When I was younger I had a very active imagination and active dreams. I also had a couple of very specific, unfounded fears.
The first I remember was that things wanted to take me. Grey arms, hands and fingers in the night. Not a single thing but many. There wasn’t any reason I was aware of just an idea that something wanted me.
I imagined arms grasping at me and if I fell asleep they could take hold and pull me in. I didn’t know to where or why but it was enough for a young mind to try to imagine escape.
I started to think that if I slept away from the closest wall to my bed,or just out of reach, they would not find me.
I assumed they grasped from the wall intuitively, like they must be anchored to something and they could pull me from my bed to there. I thought that the walls in my room were a door.
I slept away from any walls out of habit but I still dreamt they were reaching, finding nothing and recoiling when they couldn’t touch me. I slept in abnormal places on my bed.
I never told anyone about this and I felt safe in company (sleepovers etc.).
As soon as I I was alone I resumed my pattern, I stayed away from walls, and I slept at the foot or edge of the bed.
It was one of those rituals of personal but embarrassing fears you keep to yourself since you can’t explain it, and I carried it with me.
Once, I tried to talk to my mother about what I was seeing. I must have been around 6. I don’t think it was part of the dreams but as I was talking her face decomposed in an instant. It was not real, it hadn’t happened, but it was real to me. It was like reality fell away and I saw the worst thing I could think of. I cried and she comforted me.
I was more upset than I could say, and I didn’t want to scare my mum or tell her what I had seen. It was the first time thought I might be crazy. It may have been anxiety or stress, I was sensitive child who couldn’t sleep.
A few years passed and I forgot about the grasping arms. I’d read The Time Machine for school and it changed everything for me.
I wasn’t raised to be religious, I felt my night terrors were just that. My new depression was for the death of the sun.
If the sun would eventually die, and a supernova would consume everything then everything I did or intended to do, or was ever done before me, was pointless.
I, again, trying not to be pulled into something I couldn’t escape, tried to think of a way out.
If it all ended, I would need more than the trip from school and back again to look back on. If I died I’d have little to remember.
So I began to read everything I could, I pasted pictures of places I’d never go to my walls. I’d stare at them before bed to try to cement then into my memory.
It was at this time I came across lucid dreaming as a concept.
I decided that might be my way out, if I could gather enough images I might carry with them with me.
I began to manipulate my sleep cycle, I set alarms every hour or so and I forgot that I used to be afraid to sleep.