When I was young, maybe about six or seven, I started to have this reoccurring nightmare about dinosaurs. Well, one dinosaur, to be specific. It was a T-Rex, of course. Is there any dino more terrifying to a small child than the flesh-ripping, prey-stalking Tyrannosaurs Rex? (My friend Nick would argue that Velociraptors are the scariest because they have tiny hands and can open up bedroom doors. Right. Logical). These days, I can think of lots of things that are more panic-inducing than a big ol’ T-Rex. Like my rent being due and not having enough money in my bank account. Or global warming melting all the ice bergs and polar bears becoming extinct. Or a plane crashing right into my apartment as an act of terrorism. You know, things a 23 year old should be scared of.
But as a six year old, T Rex ruled the kingdom of fear.
My dream went something like this: I am trapped inside a building with a prodigious amount of glass windows that I seem to know is a daycare. In fact, I seem to recall that the entire wall was made out of glass windows. All the better for seeing the T- Rex, obviously. Inside my glassed in daycare, we start to feel tremors. The earth is shaking. Our 64-count box of crayons teeters on the edge of the crafts table and plummets to the moss-green carpeted floor below! Then, suddenly, we see the T-Rex come into view through the glass wall. It has ginormous and green and strangely, made out of plastic. As it comes closer we feel the earth tilt, and we cannot move. We cannot run. We can simply stare from inside our glass prison as the plastic T-Rex god stomps by. The vibration we feel running through our very bones is emanating from the thud of each of his clawed, heavy, plastic feet as they connect with the concrete sidewalks outside.
As a child within this dream I know instinctively I must get to my parents. Surely they are on their way to come and pick me up from daycare! I run to the glass wall and peer out—sure enough, there they are! Their car is parked on the curb and they are waiting for me with out-stretched arms. All I have to do is get passed the T-Rex and we can drive away from this horrific scene!
And yet, every time I try to run to them, the earth begins to vibrate, the floor begins to tilt, and I am unable to run across the street to get to my parents. I am unable to escape.
I always woke up before anything else happened. The T- Rex never smashed in my glass daycare. He never ate my family or ripped apart their car. He just stomped moodily around the block. And yet this nightmare used to chill me to my core. I would wake up panting, sweat dripping down my forehead, heart racing. It would take many lullabies and bed time stories to get me back to sleep after dinosaur dream nights.
It is almost as though what I was more afraid of in those nightmares was the fear of what was coming, rather than the actual destructive event. No one was ever hurt in this particular dream, and yet it terrified me. Knowing what was to inevitably come was what made my young heart race and my tiny clammy hands grip my CareBear sheets in terror. I still fear the same things, the same unknown black void of the future. I wonder where I’ll be in 5 years, ten years, hell, even tomorrow. We think that this uncertainty about what lies ahead is a “grown up” problem; something that little kids don’t have the capacity to fathom. As children, we must be too preoccupied with our tiny social dramas of who gets the best nap spot in kindergarten, our territory squabbles over the last piece of red construction paper, or the lunch lady running out of chocolate milk. But we do have fears. We do seek comfort in the familiar, the normal. Our world has limits, just as your adult one does, and when things appear in our world that our outside of our imagination…why shouldn’t we have trepidation over the impact they will have on our lives? Our six year old brains can grasp more than we give them credit for, I think. The truth is I’ve been afraid of the unknown for as far back as I can remember.
