Childhood Dreams

 As a kid, I’d get freaked out in the middle of every night.  I had wild dreams, major motion pictures with a cast of Hollywood stars.  Bad guys constantly chased me, and in one frequent dream, I’d fall off the roof of our house.  Now, even though, I believed that if you die in your dream, then you’d die in your sleep, I knew our house was a rancher, so I wasn’t afraid of meeting my maker if I fell.  But even in my subconscious I remembered how it felt to break a bone and I didn’t want to repeat the offense.  Anyway, I had horrific dreams when I was a child, even without watching scary movies.  I didn’t watch The Shining, Children of the Corn, Cary, Cujo, even when it was a double-feature, and I went to the movies with the neighborhood gang.  Though, I was afraid they would, they didn’t torment me for sneaking into another movie.  The most bloodcurdling movie I watched as a child was Close Encounters, and that scared the mess out of me.  I can’t do aliens.  Never could. 

I thought of this when my son told me that he had a bad dream.  Of course, I felt horrible because I introduced him to his first scary movie.  Honest to God, I thought he’d be able to take it.  I finally saw Nightmare on Elm Street as an adult, and I couldn’t stop laughing.  Besides, most rated “R” movies from back in the day are like PG-13 movies today, I thought, as I tried to justify watching the movie with my son in my mind.  The problem is he’s not thirteen.  He’s ten. 

He had his best friends over one evening, one thirteen and one eleven, and they wanted to see a scary movie.  My son, who covers his eyes when a horror trailer comes on TV, also acted enthused.  I wondered if he was “faking the funk,” pretending that he was game to save face.  I figured that if he was putting on an act, this would be a good lesson for him.  So, I flicked down the selections of Pay-Per-View, and chose Freddy.  (More than twenty-six years after its original release, there is still an audience for the burnt, disfigured face of a subliminal murderer.  If I described the movie like this at the time, I probably wouldn’t have put it on – as I digress.)  We turned off the lights, and together we laughed and screamed.  After my son’s friends went home, he wanted to see another Freddy movie, and so we made popcorn and enjoyed our Friday night. 

But he ended up in my bed that night.  I knew why in the morning, but I asked him anyway. 

“Freddy tried to attack me,” he said without hesitation. 

I told him the same thing that my mom told me when I was a kid.  I told him that he needed to learn to control his dreams.  That if he couldn’t prevent Freddie from making a cameo appearance then when Freddy tried to attack, he needed to muscle up and develop some super-human strength.  He could turn himself into the Hulk if he wanted to (I, of course, was Wonder Woman).  I told him that he could use magic and change Freddy into something else.  I told him how afraid I was of aliens when I was a child, so I knew how he felt, and he laughed. 

“There’s no such thing as aliens,” he said. 

“Well, there’s no such thing as Freddy,” I replied.  “He’s just a character that someone made up.”   

That night he slept by himself.  In the morning he said that Freddy is hard to fight, but he used his imagination and won.    

Still, I learned a very valuable lesson. 

Besides the fact that my son is too young for rated “R” movies (even from back in the day), I learned that my son kicks, talks, snores, and sleeps diagonally. 

No more scary movies.