This weekend I visited my oldest childhood friends. We have been friends since we were 14, when we all met in youth group. Each of us has a different experience with faith, now, but we have all remained friends. They now have children who are 14. Strange how life works out. But some friends are chosen family. We gossiped, ate tacos, played a game and traded our memories.
I stayed with my parents overnight. I came back late and spent the night in the guest room. It was not the childhood room in which I grew up. I had trouble falling asleep at first. I have recently started back on sleep medication that has helped me stay asleep for a full six hours, instead of waking up at 3 a.m. wide awake, attuned to ghosts. But it also helps me remember my nightmares. Usually I forget my nightmares.
I grew up in this house. The carpeting, flooring and countertops have been remodeled. There is a new bathroom. New light fixtures. New paint. But my childhood fears remain. In my childhood, I was terrified of the dark. I thought there was a monster underneath my bed. I spent many nights in terror of falling asleep, afraid to dip a toe outside my covers. I never told my parents about this fear. When I told them about my fresh nightmare, they were surprised. They wondered if I had felt this way anywhere else. Only at this house. My childhood home.
I fell asleep. I was feeling okay. I had been happy to see my childhood friends. We ate tacos, told jokes, reminisced, made fun of getting old. It was fun to be around people who had known you for all of life’s changes and still accepted you, even though you drank Pelligrino straight out of the bottle like it was wine.
Then the nightmare came. I was shifting in and out of subliminal sleep. In moments I thought I was trapped in my old childhood room. I was consumed by the old terror. There was something in my room. Maybe it was movement. Maybe it was my mom coming in to check on me when she couldn’t sleep at 2 a.m.. Maybe it was a ghost. Maybe something had died in this house and it would follow me around forever. I couldn’t poke a toe outside my blanket. I couldn’t move. I had to remain absolutely still.
Until I realized, this is not the same as my old childhood fears. Maybe my old childhood fears were totally unfounded. Maybe I am a different person now. So I opened my eyes. I looked, in that subliminal space. I saw a shadow flitting about my room. Maybe I imagined it. I was terrified. I stayed frozen in my blankets, unable to move, paralyzed, but I opened my eyes and saw what my fears materialized. It was movement. A shadow. But it was my old childhood room. It was not the guest room where I was staying. Somewhere in my subconscious, I recognized this. It was a dream, and now I was awake, but I was still asleep, half-asleep.
Then I did something I had never done before, other than looking at it. I tried to talk to it. I opened my eyes, and croaked. I was dehydrated, my throat dry, and I couldn’t make a sound. I was stuck in this liminal space. Between consciousness and sleep. Between my childhood fears and my acceptance of myself. I descended deeper into terror. I was still half-asleep. My eyelids might have been closed. I don’t know what I saw. It was a whole different world. I was in the fae world, the Mirror World, and I was trying to get out, back to myself, back to my reality, but I was stuck in this in-between land, where my primal terror was made real.
I croaked, and I couldn’t make a sound, and I became more terrified, because I had tried to change my illusion, to reframe the narrative from my childhood to take power over it, and it was still firmly ingrained in my mind. But I tried harder. I tried again.
“Hello? Hello?” I said. I managed to speak. The noise sounded foreign in my ears. But it sounded like me. I was claiming it. I was claiming my voice. I was claiming my fear. I couldn’t see the shadow any more. Light poured in through the cracks in the shade.
I had never done that before. I had never thought to do that before.
And then I woke up. I was in the guest room. There was no shadow, moving around, like a ghost. I was an adult. And it was dawn, with the light streaming in through the shades. I stayed in my blanket for a long time, not believing it was real. I didn’t look at my phone. I didn’t move. I stayed absolutely still. I tasted my chapped lips, and they were like salt.
Tea While Writing 