Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Dreams, Part II- My Fear of Nightmares

I've had very few bad dreams in my lifetime and most of those are no longer remembered. To me this is strange because as a child I was terrified of having nightmares after falling asleep. After watching a scary movie or even a borderline TV show, I would lie in bed afraid to fall asleep. Sometimes I'd get myself so worked up I'd become nauseous to the point of vomiting. The extraordinary thing about all this is I seldom had the bad dream I so worried about.
My parents of course would limit what I was allowed to view but as I thought I was maturing, I would argue that I was now old enough to see some movie or show that they considered too violent for me. I didn't want to tell my friends that the reason I couldn't go to the latest scary movie was that it would give me nightmares so I would argue with my parents for something I really didn't want. If they relented and I ended up not being able to go to sleep I always heard about it the next day.

Eventually I grew up enough to watch a fright-flick without having nightmares. Still I choose not to watch them, my logic being most scary movies are made too poorly to scare you and even if they did, I didn't consider being scared as entertaining. That being said, gore doesn't bother me at all and I watch regularly the CSI shows and Bones, etc that are all loaded with body parts and blood spatter. I keep trying to tell my wife that the coroner is sawing off the top of a dummy's head not a real corpse, yet she still needs to cover her eyes at scenes like those. Today's TV is far more violent and suggestive than the days of my youth so I'm not sure if I'd ever sleep if I were a child of the modern world.

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