Dream Frequency and Intensity

I remember most of my dreams from early childhood to early adolescence. It was impossible not to. Most were rather terrifying but a welcome surrealism made for an interesting experience nonetheless.

My dreams nowadays are fairly boring, yet still strange. I have no reason to remember a dream which bores me.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

When I was young, I used to have dreams which rocked the fabric of my mind. That is, I couldn't establish whether or not I was dreaming or awake.
This is particularly troubling as some of the dreams were quite horrible.

Take this for instance: being chased by a monster for 5 minutes, my foot then gets stuck in a strange jelly, rendering me incapable of further movement. All the while, the monster's footsteps come closer. The tunnel itself was fairly inventive. It was a corkscrew like tower, with each room room consisting of cube like sections, proceeding at an incline. The lighting in these interconnected room was very good...all the more awful to see that my death was quickly approaching, where around the next corner, its awful visage might manifest...

This demonic creature, steadily kept coming...the footsteps inching ever closer, nearly right behind me, but the creature still obscured from view behind a few walls. The jelly meanwhile had plastered itself to my skin and was now beginning to melt through to the bone. I tried to grab my leg and pry it free, but to no avail. Finally, I stopped. I stopped struggling to get a good look at the creature... to meet what was coming to destroy me. The creature was just around the corner I suspected, still mercifully out of view. It stopped moving, the tower started shaking, and the creature let out a roar which could've layed waste to mountains and the heavens and unsurprisingly caused my heart to jump out of my chest, causing me to wake instantly...the scream still echoing in my mind.

I stirred in my bed, not sure whether or not I was awake or asleep. I was in my room...but my bed wasn't in the normal spot that it usually is. There is nothing more terrifying than realizing that things are closely familiar, and yet so far away. (Especially after having a nightmare which brings the mind frightfully close to despair.)
I pressed the covers up next to my face. Strangely enough, there was a strange mirror next to my bed. I despised mirrors, especially during the night. Even my own reflection seemed to take on uncanny characteristics when the moon's natural light shone through the blinds.

I cautiously looked at the mirror. I couldn't see a reflection in it. So far so good. To test whether or not it was a dream, I looked in the mirror expecting my reflection. I received it. "PSHEW!" I thought to myself...then something strange. I looked in the mirror a little more closely and realized that while the face was mine, the eyes were not. They were flowing with a blackness that would've shone through midnight itself. I tried in vain to make faces in the mirror just to make sure my eye's weren't playing tricks on me...they weren't.
The face in the mirror looked at me, and I looked back at it, helpless. Then its eyes widened to a space which could've swallowed the stars and it opened its mouth. It wasn't a normal mouth and the mind surely plays tricks on us in times of great distress, but its mouth opened to swallow me revealing a plethora of razor sharp teeth and then it screamed for me...for my soul.

This was the exact same yell of the creature that had been chasing me in the corkscrew tower maze. So the creature had a face after all...and apparently I wouldn't escape after all. I felt my blood rushing to my head, the hair in the back of my neck stand up, and then while the face kept staring at me, eyes widening, mouth screaming like a cave without a beginning and an end, my mind met its fever pitch. Then, a light came on in my closet, the door opened, revealing the millennia stench of neverending blackness, and I was sucked into a maelstrom of darkness and despair.

Sometimes I would wake up in a cold sweat, in my bed...staring at the closet door until sunlight came. It was never soon enough.

I later found that these were night terrors. This is terrifying in that the truly terrible dreams effectively become pyschological death traps. The only thing real about the dreams becomes the darkness which envelopes them. However, that darkness is very real when you are a child and its impossible to make sense of such things.

Its a strange thing that a sleeping mind can't initially tell where one sequence ends and another begins. Most things in life are fairly linear but not in dreams. We sometimes lose the ability to question linearity and non-linearity in dreams because dreams contain their own sense of inarguable logic, at least at the time.

Anyways, the most horrible things I have dreamed were losing family members...such as my brother falling off the bow of an aircraft carrier, and then hearing him screaming, calling out my name while the bubbles filled his lungs. Another involved me being eaten alive by cannibals. Defleshed, skewered, intestines ripped out...the whole shebang. Its like every terrible thing throughout the course of sentient existence made its way into my dreams during childhood. YAY.

Another weird things about these dreams is that they were always accompanied by the most insanely terrifying soundtracks. The noises and the actual music oftentimes accompanied such scenes and were many times even more terrifying than the events as they occurred. Most of the night terrors were A tonal and strangely enough, Symphonic.

So, there it is. Now I prefer the darkness, but even 20 years later I still don't look in the mirror when the midnight sun is burning highest in the sky, through the blinds, shining everything in its path with an eerie light.

How ya doing, buddy?