Nightmares

Plagued since early childhood with nightmares of the most distressing kind, I have often awakened myself with my own screaming.

There is no horror movie by Wes Craven that could compare to the technicolor and vibrance of the nightmares that have been visited upon me. There is no rhyme or reason for when or why they come, if I could figure that out I'd prevent the nightmare from the get go.

I don't watch horror movies for that reason. I don't like to be scared to begin with and the very idea of paying money to pee in my pants sort of seems counterproductive. And embarrassingly expensive.

There has been a constant thread from the time I was a small child that I had an arm cut off. Not a fun dream. When I was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, it was in the arm which I had repetitively dreamed was cut off. Go figure.

While I still retain a majority of my arm, I do have a pretty wicked scar where they followed my instructions to 'get it all while you are there the first time'. Adults are repulsed by it, but I am personally just thankful to be alive. Kids are fascinated by it and I generally tell them I got it through some sort of heroic battle with a shark near Madagascar.

They know I am kidding with them because I wink at them when I tell the story. Sometimes just the joke is enough, but for kids who have been through that kind of nightmare with family or personally, we dispense with the hokey stories and jokes when the crowd thins out and we talk pretty seriously about the fear and the horror that cancer can bring.

Most of the time, when people think about nightmares, they are truly confined to the evening and sleeping hours of the day. But I've lived through a few of them in broad daylight, so I am well aware that horror producing events don't always wait until bedtime to show up.

Having heard that "C" word more than once, I just sort of take it as a process of life. Not normally so sanguine about my life experiences, it just seems like there are some things that are part of the mortal journey that require a few marks of their passage in order to come out on the other side of the event in any measure.

Scars on various parts of my body are reminders that I have lived through some of the daytime nightmares in my life. Some scars are deeper and wider than others and some create physical changes in the tissues around them that are hard to explain and some days are even harder to deal with. I want to wear cute shirts and blouses, but truthfully, I consign my wardrobe to a selection of t-shirts mostly because I get so tired of people staring at the gaping absence of me where part of my arm used to be.

I feel like shouting "LOOK, IT WAS GET A HOLE IN MY ARM OR BE PLANTED IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND!!! GET OVER YOURSELF!!"

But that would probably be rude and hurt someone else's feelings and I would never want to intentionally hurt anyone. I know what that feels like and it's not pleasant.

I remember waking from a nightmare shortly after my Momma passed away, feeling very lonely and keenly aware that I couldn't just pick up the phone to call her and talk it all over with her. Momma had told me some years before she became ill that she had experienced that particular feeling herself after her own mother had passed. The feeling of wanting to share a moment - good, bad or indifferent - but knowing that it was no longer possible. That kind of nightmare of missing someone from your life even on the temporary basis which we believe this separation to be is still pretty hard to take.

I am thankful for a wonderful husband who sometimes gets awakened from a deep sleep to help me cope with a nightmare I can't understand or deal with by myself. He has even offered quiet and sleepy prayers to help the imagery to fade away and held me in his arms until a peaceful sleep finally came to claim me.

I listen to a special selection of music when I get freaked out at night. Sometimes the terrors of the night take on their own life and creep into my next day unbidden and most certainly unwelcome. For those times, I am thankful to know that I can ask for a priesthood blessing to help sort out and put right the truth from the fiction and be able to have an oasis of calm through the desert storms of my nights.

Even though other people are susceptible to the ravages of nightmares in their nocturnal mental gymnastics, it doesn't seem as personal to 'hear' about them as it does to experience it all in the full-color, imagination filled darkness of your own bedroom at night.

We normally have at least a little bit of light on for that reason. I am afraid of the dark.

I know all too well what happens in the darkness.

So a tiny shaft of light piercing the gloom makes all the difference between making it through the night and being overcome by it. Beneath a blanket and with my music playing softly in my ears, the light is the one element that truly drives away the nightmares. Light and dark cannot exist in the same physical space. Maybe that is why I am afraid of the dark so very much. Because something has to be in charge in this life and be the boss - and my childlike heart knows that it cannot be the darkness that wins and me survive it for very long.

That is why I am happy to be aquainted even at a distance with the Light that can fill the whole world. Through His Light, I can survive the nightmares that come.

Just rambling through some random thoughts tonight while revisiting my music collection . . .