I am participating in Reverb Broads Summer 2012. Check out there site here and join in the fun! Today’s prompt is courtesy of Kassie.
What gives you nightmares?
I’ve known for quite a few years that I had night terrors as a small child. What I didn’t know, until more recently, was that they got so bad my parents eventually took me to a child psychologist, probably thinking I was slowly losing my mind. Or possessed by a demon. Possibly both. Anyway, a few years back my mom told me that the psychologist told me to draw a picture of the dream I’d been having. The one that caused me to turn into a screaming sleep zombie. It would seem that my little two-year-old self picked up the crayons and drew a picture of my bed situated in my bedroom and hundreds, nay thousands, of spiders making their way out of the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and crawling their creepy little hineys towards my bed.
When my mom told me that not too long ago, my eyes got wide and I gasped in horror–I might even have fainted.
“MOM!” I screeched. “I SOO remember that dream!”
And I do. I’ve had this memory in my brain for as long as I can remember of that exact scene taking place. I’ve always chalked it up to something I’d imagined long ago or maybe a movie I’d seen and somehow morphed it in my mind. I was pretty shocked to hear that it was an actual dream that I had as a very small child. I still have this dream very occasionally. And it is still just as frightening.
This, my friends, is why I am deathly afraid of spiders.
I remember a time when I was 7 or 8 years old and I found a tiny little spider in my room right before bed. My dad was unable to kill it before it skittered away into the abyss of my bedroom. I refused to go to bed until the murderer spider had been caught and properly disposed of (and by ‘disposed of’, I mean killed. Brutally.) My dad also informed me that the arachnid in question was called a jumping spider. As you might imagine, this did nothing to help my fear.
Luckily, I am not quite so terrified of them as that nowadays. I can even kill small spiders myself, with the help of a very large shoe or any other object that is capable of causing blunt-force trauma. I did have an epic stare-down with a large spider a few months back. He was on my living room ceiling right above my couch. I kept a close eye on him, making sure he didn’t move a muscle (do spiders even have muscles?) until my husband got home. Then I made him kill it.
However, I think this is a fear that will stay with me forever and there is nothing I can do about it. I can’t stand the tarantula section of the store. I get mini-panic attacks when I see pictures of huge camel spiders on the interwebs (pun intended). I realize my fear is probably irrational with no real basis. Supposedly they are tiny little creatures that are more afraid of me than I am of them. But I still contend they are slowly trying to take over the world. Just look at those hundreds of beady little eyes. There is nothing innocent about that.
I hate spiders, too! That dream sounds awful, but I’m glad that you don’t have it very often any more. Those eight-legged creatures are nothing short of horrid!