Fears

When reading this, i find myself transported back to the age of 7 as many of the qualities in this description applied to me, but not all of them. I can't recall ever worrying about much at all. I didn't have any irrational fears, like spiders, ghosts, etc, that many other children did. I remember on quite a few occasions exploiting others for their fears, and regretting it afterwards.

I remember oncet a sleepover once at my friend simone's house, there was a red light on the security unit on the wall. I convinced one of my friends, Rowan that it was a 'wolf's eye' and it was looking at her. I'm not sure how I managed it at the time, i guess i was just very persuasive or good at telling scary stories. In the end she got so scared that she had to go home, thats where the regret comes in, I hadn't expected her to actually believe me.

Another occasion, another sleepover. We were being so loud that the neighbour knocked on the wall for us all to be quiet. It freaked is all out at the time but i decided to make a joke of it and told everyone it was the ghost of a little boy who used to live here and he did that all the time. When the other kids started to get too scared though (and i was afraid they'd be scared enough to leave) i told them not to worry and that the ghost was actually quite friendly, like casper (the friendly ghost).

At school it was the same, I remember this one occasion where i managed to convince a girl in the same year as me that I was a witch and i could turn her into a frog. I'm sure it started out as an ongoing game of sorts, but then she started to believe me and got scared. I remember thinking that children who believed in ghosts, witches and vampires were very silly because 'everyone knows they don't exist.'

I found this in my year 3 'best book' of schoolwork that luckily my parents kept.



I guess this shows how much I liked telling scary stories and perhaps how I saw monsters and ghosts as clearly fictional characters, to be told in stories and not carried over to the real world. I did have nightmares though occasionally. One that comes to mind is the reoccuring nighmare I'm sure I had at around about that age.

The nightmare was really quite gruesome, a pack of snarling, hungry, black dogs escape from a cage at the far end of a garden and by the end of the dream are tearing at my innards and eating me alive. I think we can call that a rational fear at least, after all all dogs are decendants from wolves, but the strange thing was I wasn't actually afraid of dogs at all. It must have meant something. 7 was about the age I dreamed a lot about flying, I loved those dreams. But with the dogs, gravity seemed to drag me down and make flying a real effort so they would snap at my feet till I would eventually float down with exhaustion and resignation that there was no escape and they would just have to eat me. And I'd feel them eat me, strangely. I'll have to get that dream analysed at some point and see what it might have meant, it must have been significant since it reoccured several times... Maybe I was scared of something after all.