No Escape

Recently, I awoke from a nightmare. I rarely have true nightmares. Mostly, I have unpleasant dreams, especially the kind where I am looking for something and can’t find it. For example, I might be looking for my car. But I never find it, and the dream-search goes on and on, seemingly for hours. This dream was different. There was no single person or object to fear. Mostly, the dream consisted of a series of paranoia-inducing events.

As the dream progressed, my paranoia rose. The nightmare reached a point where I tried to run away from some nameless dread but only managed to fall down. I couldn’t escape. My fear level was one I haven’t felt in a long time: actual terror. But that is when I woke up.

It’s curious that a nightmare has the power to make us feel a kind of terror that we never experience when we’re awake. I think when we’re awake we have mental defenses against that kind of fear, but when we are sleeping our defenses are down and we can, under the right conditions, experience real terror. And there’s no way to end it, no way to get away from it. It builds and builds and we know it’s going to get us. The dream is in control, and when the dream wants to scare us, it knows exactly what to do.

Our dreaming mind taps into what we’re most afraid of — deep, subconscious fears that we’re usually not aware we have — and it plays with us, firing just the right neurons in just the right part of our brain to scare the bejesus out of us. It knows the weaknesses in our mental armor. At least in a scary movie, we’re aware that we’re watching a movie. But in a dream, it’s all real. Everything happening to us, and everything around us, is real. We’re trapped in our own fantasy world, a world that is in our heads.

If you have nightmares, it’s best to watch what you eat before bedtime. Ditch that late-night pizza, that sugary snack, that greasy bowl of chips or fries. Because once the nightmare starts, there is no escape. You’re in it to the end.