I must have gotten away from them. The only problem was that coming there in front of me were new people. I turned and ran again, and again and again as new shapes emerged. Some of them women, dressed similarly in dark clothing and some were men dressed in vermillion robes.

            After running for a while in my terror-stricken state, I fell down a hole and found myself in a room that seemed to be a living room for these people, and I was surrounded on all sides by these strangely dressed men and women. They were laughing wickedly and talking about how they were going to eat my soul.

            As if through a stroke of inspiration, I exclaimed “You’re a witch!” at the closest one. Immediately she fell to the floor screaming and shrieking. Seeing this the others stopped laughing and turned towards me angrily. I started calling them all witches one by one followed by a scream of “You are all witches!” at which the last ones fell shrieking.

            Grasping the quilts that everything seemed to be made of I climbed back out of the house in the ground and kept running. After a while, the head warlock from within the house appeared before me, simply stepping out from the trees as if he had been waiting for me. He had an empty glassed overlook in his eyes now.

            “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said to me coldly. “You killed their souls and now they have nothing left.” Saying this he started walking towards me. In a panic I looked left and right and shouted at him that he was a witch again.

            It did not work again. It seemed that after disabling them once it no longer had any effect. I took off running. More and more of these witches and warlocks were appearing out of the trees, always trying to catch me but strangely they never needed to run to catch up to me, only walk. Sometimes I was able to buy some time by calling them a witch and others not, I began to tell that the glassed overlook in their eyes was an indicator that it had already been done to them as the all looked very similar.

            I kept running and running until eventually I woke up from this horrible nightmare kicking and sweating and scared. It was dark in my bedroom and even knowing that I should go back to bed for fear of getting in trouble for being up past my bedtime I could not bring myself to go back to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I would see the swamp and the laughing faces of the witches that wanted to eat my soul.

            After an agonizingly long time I went out into the living room where my mother was sleeping on the couch because we only had a one-bedroom trailer and my brother and sister, and I all shared the one bedroom. “Mommy,” I said cautiously, not wanting to get in trouble for being up, “I had a scary dream.”

            Bleary eyed and half awake she turned to look at me and told me to tell her about it. As I described it, she made small scoffing noises and by the time I had finished my account I felt quite foolish as if I had woken her up over nothing. After this she sent me back to bed.

            Having told my mother my nightmare and been made to feel foolish about it I went back to my room slowly, still scared and in the dark, my mother already having fallen back asleep. I crept back into my bed and pulled the covers up to my chin tightly.

            I closed my eyes several times that night, but I was not able to remain asleep for more than a few moments. It didn’t matter though. I knew what response my terror created in my great protector. There was nothing to be afraid of so I should not be afraid.

            It was over a week before I managed to sleep through the night again, after that I was never able to sleep as soundly nor as long as before. Truly my fight with insomnia began during the early parts of my childhood because my parent could not be bothered to deal with my fear properly.

Prioritize your children or they will decide that there is no point in coming to you when they are scared. This may seem trivial for a nightmare, but it sets the tone for everything, people, places, injuries, you name it. If they don’t trust you to protect them when they are scared, they will simply stop coming to you. It does not mean that they, or I in this story, stopped being afraid, only that we stopped coming to the parent for safety.