I feel fear in the backs of my heels…

When I was younger, I had several recurring nightmares, the most common of which was quite odd in content, but which always scared the shit out of me:

… It was in the living room of my childhood home, prior to moving to C. where I spent most of my youth, but after my sister was born. Plenty of light filled the room, and its cream-colored walls always kept the room bright. When I walked in, the room was as brightly lit as usual, but ice frosted every surface. Icicles and little pillars of ice hung from the ceiling and jutted from the floor. Frost hung in the air after each breath. I remember a sense of foreboding, of such intense cold.

In the middle of the room lay a tire on its side, as if someone had rolled it to the middle of the room, toppled it, and forgot. I can’t remember if any ice coated the tire or not, but my sense tells me it was cold but not showing any frost or signs of being frozen in the room for long.

My curiosity got the better of me, despite the cold and eerie sense I got from the room, and I walked slowly to the center of the room and looked into the center of the tire-

It was a hole. A big, dark, dizzying hole. I don’t remember if I was pushed, pulled, or just lost my sense of balance, but I tumbled right down into it, falling, falling for a long time, and then landing with a painful thud on my side.

I was in hell. I couldn’t see much, but muted reds and black filled my vision, and it was just as cold here as in the room above. Worse yet, I could sense.. or feel… someone nearby.

I don’t remember any more. I think I woke up convulsing in terror, sweating, about this point…

The other one came when I was slightly older. I had been living in C., the town where I spent most of my youth, for at least a couple of years. The nuclear threat of the 80s figured prominently in this dream:

… I was playing outside in the yard, having a grand time with myself. After a while playing, I heard air raid sirens blaring (these were used to signal the noon hour, so I was familiar with the sound by then) and looked up to see dark clouds on the horizon, and flashes of brilliant light from far away. I could only stand still and watch. Planes droned overhead after only moments, and I was running, running, running. I heard the whistle of the bombs rushing down toward the earth, heard the thud of impact, felt the THUMP of detonation pass through my body, and the warm breeze of expanding air.

But I was not running from an explosion… I looked back to see a horrible wolf-like monster, twice the size of a man, more like a gigantic bear dressed up like a wolf, so huge were its muscles, its jaws and its claws. And I was transforming as well, first growing younger in age… until my legs would no longer carry me away; I could no longer run but I could crawl. The ground shook as this creature lumbered toward me, closer, closer… But I was no longer human – I was turning into a sheep, my cries turning into pitiful bleating barely loud enough over the chaotic din of my dream for anyone to hear.

I leaped into an open car trunk just as the beast’s massive jaws opened, its hot and rancid breath curdling the air around me. I remember only blackness after that; whether I managed to close the trunk or suffered a far worse fate, I don’t know. Again, I would wake up in trembling sweats at this point.

The final dream was about being lost in a large institution of some sort, something like a large college, hospital and airport all grafted onto one another. I don’t remember many of the specifics except that I realized I was searching for my mother, I’d lost her and needed desperately to find her before she left. After a lot of running, I came to the top of an open-air concrete landing. There were steps leading down to the lower level, where I saw my mother. I called out to her but I don’t know if she heard me, and I realized that if I tried to run down the stairs, I would never catch up with her. There were at least several hundred vertical feet separating the level I was on and the level below, making the staircase thousands and thousands of steps long.

So I jumped. And suddenly I was falling, and aware of my fatal mistake.

But I never hit bottom. I woke, as usual, trembling, sweating, gasping, before I landed.

…

I have issues with memory losing its emotional color very quickly. The problem hasn’t been as bad in the past few years, but during high school and before, I had extreme difficulty with long-term memory in the emotional sense. I could usually, but not always, recall an event, but the details significant to my emotional states, even if they were physical in nature (for example, the color of the shirt the girl I first kissed was wearing, which I remember was strong in my mind at that time) remained unavailable. I felt as if my memory were a thick fog, allowing me to see only certain things.

…

I feel fear in the backs of my heels, as if danger itself were tickling them and trying to incite them to run. I used to get the feeling when walking down (more pronounced, when walking back up and out!!!) into a dimly lit basement, or walking through dark woods alone, or when I was alone at home (sometimes still) walking up stairs in the dark. My heels burn with fear and I begin to move faster, getting myself someplace safer as quickly as I can.