Bad Dreams? I Love 'Em (Mostly)!

Jim Hinckley posted recently about Doctor Who giving him his first nightmare. That made me think about how I generally love bad dreams, whereas it seems like most people are terribly worried about them. If that doesn't warrant a blog entry, what does?

As background, I've never quite understood why people get so worked up about scary movies. The first movie I remember seeing was (some version of) The Phantom of the Opera (I think it was the 1962 film with Herbert Lom, of Pink Panther fame, as the Phantom. But that's just a guess because I was probably only 5 or 6 years old, based on where I remember seeing it and when we lived there.) I remember it being extremely scary at the time, although I doubt it'd even give me pause now. But I also recall my mother worrying that I'd get nightmares from seeing it, which of course made me wonder what that even meant. It almost sounded like a bonus to me: first you get the movie, which was a huge treat to me, and then you get a nightmare! As a kid, and in fact ever since, I generally remembered my dreams when I woke up. If someone were to ask me, right after I woke, what I had dreamed about, I could generally tell them about at least one or two dreams I'd had, though not many details about it. Other people I've met have claimed they almost never recall dreams - what they actually say is "I usually don't dream" which of course is nonsense, but it's their perspective - and this state of affairs boggles my mind because I can't think of the last time I awoke without some sense of what I'd dreamed.

Similarly, I'm never really sure what distinguishes a nightmare from a dream. If we say a nightmare is a dream in which something bad or scary happens, then probably most of my dreams fit that definition. But they usually don't depress me or cause me anxiety, because often those are the dreams I enjoy the most! For one thing, if the dream's about something awful happening (someone dies, I make some horrible lapse in judgement and go to jail, the world's about to end) then it's such a relief to wake up and realize it was only a dream! And some of the scariest dreams I've had have also been the coolest, from my perspective. I distinctly remember a dream I had, when we lived in our last house, in which the Martians from H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds had landed and were moving through the area, using their death rays. In the dream, I went out to our backyard, which was on a small rise in reality but a higher one in my dream, and watched the war machines off in the distance, lighting up the night sky each time they'd fire. I was able to just stand there and stare, drinking in the grandeur of the scene playing out before me, and I wasn't scared at all, possibly because I partially realized it wasn't real (I frequently figure out I'm dreaming while it's going on, to varying degrees... have to blog on that another time!). When I woke up from that dream, that scene was all I could think of, and I brought it back to mind for days afterwards.

I'll admit that I occasionally will have a dream that bothers me. I had one a few weeks ago in which a young woman was operating as a crossing guard at a busy intersection that I was standing at. One of the kids waiting to cross was in a hurry to get home and begged the woman to let him go, and so she did. As the kid was crossing the street an extremely fast car came racing by, hitting the child and decapitating him, right in front of my eyes. I saw the head rolling violently away from the body, and could only think how sorry I felt for the crossing guard. I could see her face, as the realization dawned on her that she'd never be able to get past this poor decision that she'd made in a heartbeat; that, in fact, in the span of those few seconds she'd ruined the rest of her life. I experienced so much empathy for her in that dream, that when I woke up it was like she was a real person and I wanted to find her and console her. That dream bummed me out for awhile that day. But I've probably had a dozen or fewer dreams of that sort in my life.

When Tammy was little, we used to let her watch scary movies that other parents would've reported us to Child Welfare over, had they known. But we did it gradually, starting with tame fare like Silver Bullet and working up slowly to the good stuff like Alien and Psycho. At each step, we made sure Tammy realized it was all make believe, and we always checked that she wasn't being given nightmares (or if she was, that they weren't bothering her). And of course we also checked that she was enjoying the movies, since this was supposed to be a treat, not a punishment! She can certainly weigh in now, as a full-grown adult, as to whether or not it warped her in the end. But it certainly seemed like she reacted the same way I had: scary movies are just for fun, and you don't take them seriously once they're over. And similarly, dreams are just dreams.