Real Terrors

The dreams kept getting progressively worse. They were not only occurring with greater frequency, but they were getting scarier, and now they were happening more than once a week. It was so bad that Marilyn was afraid of falling asleep.

The first dream Marilyn could remember had come about eighteen months before. Marilyn had finished her racquetball set. It was a particularly gruesome workout. As usual, she played three sets of doubles. First, it was Marilyn and her husband, Rick, against their best friends, Sandra and Barry. Then it was the girls against the guys, followed by her and Barry against Sandra and Rick. Finally, she played three sets of singles: first against Rick, then against Sandra, and last against Barry.

Marilyn had a pretty good night. She and Rick won the first set. The girls beat the guys, a rare occurrence, in the second set. Then she and Barry beat Sandra and Rick. Lastly, she beat Rick and Sandra and lost to Barry. Not bad for a 110-pound, five-foot-two-inch, twenty-eight-year-old hottie with two children.

When she arrived home at eleven PM, she was exhausted. Still, she couldn’t go to bed without a shower after three hours of racquetball. She jumped in the shower first. This way, she might have fallen asleep when Rick showered and came to bed. What is it with men? The more they work out, the more they want sex. Well, not tonight, honey.

She put on her flannel pajamas. This was a sign to Rick that she was off-limits. Unfortunately, Rick sometimes took it as a challenge. She was so tired that she was asleep when he came to bed. He just kissed her on the forehead and lay down next to her. The next thing she knew, it was eleven-forty-five PM. Rick was shaking her and screaming, “Honey, wake up.” Five-year-old Jason and three-year-old Alisa ran into the room screaming, “Mommy, don’t cry.”

She never remembered what the dreams were about. All she knew was that she had never been so scared. Unfortunately for her, the fear she felt then would not compare to the terror she would experience in the future. Little did she know that this would not be an isolated incident. It would soon become a common occurrence. She did not realize or remember that she had had a dream eighteen months prior and another three years earlier.

People have been asking questions about dreams from time immemorial. What are they? Where do they come from? What do they mean? Why are they sometimes so fuzzy and sometimes so clear? Why are they sometimes so hard to remember and at other times so hard to forget? Are they gateways to an unknown dimension? Do they connect us with other people? Do they only happen when we are asleep? If we die in one of our dreams, do we ever wake up? Can we use them to predict or shape the future? Do they warn us of things to come? Are they caused by a bunch of active neurons in our brains with nothing better to do than play havoc with our minds?

For Marilyn, dreams had always been pleasant. Nightmares were a new experience. When she was a little girl, she sometimes had nightmares of gray boogeymen in white coats. But all children experienced those.

Nine months or so had gone by. She had forgotten about the previous nightmare; then came the next one. It seemed longer and more vivid than the first one. In reality, she was not entirely sure. It is human nature that the closer one is to an experience, the more vivid the memory. With time, the memory begins to change. One may remember pleasant experiences as better and bad experiences as worse than when they occurred. Some experiences may fade away. That makes it difficult to compare something that happened last night with something that happened nine months ago.

The next nightmare came four or five months later. Marilyn was not sure how long it had been since the last one. Another problem with memory is that the sense of time becomes warped. We recall pleasant experiences as having happened in the distant past and bad experiences as having occurred more recently. The experiences one wants to forget always seem to have just happened and never go away. However, she sensed that there had been less time between nightmares than before. As an analyst by nature, Marilyn decided to track the nightmares. She began a nightmare diary.

Sixty-four days later, the next one came. Then it was thirty-two days. She was sure the nightmares were occurring with greater frequency. She could compare them more accurately because they were closer together than before. She was sure the nightmares were getting more intense and more frightening.

Finally, the nightmares came every fourth night.