spinning

Ok, I know this will sound strange. Everyone I have ever told this too just looks at me with a blank look on their face as if to say, ‘Is that all?’ I am sure you will have the same reaction, but I am going to tell you. It’s not like you understand me anyway, right? I don’t even understand myself. I don’t expect you to.
There are a few particular instances that sum up the most terrified I have ever been in my life. Terrified isn’t even the right word. Maybe petrified? Damn, I really should not have cheated on all those spelling and vocabulary tests! They are dreams. I would have them occasionally from the time I was around five years old until I was nine. Even to me, when I hear them described, they sound lame. However, they were anything but lame at the time, trust me.
Let me preface this by letting you know that I often would have night terrors when I was a child. I would wake up and still see my nightmare going on around me. Fully awake, the dream fully still happening. One common dream was, get ready for it, of the movie “American Tale.” Remember that little mouse Fifel? There are these evil cats in the movie. I would wake up and see these horrific felines crawling up my bedspread, making their way towards me. Mom and Dad would come running to answer my bellows.
There were two dreams that I would have over and over again. They were nearly identical in their structure. I would wake up for some reason and be plunged into the middle of these “dreams.” I would be standing still and around me would fall this panoramic view. Above and below would be pure black—kind of like when you watch a wide screen movie that doesn’t fit the screen. It would circle three hundred and sixty degrees around me. No matter where I would turn, I cold not escape it. In one version of this there would be farm animals within the panorama: cows, horses, chickens, ducks, pigs, you get the idea. In the other, there would be ladybugs. Nothing but billions of ladybugs. Both the farm animals and ladybugs would be traveling counterclockwise around me. They were moving as if they were on fast-forward. They were almost a blur. None of these animals had any animosity towards me. They never tried to hurt me or even touch me. I was simply in the middle of them, barely able to move. I was in slow-motion. Even when I tried to speak, it felt and would sound as if I were drowning in molasses. I would just stand there, trying to move, not able to do anything but scream and cry. When these would occur, Mom and Dad would walk me all through the house, sometimes for up to an hour, just back and forth from room to room, trying to get me to calm down. It was if this alternate reality world would transpose itself above the one I truly lived in. I could see both. I could see Mom and Dad, I could see where we were going. It was as if viewing the world from a double exposed picture. Even Mom and Dad seemed to move with the lightening speed of the animals, as it would take tremendous effort for me to even move one of my feet.
These dreams stopped after I “got saved” when I was nine. They did not return, until one night while I was visiting our home over a long weekend during my freshman year in college. It was no less terrifying as an eighteen year old than as a child. It was months until I could fall asleep without the fear that I would wake up to ladybug or cattle.
Years latter, Dad told me that he use to have the exact same dream when he was a kid, except with different subject matter than my animals. I talked to my therapist about these dreams once. We were talking about times of fear, and these top the charts. His interpretation was that the dreams were telling me that I felt that I was not prepared or capable of handling what life demanded of me. The world flies by and you can not catch up or change what is happening to me. He assured me that those dreams were not true, I am able to keep up with the world and take charge of my life, even when my these dreams say that I can not. Sometimes, I wonder if the ever-benign animal demons were more accurate in their assessment of my capabilities than my loving therapist. Who knows, maybe they are still inside my brain, constantly running on there horizontal hamster wheel, causing my mind to stay stuck and frozen in abject, paralyzing terror.