Alice Bolin’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
I had my first recurring nightmares in preschool. They involved the witch from Disney’s Snow White waiting to snatch me in my laundry room. Sleep is a major mindfuck for most children. I was convinced I didn’t sleep until I was three because I couldn’t remember it. But I’ve had vivid dreams and bad nights since, at least, then.
There was a special I watched on Nickelodeon’s early 1990s educational show, Nick News W5, about kidnapping. One girl they interviewed faked an asthma attack to get away from a stranger. I have so many details like this I’ve held on to. At preschool we read a book called Heckedy Peg about a mysterious crone named Heckedy Peg who comes to some children’s door when their mother is away. “I’m Heckedy Peg, I’ve lost my leg,” she says. When the children let her in, she uses her bad magic to turn them all into food. If their mother can’t guess which child is which, Heckedy Peg is going to make her eat them.
“I’m just not going to think about the book,” I told my teacher about an hour after reading Heckedy Peg, while I was coloring in a picture of some grapes. It may not surprise that my pre-K attempts at administering my own cognitive-behavioral therapy did not stop me from thinking about an almost implausibly macabre children’s book that perfectly combined my two greatest fears. It imploded my existence. I didn’t sleep for several nights. This has happened to me so many times since then, and there isn’t a single one of these experiences that my adult brain has let go of, trivialized. I’m still scared.
*
Some beds I have known. My older brother and I shared bunk beds until I was seven. I preferred the top bunk because from there I could mutilate the popcorn ceiling. When I was in third grade, I moved into my parents’ old room, and into their queen-sized waterbed. “Like a third grader with a waterbed” should be a new idiom along the lines of “nothing gold can stay.” It was only a few months before it was slumped like a dying whale in front of our house, leaking out on the sidewalk. After that I had a series of air mattresses that deflated so quickly that I was often lying on the bare bed frame. Then I had an old single mattress with dagger-sharp springs that would pierce the surface at unexpected moments. It was like sleeping in a booby trap. Through junior high and high school, I slept on a metal frame futon. The crossbars supporting the mattress kept falling off, until there was a large, unsleepable depression sunk in the bed’s right side.
*
I was about nine years old when my bedtime fixation began. I had a friend who went to sleep at 7:30. Even as most of our bedtimes were edging closer to 9:00, this did not strike me as excessively, dorkily early, but rather as intriguingly, exotically early. I began going to sleep earlier and earlier: after The Simpsons, at 8:00, after Jeopardy! at 7:30, after Home Improvement, at 7:00. Then I set my bedtime later and later, at 10:00, 11:00, midnight. I was always interested in how much these patterns could be manipulated, the extremes my body could get used to, what I could train myself to do. I don’t think I’ve really heard sleep disorders discussed the way eating disorders are, but that’s how I see my elementary school sleep compulsions: an attempt to manage a part of my life that always felt out of control. It’s like a formula for a build-your-own anxiety disorder. I was always stressed out by sleep, and obsessed with it.
*
There was a craze that swept my fourth grade class for a book I knew would fuck me up, and I read it anyway. It was a semi-educational collection of “true” ghost stories. The book was meant to be scary, but the narration told its pale, dubious stories a little wearily; it didn’t even buy into its own premise. It told the legendary story of the Fox Sisters, who began the Spiritualist movement in 1850 when they claimed to contact a ghost who communicated through a system of knocking sounds. The book pointed out what frauds the Foxes were; they made the sounds by cracking their knuckles. I also remember a story about a possibly haunted house, the evidence for which included a strange smell on the staircase and a mysterious vision a man had above his bed when waking up in the middle of the night. My tolerance for the creepy was profoundly low. It didn’t take much, just a wedge to let the darkness in.
After I read the book I couldn’t sleep with my door open without seeing a sinister shape in the hallway. I sensed spirits floating in front of and behind me, stalking me; after dark everything took on a queasy glow. This was when I started having trouble sleeping through the night. Every other night I would wake up around three in the morning and stay awake. The next night I would be so exhausted that I would sleep well, setting up an exasperating cycle. On bad nights I would go upstairs and lie down in our living room. I didn’t sleep, but I felt better. Once I counted all the way to one thousand, staring through the spokes of the exercise bicycle.
*
If you don’t think a movie trailer can ruin a person’s life, I invite you to consider the following. Nicole Kidman, in Victorian dress, is working on a needlepoint. She looks up to see the chandelier above her shaking mysteriously. “Sometimes, the world of the dead gets mixed up with the world of the living,” a woman says in voiceover. A little girl is lying in bed staring at the doorknob to her room when it begins to rattle. A little boy is lying in bed when the curtains behind him open in a dramatic woosh. “You told your brother there was someone else in the room,” Nicole Kidman tells the little girl sternly. “There was,” the little girl replies. “Sooner or later, she’ll see them, and then everything will be different,” the voiceover woman says, and we see a frightened Nicole Kidman slowly entering a room in which everything is covered in white sheets. Nicole Kidman whips off the sheets in a frenzy, but finds only furniture. She stares at herself in a mirror she’s uncovered; she sees a door opening slowly behind her.
In rapid montage there is a series of creepy rooms and a figure wrapped in a lacy veil. “What do you want,” Nicole Kidman yells in a dark room, a stained glass window behind her. A hand touches the little boy’s face in bed and he screams. “They’re everywhere. They say this house is theirs,” the little girl tells Nicole Kidman. Nicole Kidman cowers behind a banister. The little girl and little boy run through dark woods and dark hallways. “Could you hear it? There’s someone there,” the little girl says. The picture goes dark. “THE OTHERS” illuminates the screen in glowing letters. Then we are back in the house. An old woman beneath a lacy veil sits on the ground playing with a strange wooden toy. “Where’s my daughter?” Nicole Kidman says. “Are you mad?” the woman says with a child’s voice. “I am your daughter.”
*
I still have not seen The Others. As far as I know, it is a fairly generic, not that scary haunted house movie elevated slightly by its only movie star. But it hit me like a curse at a vulnerable moment, the summer I turned thirteen—its commercials were the scariest things I had ever seen. They infused every second of television watching with peril. The overhead light in my bedroom had been broken for four years, but a little before my thirteenth birthday, one of my friends flipped the light switch, and, mysteriously, it turned on—and it wouldn’t turn back off. This is a common method of torture: I didn’t sleep for a week. It made me fragile, morbid, and a little feral. I had hallucinations. I became convinced that I would die before my birthday in August, and I’d never have to go to ninth grade. That summer brought the catalysts that converted standard-issue puberty and anxiety to crisis. Eventually, in the middle of one night, I stood tiptoe on my window seat and slashed the wires to the light with kitchen shears. The darkness felt like a breathing out.
*
If you don’t forget anything, then you will have evidence for every moment, every situation, that you should not relax. In ninth grade, I stopped sleeping through the night again. I would lie there, paralyzed and terrified, not letting myself move until the sunrise. I saw a TV special once about a woman who had been raped by an intruder at 3:00 AM. This became the time of highest danger, and I would not let my guard down even a little until 4:00 struck. I listened to the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” on repeat, pitifully.
One Wednesday night at Catholic Youth Organization we watched a video about mental illness. It was my very first indication that my experiences from as far back as my memory went were not run of the mill childhood stuff. “Symptoms of anxiety disorder include: constant worry. Difficulty sleeping. Fear of a bad outcome if you don’t do certain things a certain way,” the video explained, and blew my mind. “I think I’m mentally ill,” I told my youth group leader, and he told me to talk to the school counselor. I told my counselor I was tense all the time and I didn’t sleep. “That sounds very hard,” she said, and told me to see a doctor.
*
About a year after that, I told my doctor that I couldn’t stop sleeping. I slept in until 2:00 on weekends. I would come home from school, take a nap, and sleep until morning. He told me my body might be making up for lost time. I had barely slept for so long, so once my mind had calmed down, my body was taking all the rest it could get.
At the end of ninth grade, my friend had me keep a dream journal for a project she was doing on dream interpretation. In the dreams I was wound really tight. I was always screaming. “R. L. had like 5 calculators and I took one and he got mad and screamed,” I wrote. In another entry: “It was after some formal dance and we were sitting on these big wall things. A. touched me and I started screaming.” I remember a dream where I was naked and strapped to a bed in a prison for child molesters. Even after I went to a doctor and a psychologist, after I started sleeping again, the nights were always long, and my journey through the darkness to morning was strange and hard. My recurring dreams never went away; in a way I always knew they were a more fundamental part of me than my fear. “I woke up last night after having a dream about old guys molesting people,” I wrote in my diary in tenth grade, “and I mean, that sounds funny, but really it was scary.”
Tags: alice bolin, anxiety, health, mental health, nightmares, sleep
I too have always had trouble sleeping. I had night terrors, I had/have insomnia, anxiety, nightmares. It has always, since I can remember, taken me at LEAST 45 minutes to fall asleep if not more. My parents never believed me on that, that was fun. On family vacations we’d all share a hotel room and I couldn’t sleep while my parents watched tv in the room. “Just close your eyes and you won’t see the tv” my dad sagely advised me. ::snort::
Real talk – I saw The Others as a grown-ass adult and it scared me, so the trailer didn’t lie on that one. Truly scary ghost story.
I am horrified by the description of your various childhood beds and mattresses. If I could go back in time and deliver your childhood self a tempur-pedic mattress I would.
The “time of highest danger” is so resonant. In elementary school, for me, it was midnight, because of some twisted memory about a Sesame Street movie in which they are locked in a museum and the ghost comes out at midnight. (This recollection has to be manufactured, right?) I had to be asleep by midnight, and of course imposing that boundary often made me too stressed to fall asleep… It went away and then resurfaced in middle school, right after I got my first iPod. Somehow the music alarm got turned on, and defaulted to midnight, so I’d awake every night to hear faint post-hardcore noise tracks playing through my earbuds, and would have to get out of bed and walk across the room to turn it off. Took me months to figure out the cause.
No, I remember that too! Bert and Ernie were stuck in an Egyptian exhibit and at midnight the ghost of a pharaoh would come out. Bert is all whatever Ernie that’s not real and Ernie is like I dunno about that. And then the ghost comes and it’s like pharaoh Ernie and him and regular Ernie dance together. I think at some point Ernie maybe takes his nose off? I’m sure it was meant to be lighthearted and fun but it scared the shit outta me. I was obsessed and afraid of any thing related to ancient Egypt anyway so this just burned into my brain and kept me awake for years. It’s the first thing I remember being really freaked out by. Even after I outgrew being afraid of that particular set of things that feeling of terror stayed and just got applied to other things (many of them still ancient Egypt or ghost related though). Oh man, so many miserable nights!! Thankfully I have mostly outgrown this – and when it occasionally bubbles I just turn on netflix because for some reason I don’t think anything supernatural can happen while star trey voyager is playing.
Holy crap thank you for validating this for me. I totally remember Ernie taking off his nose and that was no small part of the horror. I’m still kind of in shock that I didn’t totally misremember it.
ps right after posting this i went to facebook and the first thing I see is a link to this: http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/tomb…
whyyyyyyy?
YO FUCK THAT SCENE SO MUCH
I actually really loved Don’t Eat the Pictures because I was a big art/Ancient Egypt/Metropolitan Museum nerd, but that scene was very very upsetting. Recently I was watching through Bert & Ernie clips on YouTube and that clip came up, and something very very deep inside me said “NOPE NOPE NOPE!” Every now and then someone brings it up on the Internet, and it’s really validating that it was so scary for other kids too.
Well, but nothing supernatural CAN happen while Voyager is playing, so. You’re good.
excellent. now that my theory has been favorable peer reviewed I will rest easy!
Thank you for confirming this existed and wasn’t just some effed up mental artifact of my morbid childhood. Now to exorcise the demons on youtube.
Not manufactured! That Sesame Street movie is “Don’t Eat The Pictures,” which was definitely one of the VHS tapes I watched over and over again as a child. I didn’t remember the ghost at midnight, but apparently there was a ghost of young Egyptian prince stuck on the mortal plane until Big Bird and Snuffy help him solve a demon’s riddle.
I’m def going to look for this on youtube later!
Thank you so much for placing a name to it! But now I’m questioning whether I’m conflating this and the thing in the other comment, or if they’re both facets of the same movie… Holy repressed memories, Batman
I’m wondering the same thing, it must be online somewhere, we’ll find out soon!
Definitely part of the same movie, you guys. Big Bird/Snuffy is the (weirdly not-scary?) A plot, and the Bert & Ernie nightmare fuel is the dud out of a series of delightful supporting-character adventures.
I am here for all your Don’t Eat the Pictures needs.
Thanks so much for the info, I am now both excited and apprehensive. I’ll youtube this when I get home from work, although I’m scared of what it might reawaken in my psyche.
You should be fine, though it is super-weird to see as an adult. I had also chalked it up to a fabricated memory when I happened upon it again. If you search “Bert and Ernie mummy” on YouTube it comes right up. It may or may not be part of the movie, actually.
I can’t say if it was part of the movie but I definitely remember it being on the show.
One of the earliest nightmares that I can remember having involved Cookie Monster and a shortage of cookies, so he was eating people instead. Thankfully I managed to avoid being eaten by running away and eventually hiding in Oscar’s trashcan.
By this time I’d learnt that telling my mother about nightmares based on TV shows would mean that I wouldn’t be allowed to watch that show anymore (after telling her about one I had that involved giant cockroaches and astroboy), so I was faced with the dilemma of either telling her and not being allowed to watch Sesame Street anymore, allowing myself to fall asleep and having it again (it was a recurring dream) or lying there trying desperately not to fall asleep. That said, Cookie Monster was, and still is, one of my favorite Sesame Street characters.
That ghost prince boy was actually super fine though so that kinda helped.
Oh my, I am so sorry you spent a good part of your childhood sleeping on substandard surfaces! Ouch. Ouch ouch.
This really REALLY struck a chord with me, because I have always been anxious from my earliest memories, and I used to torture myself by reading those weak, limp “ghost stories” and then I would lie awake, trembling with fear at every creak or gust of wind. If it wasn’t ghosts, it was robbers come to sack the house. If it wasn’t those, the house was on fire and I had to be awake to warn everyone. If it wasn’t that, it was that I would die in my sleep somehow. And so on and so forth.
Sleep is such a huge part of our lives that since I’ve settled out my sleep issues (mostly), I’ve become a huge sleep evangelist. Which sounds weird, but whenever I run into people I know having the “oh I got three hours of sleep, I worked so much on that project” “oh I got two because I worked harder” I deliver a humourless lecture on why sleep is so important to us and how there’s no virtue in not sleeping. It screws us up so much.
Now after a mostly-sleepless night last night I’m wanting to go right back to bed.
I need to work on a lecture like that. At my brother’s college graduation the speaker said something along the lines of: “If you’re getting enough sleep, you’re doing something wrong” and I got so angry.
I worked a thankless (and hourly intensive) job for a while, and one of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from one of the mid-level managers: “Go home, go to bed. You don’t get an award for not sleeping.” Which seems stupid, but we’d all been locked into this cycle of one-upping each other in terms of how much sleep we WEREN’T getting as we worked on one huge project or another, and it was just… pointless.
This is really timely, because I saw The Babadook a couple nights ago (highly recommend because it’s a really lovely metaphor about depression/grief/anxiety/parental stress–but SO, so scary), and while I was good the first night after seeing it, my husband went out last night and I did. not. sleep. at. all.
I saw The Others at a friend’s sleepover when I was 14 and it was INDEED TERRIFYING. My friends who had already seen it tried to comfort me by saying (SPOILER) “Oh, it’s nothing to be scared about! She’s not being haunted! SHE is the ghost! See, unscary!” BUT THAT WAS POSSIBLY WORSE OMG I have never forgiven those friends. Never.
Anyway never had night terrors but chronic insomnia from about the age of seven onward (that I have only managed to get a handle on in recent years). Sucks.
Not insomnia related, but I have definitely integrated scary stuff from childhood into full-on, panic-attack-inducing phobias.
1. Any kind of demolition derby/racing/monster truck event: I am convinced there’ll be a crash and I’ll get hit in the eye by a shrapnel and die (from some compendium of scary stories, read at about age 10–definitely not Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark, though, I don’t think)
2. Carnival rides generally, but the swings especially. Same story compendium as above, in which the cables holding a swing on break while the ride is moving, throwing the unsuspecting rider to his/her death
3. Halloween terrors from the frankly unbelievably scary Garfield Halloween special–ghost pirates and Garfield hiding in a cupboard
4. Straight razors, definitely as a result of the movie Murder In The First, in which Kevin Bacon’s Achilles tendons are severed by the warden at Alcatraz
The mind is a fucked-up thing sometimes.
Omg this is great. Irrational childhood fears ahoy.
I have:
-Glass from an explosion that will fall flat into an eye and will eventually cut an eyeball or eyelid
-A shark/dolphin hybrid that jumps bottlenose first down your throat to explode/devour you
-Being injected by something that makes your limbs blow off
-Having a knife and being unable to stop stabbing myself to feel the really cold knife in my really warm leg
-Kneeling on nails and then have them be in my knees (I did not know physics, this seemed very real??)
-Watching a barbed wire fence go by from a car and being unable to not imagine a person/animal being dragged along said barbed wire at such speeds
-Touching the fake velvet clothing hangers EWWWWWWW
Wait, how long is it supposed to take to fall asleep? I’ve always taken forever to fall asleep and I loathe the waiting period – my brain won’t shut up, and I either start thinking about awful every day things like work, awful past things like that fucking time I did a book report in an English accent WHY WHY WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, or The Ring which I saw literally 12 years ago and still scares the crap out of me because she is under my bed I know it I know it fuuuuuuck.
I used to make my mom read me books until as late as possible because I was terrified of the house catching fire while I slept; I couldn’t get out of bed when it was dark because there were wolves waiting to bite my ankles; I still won’t sleep in an empty house because I’m convinced I will be attacked by an intruder.
I don’t think I realized until now how much anxiety I have around sleeping! Thank God for weed and Netflix.
I’m the same way! I’ve read that if you don’t fall asleep within 10-15 minutes you should get out of bed and do something else until you feel tired but, like, that means I would literally never go to bed…
10-15 minutes seems really short. I usually have no problems falling asleep, but it still takes me 10-20 minutes to get my head squared away properly to fall asleep and staring at the clock would just make it take longer.
That seems so short, it’s never taken me less than half an hour, usually closer to 50mins -but I’ve seen people do it and want to learn their secrets…
It used to take me that long, then I got a job that meant a lot of very physical work with poor sleeping conditions so my body decided to not waste a single minute of sleep. That, and fancy custom earplugs that block out all sound. I’m still jealous of some of my coworkers who can literally fall asleep on a pile of rocks if they get to sit down for 10 minutes.
In my experience, it involves not turning the lights out until I’ve dropped my book on the floor at least twice. I don’t know if that’s an improvement.
Maybe that can be an improvement. I used to hear the voice from my cloth dryer at mid night.
Who can fall asleep within 15 minutes? It takes me at least 30 minutes, I think, and that’s much better than it used to be – as a child/teenager I would lie awake for at least an hour most nights.
I always took a long time to fall asleep, but after a bad breakup, I had a few panic attacks in bed, and ever since, the idea of laying my head on a pillow and just… waiting is terrifying, thank god for laptops, iPads, NetFlix and ASMR videos. Also thank god for melatonin and those sleep-eze things that are basically just benadryl.
Those people who are like BAN SCREENS FROM YOUR BEDROOM…. I’m like welp, I’ve banned night-time panic attacks from my bedroom you fuck.
I have to distract myself from falling asleep – if I realise I’m falling asleep I wake up in a panic because I think I’m dying or something. I have to listen to documentaries or audiobooks on my phone to keep my mind off it, but they have to be kind of dull so I don’t get engrossed and stay up ;).
All of my childhood memories involve my life-ruining sleep disorder. It took me until about three years ago to finally get a prescription for Ambien, which has been a wonder drug ever since. I was so hesitant to try, because I didn’t want to “abuse” it – it took a doctor grabbing me by the shoulders, looking me in the eye, and saying “YOU ARE THE PERSON WE INVENTED IT FOR” before I would take it. Thank god I did, I can’t believe I was willing to continue living the way I was – I simply had no frame of reference. I’d never known a life of regular, restful sleep. My most lucid childhood memory involves stacking up a pile of about 30-35 Babysitters Club books and reading my way until sunrise. This continued through college, where twice I managed to go four days without sleep. Four days! The hallucinations begin on day 3. One time day 3 was New Year’s Eve and I’d been watching an SVU marathon all day, so when my brain cracked in half I was convinced I had been raped and was just now remembering it. The other, normal part of my brain knew that wasn’t true and was worried I was going insane. I wish more people talked about sleep disorders. Sleep and the lack thereof dominated, ruled, and ruined my life for about 23 years.
Oh, man, that’s some extreme anxiety and sleep issues. I’m so glad you realized this wasn’t normal and got help.
I also realized in high school that I should not watch horror movies, period, because my imagination wanted to give me a fucking heart attack at night. The Ring was particularly awful, of course, but so was Darkness Falls — anything about stuff lying in wait for the dark, just out of sight.
Now I can only watch them if they’re funny-bad and also not rated R.
I’ve had a similar experience with horror movies triggering periods of anxiety disorder. Mine started in the 9th grade, when we all took a trip to Disneyland for a theater workshop on one of those awesome tour buses with the TVs and stuff. Of course, once it got dark, we HAD to watch The Grudge. I didn’t even watch the thing (I was savvy enough to know watching it would bother me), but the damn sound the spirit thing makes was enough to prevent me from falling asleep quickly for a loooooong time (though thankfully, once I fall asleep, I stay asleep and I rarely have nightmares). That entire next summer, I slept out on the couch in the living room, and only went back to my own bed once the sun started to rise. I sort of got over it once school started, but I still slept out on the couch a lot. The cycle repeated the next summer, and would have continued the year after that had I not chosen to go to Girl Scout camp the weekend that the rest of the kids were heading off to the workshop. I had a much easier time that summer, and plus that was the year I decided to get help for my anxiety about fire drills so I started taking anxiety medication.
Even now in my own college apartment, I have to check under my bed and in my closet like a little kid before I go to bed and I sleep with a billion stuffed animals and pillows to prevent something scary from getting me. During the day, I am a rational woman of science but at night I turn into a superstitious worrying lady.
Brains, man. They’re strange little organs.
I have Night Terrors often. I have had them since childhood and I’m certain most are because of frightening dark men, clown and doll tropes. Also, I have an inexplicable and irrational fear of combustibles and burning. Ever since I was tiny I’ve been afraid of being burnt by water or fire. It extends to disliking using certain words that are associated with combustibles and burning. I wish I could explain it, as far as I know, I’ve never been burnt by anyone or anything.
Lately, I have started using a white noise app that I can mix a with pre-sleep or dreaming binaural. I am finally not waking up within an half hour of sleep thinking I’m seeing things (dark man shapes) in my room. While that part is really nice, to replace my night terrors I have had awful nightmares. WTF, brain. Even with your brain, no good deed goes unpunished.
I don’t have sleep issues, but I am So Easily Creeped Out, and it was much worse when I was a teenager. Aliens were the thing that freaked me out the most–but only when you couldn’t actually see them, it was just the idea that they might be there. The ads and theme music for X-Files freaked me out SO BAD, so I never ever watched it. (And missed out on a great show, or so I’ve been told.) Ghosts freaked me out, and so did the show Are You Afraid of the Dark. Just…everything gave me those horrible creeps.
As an adult I made the mistake of watching the movie Signs and I screamed a bunch of times. And then slept with the light on for two weeks.
I hate horror, and creepy things, and I always thought I was just oversensitive, but I HATE them for making me not sleep. And I had mostly nice and comfortable beds, and nice parents, and nightlights as long as I needed them, and othe such comforts.
Nightmares just put such a crimp in the following day, and the whole week suffers in some ways. I fight them by sleeping cold (being hot definitely makes things worse for me) and keeping a window open, and having enough light to see around if I wake in the middle of the night.
This really resonated with me, especially the part about The Others. As I kid I saw a trailer for Childs Play and spent most of the next decade sleeping on the floor next to my parents’ bed, or with all the lights in my room on.
It can be very frustrating to have such extreme reactions to horror. My boyfriend compares it to an allergy, only instead of my face or airways swelling up when I’m exposed to peanuts, my stupid brain (metaphorically) swells with nonsense that makes it impossible to sleep when I’m exposed to anything remotely creepy.
I work in the film/television industry and can tell you exactly what is happening in a scene to make me scared, but critiquing the lighting or counting down to the jump scare doesn’t do a damn thing hours later when I’m convinced that there’s something in my closet waiting to murder me. The last time I saw a horror movie it took about nine months for me to stop thinking about a particular ghost every single night as I was trying to fall asleep.
Sometimes I feel like an idiot for being a bonafide adult who is still afraid of the dark. Your sleep issues and mine may be different, but it is nice to hear from others who were truly scarred by ill-timed childhood movie trailers or picture books.
Hello, fellow adult still afraid of the dark here! I get the feeling there’s a lot of other people out there with similar fears, but we all get shamed into not talking about it. *shakes fist at society*
Oh man. I had such a hard time with sleep when I was younger. And, also, now, if I let myself think about it too much, which is basically at all. I was really depressed as a kid/teen and when I tried to talk about it with my mom she was completely dismissive – what did I have to complain about, right? So basically I didn’t sleep properly for a couple decades. My sleeplessness came in two flavors: the sads and the scareds. The house would shut down for the night and I would be consumed with loneliness and despair about death and that dumb thing I said in English class. Or, I would become CERTAIN that there were evil, otherworldly beings watching me and if I closed my eyes for even a second, it would take advantage of my inattention to drag me to hell. Like ya do.
I always put on tv in the background for company. Like, there are other people alive! I am listening to them speaking, therefore we are interacting, I am not alone!/Nothing bad happens while re-runs of sitcoms are playing! I even brought a mini tv to college and cuddled it under my covers so the light wouldn’t bother my roommate (no sound, either, I’m not a monster).
It’s gotten waaaay better over the years, and I feel really lucky about that. I found I really really feel better about sleeping if there are other people around, preferably in the same room, but ‘nearby making noises’ works for me too. I’ve gotten my OCD more under control, and I use the same CBT stuff to Just Say No…to thinking in bed. Of course, having a permanent bed partner helped me hugely, too – I am a needy sleeper, I guess. My previous high point towards the end of college was ‘I can sleep pretty much ok, if I unplug my computer with Netflix on I’ll probably fall asleep before it does’ and now it’s more like ‘Hmm, I’m sleepy….zzzzzz.’ I am so grateful that I can sleep now. My bed partner has trouble with insomnia, and no amount of snugs have budged it for him :
I am always interested to hear about other people’s fears and nightmares related to media they consume because I 100% have never experienced that at all (except, sometimes, with things that trigger me, but even then it doesn’t usually make it into my dreams in a clear causal way). I was definitely the kid who had to really consciously remember to practice empathy when a cousin or friend was freaked out by a scary movie, because they never did more than startle or disgust me temporarily.
I, uh, am just a bit more understanding than when I was 10, so I’m not trying to say, “Haha, isn’t it weird how you humans have your strange nightmares, while I am elevated above that!” Rather, I’ve had a shit ton of anxiety and sleep issues since I was 8, so I more find it strange/interesting that social anxiety will work its way into my dreams (hello, stressors from a decade ago that still make regular nighttime appearances!) but that horror is a total null for me.
Oof, I could have written this – down to the bed with the messed up slats so the mattress falls down. I’ve had a rebound of the worst insomnia since I came off my antidepressants six months ago, and I’m waiting to see if the new ones will do anything to ease the horrible, long, scary, sleepless nights.
I’m not sure if I had dreams exactly – just horrible, waking fantasies and intrusive thoughts. I used to start getting scared of going to bed at three in the afternoon, and spend the rest of the day shaking and snapping at people. There was this book called Gruesome Tales for Grisly Kids, with a story about a man who stole people’s eyelashes so they could never go to sleep again. I fixated on that for *so* long! Always meta, I guess!
I’ve got some powdered Calcium and Magnesium that a spoonful can be mixed into hot water to make a kind of tea. You put in a drop of vinegar, which helps get it into the system. Also it bubbles up with the water, so it’s like a witches potion. It has to be the last thing one does as it can hit fast, so for me it’s be in bed, house lights out. It is a wondrous feeling to sleep so well. I was told it actually heals up the nerve sheath…So why do I forget to take it? Hooked on insomnia? -Also, you might want to check with a pharmacist to make sure the calcium doesn’t change your meds, as it coats things.
Am I the only one who feels like the author’s parents are alarmingly absent from this story? They’re only ever mentioned as previous occupants of a leaky waterbed. Did they know about their daughter’s sleep problems? Why did they have her stay on that awful series of uncomfortable beds? Why didn’t they fix the light in her room? Weren’t they terrified to find she’d cut through electrical wiring to turn it off? Why was a nine-year-old allowed to pick her own random bedtimes? Did neither the youth group leader nor counselor nor doctor tell the parents about her expressed fears? Was the author’s mom *actually* Ghost Nicole Kidman? WTH was going on here???
I can’t assume anything about the author’s anxiety*. But this piece reminded me of my childhood neglect. The world is large and beyond the comprehension of all children. Most children would get reassurance from a parent in the face of the fearful world, but a neglected child assumes they have to figure it out alone. And they do. (Until adulthood–thanks, therapy and loved ones.)
*- Anxiety correlates with temperament, past adverse experiences, learned resiliency skills, all sorts of stuff that a present and loving family can’t control. But damn, pediatric anxiety sure correlates strongly with absent/inattentive caretakers, too.
When we think seriously about some particular things or incidents repeatedly, there may be more chances to get dreams/nightmares about those things/incidents and these dreams may be good or bad. These may cause sleep insomnia that leads to anxiety or stress. So try to get sleep earlier. Change your bedroom environment to pleasant mood to get sleep earlier.
I didn’t start experiencing difficulty falling asleep until I was in high school, but I’ve had recurring nightmares all my life, starting from age 3, and I can really relate to the experience of innocuous, supposedly kid-friendly stuff creating huge amounts of terror. When I was four, there was a commercial on Nickelodeon for Lassie reruns which involved a big collie barking at a refrigerator and a houseplant. I was convinced it meant that inanimate objects would randomly come to life and attack me. The nightmares began tapering off once I started recovering memories of some crap from my childhood, but they still spring up, vivid and technicolor and bizarre, about once a week.
I didn't start experiencing difficulty falling asleep until I was in high school, but I've had recurring nightmares all my life, starting from age 3, and I can really relate to the experience of innocuous, supposedly kid-friendly stuff creating huge amounts of terror. When I was four, there was a commercial on Nickelodeon for Lassie reruns which involved a big collie barking at a refrigerator and a houseplant. I was convinced it meant that inanimate objects would randomly come to life and attack me. The nightmares began tapering off once I started recovering memories of some crap from my childhood, but they still spring up, vivid and technicolor and bizarre, about once a week.