I was pretty apprehensive during a bad hitch hiking experience in my late teens. The guy who picked me up essentially told me we were going to his place for sex and I had no voice in the matter. He refused to pull over and let me out or even slow down to let me jump out. He pawed at me repeatedly with his free hand as he drove. I tried reasoning with him and being persuasive, but he didn’t want to hear it. Even though I didn’t want to play it that way, I eventually had to display a weapon and the absolute willingness to use it. He let me out then, but I was a different color than everybody else, in a strange city, and illegally armed. He looked like he had some money and I was afraid that he’d run straight to the popo and claim I’d tried to rob him or something. I eventually got where I was going, but that was a very long, tense night.
I’m one of the most unfortunate people when it comes to dreams. I’ve had more bone-chilling nightmares than I can even begin to recount. Luckily, through years of having a nightmare almost every night, my brain has started to cope with them.
Sometimes in my nightmares nowadays, I slip into lucidity, where I realize it’s a dream, or at least, that I have more control over my own actions. I also often sometimes realize that I’m dreaming, and I start screaming and making a lot of noise, in an effort to wake myself up.
This happened a few days ago and my boyfriend, while mildly shaking me and saying, “You’re having a bad dream,” I responded with a very calm, “I know.”
And then I was awake. It was funny because even though I said, “I know”, I was still just awake at that point, snapping out of my bad dream, but my brain had been aware of the fact that it was dreaming for a while, and that to me, in retrospect, is very creepy.
Night terrors are pretty damned awful, for sure. We never had anything like what you described, with Dweezil, but for months, he’d be up screaming, utterly unreachable, more nights than not. We were travelling once, right around his 3rd birthday, when he had a bout. He was screaming and hitting at us, and when we tried to dump him in the middle of the bed (we were sharing a king-sized bed with him) he would scramble back to the edge to try to hit us some more. We finally dragged him out to the car to drive him around. As we passed through the hotel lobby, I said to the desk clerk “if you’ve been getting complaints about a murder in progress on the 4th floor, this is what’s going on”.
He passed out within minutes of us forcing him into the car seat and starting the car.
As far as fear: I’ve posted this here before. When I was about 11, I’d gotten up early in the morning (summer weekday), then went back to bed mid-morning. Woke up about 11 AM - completely paralyzed. I COULD. NOT. MOVE.
After a week or so, or maybe it was a few seconds, I finally managed to make a small noise - and then I was fine.
I stumbled out into the kitchen, sat down, and burst into hysterical sobs, which doubtless scared my mother badly (this was not typical behavior for me). I was 100% certain I had nearly died. The next night, I was up nearly the entire night, too terrified to try to sleep. I think I finally passed out early in the morning. My mother actually called the doctor for some pills for me - probably a tranquilizer of some sort - which I took in the evening for a couple of days.
Now, in hindsight, this was “just” a brief bout of sleep paralysis, lots of people have a few in their lifetimes especially at adolescence, no big deal, etc. - but at the time, it was frightening enough to qualify under the thread title. I can’t recall ever feeling anything like that frightened - not when I saw a large car barrelling at us head-on (not enough time to feel that scared), not when they were threatening me with an emergency c-section and didn’t believe that my epidural wasn’t working…
If he does, then that kind of stuff will start happening in the UP. Keep him far away from you!!
Kind of like Angela Lansbury. Nobody ever asks why people start getting murdered wherever she shows up.
My daughter just forwarded this webcomic to me, just in time for Halloween.