Were you walking around inside of my dreams seeing the same terrifying stuff that I did??
By: Nikunj Savaliya
Tags: Terrible, Child Development, Nightmare, Dreams, Dreamscape

Boy, can I identify with this question?

Thinking way back now, using a simulacrum of Mr. Peabody’s “Wayback machine”, while not quite as powerful as the telephone booth shaped TARDIS in Dr. Who, I still manage to get around fairly well inside of my own space-time continuum.

I think when I was very little 5 or 6 or somewhere around that age, I might have been narcotically affected by the phenobarbital I was given at bedtime for I don’t know exactly what reason, and my mom doesn’t remember either.

Way back in the Dark Ages, the early 1960’s, Phenobarbital was sometimes directed as an antiepileptic preventative for febrile seizures. See: Febrile seizure recurrence reduced by intermittent oral levetiracetam

I only figured this out as a possible causal factor for my white-knuckled lucid dreaming as a young boy (see: Lucid dream — Wikipedia) many many years later, like 40 or so? Phenobarb is not used like this nowadays.

Oh man, I sometimes would end up hanging on to the edge of my mattress in the fetal position — Wikipedia absolutely terrified I was going to fall off into empty space, like tipping over the edge of the Grand Canyon.

There were other times when I had sleep paralysis, I could not move anything, no part of my body would respond to my desperate desire to escape from the “black orb”.

Do you play Chinese-Checkers? Remember any of the rules for moving and jumping your own and capturing others in the process?

Sometimes my heart would be pounding so hard that the entire bed would begin to shake in sympathetic harmony with my pounding heartbeat. Sometimes it was like I was trapped in a spider's web, my heartbeat throbbing the web, thump, thump, thump, trembling it with its latest captive prey. Instantly signaling to the “blackness” (Stygian Blackness) where I was, stuck in the web, cowering in fear and much trepidation. Stygian — Wikipedia

The “surface” of my bed would initially appear as if it was endless, but I always seemed to end up perched on the “Edge of Darkness” waiting for that “something” to happen. I’m not sure I ever actually went completely over the edge.

I do remember my torso and one leg hanging off the edge in a desperate attempt to appear as small as possible, and thus more difficult to find by the “orb” of darkness. The Orb was shiny black, a huge black marble, towering in height over me, and my tiny size in comparison.

The surface of my bed was laid out on a grid-like pattern, like a checkerboard, but it had the rules of Chinese Checkers. The black orb was a huge marble “looming “ over me, seeking I think to “engulf” me like a paramecium engulfs a “food particle”.

I could move one space at a time in any direction sorta like in a game of Checkers. The Blob, the immense black orb seemed to be able to move like a Queen (chess) — Wikipedia

There was no place I could escape to that the Queen could not “head me off at the pass” and in doing so, force me to go in another direction.

Each “move” I made was followed by “her” (symbolism “her”?) and the closer she got the more I could “feel” literally since her crushing presence, the pressing in on my “space” me and all around me, palpable and completely terrifying.

There were times when I could not breathe because of her weight upon me. I think this was me diving under the covers and suffocating myself by breathing the same air over and over. It was hot, hot as imagined hell would be like. Suffocatingly hot, but I was trapped, paralyzed by the fear if I crawled out then “it” would be on top of me in an instant.

So, instead, I would crawl around until I found a cold spot and hide out there until it too became intolerably hot and then “move on”. If I managed to crawl over to where the sheet and blankets were not tucked in, I could break open a fresh air gap between the covers and breath in the cold night air.

Have you ever seen “The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers”? I remember it being a televised thing but my IMDB searches do not show a TV serial of that title?

When the glass tube would descend down over somebody in preparation for the transfer, the swapping out, it was that glass tube descending on top of me that was also a recurring “nightmare”. I didn’t have the Capgras delusion — Wikipedia

I didn’t think others in my family were “snatched”, it was always happening to me, I was the one who was going to being replaced.

Night-Terrors, See: Night terror — Wikipedia

This is one part of being a human on this planet that I could have done without. I’m not sure I have ever fully adapted to life on this planet.

I wish I had been born in another world, in another solar system, or better yet, in a completely different galaxy.

My mind has been insufferably cruel to me over the past 50 plus years.

mrc109