Nightmares

Posted on October 31, 2011
by Karen Fayeth
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In honor of Halloween, the scariest day of the year, I figured I’d do a little mental deep dive and reveal some of my most scary nightmares.

Perhaps in the light of day they won’t seem so scary, right? Maybe I can take some of the fear out of them.

I had one of these dreams last night and found it hard to shake off. So let’s start with that one.

I’m in my car, driving too fast, and suddenly, my brakes don’t work. The pedal feels right, I’m pressing on it and it gives resistance, but the car isn’t slowing down. I grab frantically for the handbrake but that does no good. I try to take the car out of gear, but that doesn’t work….often I’m rolling down a hill. Sometimes it’s in San Francisco.

Only once in my life did I had something similar happen. I was in college and driving my dad’s old ’72 full size Blazer, and the master cylinder was going out. I rolled to an intersection, hit the brakes, and it went all the way to the floor. Yipes! I was able to get my toe under the pedal, lift it, and kept pumping the brakes until I finally stopped. I was scared, but thankfully got through that safely.

I have no idea what this inability to stop is about but it *freaks* me out. I was all jittery driving to work this morning.

I’m in danger, I turn to run, but my legs are heavy and I can’t run. I’m making a running motion but moving slower than molasses in January. I bend over and use my arms to help me run/crawl, scratching at the ground trying to get away.

I think this one is a fairly common dream. A lot of people have it. I’m not much of a runner in real life and I think this dream plays on my own insecurities about that fact. Like, if I was ever really in trouble, could I run away?

Yeeeks!

I’m in college. It’s finals week. Trouble is, there is a class that I haven’t bothered to attend all semester. I’m freaking out! What am I going to do? There is no way I can pass this class! I’m going to fail!

The class I forgot to attend is usually a math class (my absolute worst subject). Sometimes it’s accounting. Lately it’s morphed into that god awful advanced Economics night class I had in grad school.

This is such a weenie nightmare. I can’t believe how much it totally freaks me out. Oh dear, I might fail a class. Big deal!

But I wake from this dream *frantic* and freaking out.

The monsters of the mind are far worse than any creepy Halloween story, I guess.

I’m staying in a really nice hotel. I go to my room and check in. Then I leave my room for some reason, I need ice, I need to find something to eat, whatever. And then I can’t find my way back to my room. I go up and down stairs. I wander through hallways of the hotel. I keep taking the elevator and it puts me on floors I don’t recognize. The more I try to find my way back, the more lost I become. I start getting more and more frantic.

This dream often takes place in a huge Las Vegas casino (ever felt hopelessly lost inside of a huge casino in real life? I sure have.). Sometimes it takes place on a college campus or a high school building. It’s a dream of chasing my tail ’round and ’round.

Whenever I check into a hotel in my real life, I inevitably try to find landmarks so I can find my way back, owing to my whackadelic brain and this dream that recurs month after month, year after year.

Tornados. Enough said.

I’ve chronicled my own Really Bad Day dancing with a tornado in Carlsbad. I think that one afternoon left me irrevocably scarred.

Ok, of all of my frightful dreams, at least this on and the brakes going out are dreams that I can go “well yeah, that’s actually scary!”

I think the rest of my nightmares listed are pretty much crazy machinations of an over emotional brain.

To misquote Emerson, simply hobgoblins of my little mind.

Happy Halloween everyone!