It has been some time since I spoke in depth about personal night terrors I have had.. one such dream occurred only nights ago, actually the day after Christmas. I came down with some sort of ailment, I cannot say it was the flu or food poisoning, but instead appeared to be a nasty stomach bug that quickly passed around the family along with the food at our dinner table. These things happen when groups of two or more get together–especially when children are thrown into the mix..
The stomach bug was fast and hard hitting. It ran its course in about 12 hours–but it was 12 hours of pure hell on earth, agony of the spirit and body, and complete desolution of the inner core. If you know what I mean. Empty .. running on fumes..
And it’s during those feverish nights that the worst night terrors always seem to occur.
While I will not share all of the gory details of my brief tour through night terror land, I will say that this dream may have been the most realistic and palpible I have had in a long, long time.. Perhaps in a decade. It felt real. Hell, it was real, in my opinion. So real that I actually believed, when I woke up, that it either happened or was happening. And that feeling of realism didn’t escape me until I shivered with a chill and felt my head like it was being poked by the tip of an atom bomb..
This is where my dream analysis has escaped me.. I have no clue what this all means, if anything–after all dreams with fevers are filled with oddities and weird paths. You never know when your temperature is too high at night for sanity to take over..
In the dream, I was driving a car. At first I thought I was alone in the car. I was in a town I was familiar with but suddenly the scenes were different. I was in a stranger place, though I kept telling myself–or a passenger–that I was taking a ‘shortcut’ but it’s the “long way home.” A contradictory statement in reality, but in dreams I suppose such confusion can make some type of sense in a senseless way.. The next thing I knew my car came to a sudden stop. Like a stop like none other–I swear in my reality my body most likely lunged up in the air during this part of the dream. I felt a loud bang, or explosion.. The car had no movement. The life outside stopped too.. nothing was in motion. The air even seemingly stopped flowing.. I was frightened to look behind me because, for some reason, I came to a realization that a passenger may very well have been in the car. But that passenger wasn’t speaking.. Only I was, attempting to remove myself from the car and try to understand what I had just hit.. My panic began to set in when I realized indeed a child was in the back seat.. I feared to my core as to who it was.. I will stop there because the memory of the dream is still too painful to recollect in full..
What alarmed me the most about this night terror, above all else, is the feeling of nothingness when the car accident occurred.. Only I moved. Nothing else–I cannot describe the realistic feeling of having not air movement or sound.. a quiet and completely desolate surrounding. I may have died in this dream.. or perhaps all life around me did.
The ultimate feeling that I Was left with was that somehow time itself had come to an end. That time didn’t exist before and it wouldn’t exist in the future.. and that in the present tense time had lost its meaning since I came to the realization that time was never real and had no place in the coming moments. And in that regard, I don’t know there was anyone in my back seat, or anyone else either. I think that since the present moment killed time, time never had begun.. which means no one was ever born and could not perish from the dream’s false reality..
There is a little bit of irony here, perhaps.
Before I went to sleep I was deep in thought about the web series DON’T HUG ME I’M SCARED, especially the episode that was released months ago called ‘TIME,’ where an evil clock represents the slow and painful death that all of us must endure and have endured throughout time..
Was the DON’T HUG ME series enough to propel me into this state of complete night panic? Or was it the fever–high above 103 and raging through my stomach at 3am?
OH, and that is the other thing.
3am..
That is the hour I woke from the nightmare.. I wrote about that before. The witching hour–the moment of the night regardless of your time zone when you seem to get the worst news, or when something suddenly wakes you.. or even when miracles occur and women go into labor.
3am.
Fevers.
DON’T HUG ME I’M SCARED.
And the sudden stoppage of time.
All in a night’s sweat.. and a night terror.
I would so love to hear thoughts from anyone who takes the time to read this.. Am I off in my interpreation of this night terror? Is the real brutal force just a sickness that was tossing me and turning me? Or is there a deeper message and symbolic code I am not ‘awake’ to?
