Some dreams, though, all night thrown like darts against the mind, pierce and persist upon waking. Calling out like splinters. The dreams remembered don't seem to ever have any qualities that make them unique. They may be mad, obscure and arcane, joyful as sonnets, or spoken to you in dead dialects. I suspect the dreams forgotten, too, have no special reason for being unremembered.
All week I have had unusually vivd dreams. I've been dreaming in IMAX 3D, with Dolby Digital surround sound. Dreams, the memory of which, time hasn't yet been able to drown. In time I'll remember one instead as a memory, forgetting it was only a dream. Is there even a difference? What about the difference between dreams and nightmares? Technically they're both fantasies, except one is unwanted. Why does the mind fantasize about something that brings it displeasure?
When I was a child, somewhere between the age of 5 and 10, I became familiar with the mind's ability to create unwanted dreams. I loved scary movies; Halloween, Phantasm, Creep Show and whatever else I could get my hands on. There was something thrilling about being scared. It made me feel more alive. The fear we feel in childhood, though, is different than the fear we experience as adults. As children we fear the things we don't know - the monsters in the closets and under our beds, a sound in the shadows - we are gripped by the raw and inexhaustible power of imagination, painting portraits of fear with a deftness rivaling Rembrandt. As we age though, the things that we fear are things we've come to know - death, injury, poverty, loneliness, sickness, pain.
Fear, that perennially paranoid parasite - a tenant we can't seem to evict - beside us always when we're beside ourselves. It's in the water we drink and the air we breathe. In our maladies and our manias. Our hopes and dreams.
On a purely philosophical level, Nightmare on Elm Street is perhaps the greatest horror movie of all time. It's a horror movie with a real and always present danger - one that isn't a zombie wearing a hockey-mask, or a creature in a lagoon, or a depraved serial-killer with a really big knife: the monster is you. Inescapable, existing not in some dark alley late at night, or some old and deserted house, but within your mind. You are the author of your own destruction, directing your demise with a Tarantino-esque self-indulgence.
I was the ultimate captive audience. In front of the blue glow of the TV, my eyes flitting in the darkness, heart racing, rivers of adrenaline coursing through my child-sized body, all jittering with fear and exhilaration, fluttering around the screen like a moth on meth. My memory of it, like a dream, is almost musical. It plays in my mind alternating between an inconsistent and staccato tempo, switching abruptly to long suspended notes skulking and hanging from the threads of a mangled metal violin, cold, coarse and out of tune. It is a song in which all the parts bleed together, without distinction, though they are full of sentiment.
Later that night, I couldn't sleep. With the blankets pulled up below my eyes, clutching them like a shield, I scanned the room for strange shadows. The slightest creak in the room's wooden floorboards transformed my heart into a military drum and forced my eyes shut. Laying there, still as stone, believing that maybe if my eyes and body were covered in that same darkness, that I wouldn't be seen by whatever was there with me. Eventually I would drive myself to sleep, exhausted.
Once asleep, I would wait for the violent maiming and murder that awaited me in my dreams. Waking, panicked and breathless, I found I had no interest in sleeping. But neither did I want to stay awake. The fear wouldn't leave me; awake in the dark or asleep. Suddenly, from underneath my bed, giant scissors began stabbing up through the mattress, desperate to cut me. I rolled and dodged the blades about the bed, for what seemed like eternities, playing the deadliest game of rock paper scissors and always drawing - until finally, the scissors won. I woke up, realizing I wasn't actually awake the first time; a dream within a dream. A new, deeper panic held me, as I realized there was no way to tell if I was awake. Dizzy with dread, despairing and doomed, my sympathetic nervous system kicked in and purged; great bouts of vomit.
This continued for weeks, maybe months. And despite my parents decrees, I still sought out Nightmare on Elm Street and its sequels. How, as a child I was able to watch more of them - and without my parents consent - I do not know. But I did, and the nightmares continued. Actually, I remember now: it was the babysitters; Chrissy and Claire!
I would sometimes become so frightened I would flee my room, trying to bridge the distance between mine and my parents' room as quickly as possible, my feet like lightning across the floor, triumphantly leaping into their bed with them. Eventually I had to sleep with a bucket beside my bed - to catch the vomit. Sick of being serial-murdered by my psyche - night after night, after night - I resolved to put an end to it. It happened inside a church, and it involved a super-soaker full of holy water. I had crucified old Freddy and unleashed a liquid fury upon him that set him ablaze, howling back into the darkness from whence he came. After that, the nightmares were over. If I had to change it, I would have instead drank a gallon of holy water and unleashed a wrathful deluge of vomit upon him. But I was young and naive.
It's strange to consider, looking back now, knowing that no amount of blankets or clasped eyelids could save me from the sense of danger. And it's as true now as it was then. We shut our eyes to our fears and staunchly deny them, busying ourselves with work and distractions, vacations and special occasions. When we grow too weary, we hide behind bottles like blankets. Maybe those adult fears aren't so different after all.
Always running but never escaping. Forever forgetting that the call is coming from inside the house.
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