I used to have *horrible* scary nightmares as a child. I'd wake my poor parents up screaming at least a few times a week. I had my own stable of various monsters who had made appearances in various dreams and would recur, at least ten of them. I slept with the light on and a radio going until I was at least 13, and the only reason I turned it off, eventually, was because I was tired and it was easier to go to sleep with the light out.
Comes with having an overactive imagination, I guess, which helped with my writing later on. :0
Of course, this later transitioned to a huge love of ghost stories, especially freaky ones, which I now find enjoyable rather than frightening. And what's also interesting (to me, at least) is that for decades now, I have completely ceased to have monster related dreams where I'm helpless. I'm always able to fight back.
I still occasionally have dreams where I'm being attacked by zombies, or a monster, or once even Freddy Kreuger, but in those dreams, I pretty much always either grab a gun and blow the snot out of my attackers or, at the least, fight back and evade or escape.
It's odd, but I am basically *never* defenseless in any nightmare involving monsters or other ghoulies, so those dreams end up being more of an adrenaline rush than a scare. While I don't have hard evidence to support this, I am relatively certain that this transition occurred because of all my gaming ... playing games like Doom, and Silent Hill, and Resident Evil.
In those games, horrific monsters ARE attacking you and you're incredibly tense, but you can fight back. Somehow I've internalized that, so in whatever drives my unconscious mind to create dreams, any time my mind conjures "scary monster" it also conjures "hey, here's something you can kill it with".
That said, I still fall victim to the more mundane dreams, such as the ones where you've wrecked your car, or your teeth are falling out, or (the most terrifying ones since the little one arrived) where something has happened to my daughter. I did have one freaky half-awake dream (one of those sleep paralysis things) where I dreamt I heard some creepy lady singing a creepy lullaby to my infant daughter in the next room, over the monitor. So basically, some random psycho insane lady was going to steal my little girl. Those are the types of nightmares where I want to find my unconscious and knock the hell out of it.
You can send zombies and nightmares and have my teeth fall out and have me show up naked to class, but if you give me a nightmare where my little girl is dead or in danger, you are going to really piss me off. :0
