Your heart pounds. Rolls of dread crash over your body. Terror digs into your stomach and fingers of fear claw at your mind. The world is distorted; you can't see clearly, you can't move quickly. Coldness floods your veins as you give a silent scream and wonder if you can take much more.
Then you wake up.
We all have them, we all hate them.
Except for wait...I like them? >.> I like them. I do. Perversely enough, I love nightmares.
When I was little I used to hate them, of course. I'd have the same one every night: I'm swinging on a telephone wire and all the sudden it breaks and I fall
down
down
down
HIT the bed.
And wake up.
I hated that dream. I also specifically remember one nightmare where "bad guys" raided my house and came into my room. They didn't notice me but and they got into an argument with each other and one of the guys broke my little table. They were angry and scary and that little table was important to me. I hated that dream too.
But somewhere along the line, I stopped hating nightmares.
The first time I remember realizing that was after my Lord-of-the-Rings-Eragon nightmare. A whole army of 1000 Uruk-hai were in my backyard with only my family to fight them off. My mom proposed we just give them my little sister as a bribe (which she would never do IRL, just by the way). That terrified the living daylights out of me. I loved my sister, and for my mom to say something so horrible and out-of-character was disturbing. I persuaded everyone we could fight off the Uruk-hai ourselves. So we grabbed swords and got to it.
Uruk-hai are scary, btw. They're huge and inhumanly strong and have no feelings whatsoever. They will kill you and laugh as you suffer. But, somehow or another, we managed to kill or chase off all 1000 Uruks. {Shoulda known it was a dream right there.}
Or so we thought.
Just as we were congratulating each other and dancing around in victory (wouldn't you?), a massive Uruk-hai snuck up behind me. I blocked his blow with my own sword and we started dueling. Of course, he was way stronger than me and I ended up on the ground, rolling left and right to avoid his blows (you know, like you see in movies XD). I was doing pretty damn well until I rolled the wrong direction and he sliced open my back from my shoulder to my hip.
Kinda painful. A little bit.
Then the dream just gets really stupid and weird and this guy from my class shows up and tries to heal my back.
But anyway, I woke up from that dream scared stiff...but really excited and inspired for some reason. It was then that I decided I liked nightmares.
Just think about it. You get to have crazy adventures and learn how you hold up in terrifying situations. You can understand your character and discover things you didn't know about yourself. You can be in a battle, you can fall off a cliff, you can witness a murder, you can be robbed, you can get captured in a war.
And then you get to wake up, completely unscathed. You have amazing memories without all the long-lasting effects of pain and trauma. Like being in a horror movie and knowing you come out alive. Daring adventure with guaranteed safety. Character tests with no lasting embarrassment. It's like the best of both worlds.
And, really, who wouldn't want that?
~Stephanie
