It seems as if the car is sitting still and the world is flying past; telephone poles and trees, small towns a quick thought as they pass by. The little girl sits in the backseat, humming a tuneless song, her hands absently tapping the seat beside her.  The car is going faster and faster, she can feel it.  Soon a blur of green is all the little girl sees on one side of the car, nothing but sky and clouds on the other.  She carefully stands up, holding tightly to the seat in front of her for balance, and leans over between her mother and father to whisper, "Where are we going, daddy?"  Her father doesn't answer. He squeezes the steering wheel tighter, his hands turning an odd swirl of red and white. She looks at her mother who only stares ahead...

There are all sorts of beliefs and lore behind nightmares; what they mean, where they come from.  They were once considered the work of demons who sat on the chest of people while they slept as in Henry Fuseli's painting, The Nightmare.  Germanic folklore told of witches and demons that possessed those who slept alone.  Drinking alcohol can bring on nightmares, as can some drugs - prescription or otherwise.  Some people say what you eat before going to bed can cause nightmares.  (Some people might say who you eat with before you go to bed can cause nightmares.)  Me? I don't care where nightmares come from, I just want them to go back and stay there.

I have Nightmares. I've had them since I was a child. I don't mean the occasional unpleasant or bad dreams that disrupt sleep making it difficult to settle back into the comfort of bed and blanket.  I mean Nightmares.  The 3-d terror movie in super hi-def that an evil goblin slips into the dvd player of your brain then pushes 'play' when you're sleeping nightmares.  The wake up screaming in a cold sweat, crying, shaking, scared out of your mind nightmares.  Nightmares.

I've heard people complain that they never dream, or that they don't think they do because they don't ever remember their dreams, or they simply say they never have any bad dreams at all. I sometimes wish I could say that. Sometimes. 

Even when I don't have nightmares I have extemely vivid dreams.  They're occasionally wonderful, always in ultra living-color. I feel the wind on my skin, the warmth of the sun, the softness of a breeze as it rustles through my hair. If I'm walking along a sidewalk I can feel the crisp fall air and hear the shuffle of fallen leaves underfoot as I go along, the soft chirp of a distant bird or a child at play. Or perhaps it's raining in my dream? I'll hear it's patter as it falls to the ground, know the chill of the raindrops, and smell the rain on asphalt.  All of this will be as real to me as if I were wide awake.

My favorite dreams - the most wonderful to experience - are those of love and romance. Ok, sex. Now those are awesome. Not just imagining my lover's breath on my skin but really feeling it there, knowing it there.  Tasting his lips on mine. Experiencing the sensation of his fingertips tracing lines of fire on my body, chills down my spine.  There's definitely an upside to vivid dreams. Definitely.

Then there is the downside.

...I realize now that I'm the little girl in the car. I'm crying and scared; my knees are quaking, sweat is rolling down my back.  The car is shaking and going toward a cliff straight ahead. I grab my father's shoulder.  "Daddy, where are we going?" He keeps driving toward the edge of the cliff, never speaking. "Daddy, please!  We have to STOP!" 
 I want out of the car but I don't know what to do. The windows are closed and I can't roll them down. I can't find the handles to open the door.  I bang on the windows and try to scream but my throat won't make noise.  My mother turns to look at me.  Her eyes are black.  She turns back to the front of the car.   The passenger side door opens, wheels crunch on gravel, and the door swings shut with a slam behind a deafening rush of air.  She's gone!  "MOMMY!"...

I've read that some of the most common nightmares are being chased, falling, drowning, and being trapped.  Some lists include things like being contacted by the dead and teeth falling out (which is a real nightmare if you don't have a good dental plan.)  Also included on some lists is being naked in public.  I've never had that particular nightmare but trust me when I say that would be more of a nightmare for everyone else than it would be for me.   

The thing about my nightmares is that there's nothing common about them.  At least not to me.  I've been gnawed by giant animals, while they were dragging me slowly across a field.  I've searched for my children through glass and metal shards while I could hear them screaming for me; my hands being cut and sliced over and over again, and when I woke up crying from the pain, my hands hurt for days afterward.  I actually scratched my face so badly with the diamond on my engagement ring during one nightmare that I don't sleep with my wedding rings on anymore - I still can't remember how I did that, but I remember waking up terrified and crying with my face bleeding.  

When I'm chased in my nightmares I'm truly pursued - I stumble, my hands and knees ache from falls - and if I'm caught the struggle is not only real but violent. I toss, thrash, cry out.  Too many times I've scared my husband from his own sleep.  It's so unfair to him; so frightening. When he can finally wake me I'm still as terrified as I am in whatever nightmare I'm having -  heart pounding, sweating, shaking.  And I'm unable to return to sleep.  (Sometimes unable to sleep well for days after a particulary bad nightmare.)  He always asks me to tell him what I'm dreaming about but I'm never able to do it. I'm never able right then to recall what it is that has scared me out of my mind. It's usually much later that I can reconstruct the scene.

I tried once to keep a journal of my nightmares because I heard it would help me "decode" how they come to me.  I was supposed to keep track of what I ate and drank, what I did,  how I was feeling, where I went, what I did - all on a daily basis, just in case I had a nightmare. But I couldn't do it long enough to amount to anything.  It seemed too much like watching a pot, waiting for it to boil.  I don't have that much patience. Or faith that any particular string of events has anything to do with any particular nightmare at all.  (Well, except that watching A Haunting in Connecticut will definitely give me serious nightmares for days and I'm never - ever! - watching movies like that again.)

To me, the mystery of nightmares is that they are so randomly terrifying. There seems to be very little, if any, rhyme or reason as to how or when they show up.  No two are exactly alike; even if they're seemingly "recurring" there is a deviation somewhere along the way, a subtle difference existing somewhere within.  They rarely play to the fears I know I possess, like a paralyzing fear of heights, for example.  It's as if they seek to create new, irrational fears I can clutivate like crops throughout my life.  They're like a perfectly unpredictible storm suddenly appearing on an otherwise gorgeous, star-filled night - there's no warning, no time to prepare or to take cover, there's simply no avoiding the devastation.  There's only grabbing onto something well-anchored knowing some unseen force will try mightily to pry you from it and the fear of what would happen next.

It's that fear that is no mystery. That fear definitely isn't randomly terrifying.

Henry Fuseli's, The Nightmare, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightmare
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