I’m a children’s therapist, I work with child from age 3 to age 12; I’ve seen all types of horror. Physical abuse, trauma from car crashes, trauma from lost of parents and more.
One of the most common cases I have with children are nightmares.
The parents bring their child to therapy because they’ve been having horrible nightmares.
One of these are Sadie Nods.
She’s a 7 year old little girl, who’s recently been through the unthinkable.
Her parents had a fight and the father pulled out a gun and shot her mother dead, and then turned it on himself. She comes from a wealthy family so non of this ended up on the news, which I’m glad for. No child deserves such a thing to happen, and then for it to be broadcasted everywhere for everyone to see.
She’s been staying with her grandparents on her mothers side now, and she’s been having horrible nightmares. Non of which is about what happened to her; what happened to her is still most likely the cause of it.
That’s why she comes to me, I do therapy sessions with her to make the nightmares more bearable, and less scary. Overtime we’ll hopefully get it to the point where the nightmares gradually disappear. However for this we’re working slowly. One step at a time.
Her family requested no medication, which is their choice. I personally think it would help her, but again, it’s their choice.
We have 2 sessions every month, one every two weeks.
It’s 21 minutes until she should be here.
10 minutes goes by and I get notified that they’ve arrived, I go out into the waiting room and call her in. It’s just me and her, the grandparents only came in the first session we ever did.
“So, has it gotten any better since last time?” I ask, holding the door open for her.
“No, it’s only gotten worse!” She goes over to the chair and sits, taking the Rubik’s cube off the shelf to play with.
“Really?” I make sure to write it down. “Not at all?” She shakes her head no.
“Can you tell me how it has gotten worse?” I make sure to write every word she says down, “He keeps getting closer, even when my granny is in the room!”
Usually in her nightmare paralysis state when the “crawling man” crawls toward her he stops when her grandma runs in the room from her screaming.
“Can you maybe explain a bit more for me Sadie?” She’s half way completed the Rubik’s cube.
“H-he keeps coming closer eve-even when my granny’s in the room! He didn’t use to,” she has tears forming in her eyes. “I’m scared he’ll make it all the way to me! He only stops halfway now..”
“Even if he does make it to you, he can’t hurt you. It’s just a dream, you know that right, Sadie?” I like to reassure her that it’s not real and just a dream every chance I get.
“NO! No, no, no it’s real! Why does no one listen to me? Nobody listens to me!”
This wasn’t unusual for her, she usually goes on a rant about how it’s not just a dream and no one listens to her when she says it. I try to make her understand that I do listen, but she’s wrong. It’s not real, it’s a dream. But it doesn’t work, it always ends like this.
“Now Sadie! I am listening, I always listen to you, I’d never not listen. I’m your friend and I’m only trying to help you,” I try to calm her down.
“Maybe we should try drawing.” We hadn’t tried that yet, and I was planning on doing it today, and this is the perfect time.
She sniffles and wipes her tears while I get a sketch book out of my drawer. “Here,” I lay it on the table in front of her, “draw what you see in your dreams.”
“I told you there not dreams…” She takes the pencil and starts drawing, she’s only 7 so the drawing isn’t exactly awesome. But it’s enough that I could tell what she was drawing, it was a man, the man had a bunch of legs like a spider.
“He is crawling,” she points to the legs, “at me.”
“That’s a very good drawing, thank you. I think that maybe we should talk more about why you think this dream is real?” If I can get to the bottom of why she thinks it’s real, then maybe I could talk some logic until why it isn’t with her.
“Because! I’ve had dreams before and I know the difference, trust me I do!” It doesn’t seem like I’m going to get anything from her.
We talked for around 23 more minutes and I ended our session, I honestly think she would benefit with some type of meditation but her grandparents are against it. They say she’s too young.
I decided to take the picture she drew home with me, I don’t know why.
I slept all night, I didn’t even wake up once. This isn’t unusual I’ve never been the type to stay up late, and I wake up early.
I didn’t have to work today, it was Friday, my day off.
I decided to spend my day in bed going over some of the stuff I wrote down with my patients. I ended up doing that for hours only taking bathroom and food breaks; at 4:00pm I decided to take a nap, I had a strange dream. Or, you could say, nightmare.
It’s not uncommon with patients like Sadie that the longer I take about their nightmares I have a few of my own, my nightmare went something like this. I woke up, and there was something in the corner, at first I thought it was clothes but it started moving. It ended up being this man crawling towards me, and he had more than 4 legs.
It honestly wasn’t all that scary, I knew I was dreaming, and it never came all that close to me.
My husband came home from work a couple of hours later.
Me and my husband, Daniel, were laying in bed. I ended up dozing off, and I woke up to the same nightmare as before.
I kept having the nightmares, and I swear, and in one the thing got a little more closer to me than last time.
It’s been two weeks since my first nightmare, I have a appointment with Sadie today.
“Sadie, have you still been experiencing nightmares?” We were sitting across from each other, as always.
She looks skittish, she’s messing with her hands and shaking her leg up and down. “Um, no actually. Not since..” she cut herself off.
“Well, that’s good. I think we’re finally getting somewhere, don’t you?” I tried to get a smile out of her, but it didn’t seem to be working.
“N-no, it stopped because it told me I could get it to stop if I…” she cut herself off again, sniffling. She seemed to be on the verge of tears.
“If what Sadie? It’s okay, you can tell me.” I wanted her to know that she could tell me anything.
“I’m sorry.” She got up before I could even say a work and walked out.
Well that wasn’t weird at all.
I later found out that Sadie had requested a therapist change, and I would no longer be seeing her. I didn’t understand why, had I don’t something wrong?
The nightmares didn’t stop, instead they got worse. I’ve been taking some medicine but nothing seems to help.
The man is horrific, he has no eyes no mouth no nothing on his face. Even without a mouth I can hear the moans that come from him.
The man only gets closer each time, and he’s been getting so close that I have to shake my husband up. He stops moving but I can still see him, my husband can’t.
I’m getting scared that he’ll eventually keep moving even when my husband wakes up.
I know that logically he cannot do anything to me since he’s not real but it’s still scary.
Honestly, now I know why Sadie was so convinced it wasn’t a dream.
It’s been 6 weeks and 4 days since I had my first nightmare, now the man makes it all the way to the head of my bed.
I started drinking, and taking pills to make myself stay awake.
I ended up running into Erika, Sadie’s new therapist, at the bar that night. We talked for a bit, I told her about the nightmares. And to my surprise.. she had something to say about it.
“I know I shouldn’t say anything since everything is confidential, but.. Sadie told me that, she made a deal of sorts with the man form the dream.” A deal? What kind?
“Um, that he could have you instead..” What.The.fuck. She did what??
“She told me that the man doesn’t stop crawling after 6 weeks and 5 days.”