‘We stopped checking for monsters under the bed
when we realised they were inside us.’
As a part of one my course assignments this week, I was required to write about a frightening event in my life that no longer scares me, then rewrite it from the perspective of either another participant in that event or of an outsider. As a child I really did awake to the visage of a silhouetted man above my bed and for many years was terrified of the image it ingrained into my memory. I recall fearing the dark landing because witches lived in shadows and voids, so I would never walk upstairs alone and after using the toilet, I would, flush, switch off the light and bolt down the hallway to a lit room where the shadows couldn’t catch my feet. I would always have my mother, whom was, herself, troubled deeply by the shadow man, tuck me into bed at night and stay until I was asleep for fear that my nighttime companion might return. Now that I’ve matured and become an adult, needless to say, the shadow no longer haunts my nightmares, and my partner, who is fascinated by oneirology and practices lucid dreaming, and I have determined this shadow I saw was probably nothing more than a mirage, a hallucination created by my mind because I had not fully awaken, but believed myself to be conscious at the time.
This event began to pique my interest, however; I realised that all monsters, first and foremost, were created by our imagination and therefore we, as much as they, were capable of inducing nightmares. We were equal to them in darkness, in fact, we were darker, for we as the subject had the capacity to mould and shape our nightmares to be specifically terrifying to us – we personalised them, but they were simply texts and images acting out our mind’s orders like puppets, unwittingly carrying out our designs. These ideas brought me back to the Joker’s declaration (above) and led me to an image painted by missingPantaloon, a very talented Deviantart artist who seems to be fascinated with the same idea and pinpointed The Lord of the Flies, Life of Pi and El Laberinto del Fauno as novels displaying similar ideas. I’d like to add Frankenstein, The Magic Toyshop and Alice in Wonderland to that list, and in light of researching nightmares and formulating my own conclusions, I decided I would recapture my perspective during my first encounter with the shadow man, along with what may have been his, ‘the nightmare’s,’ version of events, while the question ‘who is the innocent party?’ is called into question. I admit that Frankenstein (being one of my all-time-favourite novels) inspired the character of my shadow man as a creature sharing similarities with the naive, early post-birth monster of the book. I entitled this two-part piece ‘The Nightmare.’
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The Child
I awoke suddenly in the middle of the night, as though I hadn’t slept at all, to the knowledge that some intuitive feeling had settled in the pit of my stomach, had alerted my crawling skin and hairs that now stood on end. I faced the wall on the upper bunk of the bed, watching the blank wallpaper peeling, pretending that the tickling hollow breath on my neck wasn’t real. Eternity seemed to pass by while I lay there, grappling with the fear that choked me, that clawed its way down my throat and crushed the larynx, then I drove myself over onto my side to face the balcony and the gap that lay in its wake. There was a man, or rather, the dark silhouette of a man, slender, pillar-like and inert, rising from the shadows of the space; my only meagre comfort was knowing the metal barrier of the balcony separated us. I watched him, as he watched me, through the recesses of the bars and a crushed mask of twisted, hollow miens. I prayed to be kept safe, for morning, for fatigue to wash over me again so just so that I might escape from this grim nightmare.
The Shadow Man
She was beautiful… vulnerable… doll-sized… That night she stirred while I observed the tiny pitch of her chest as she breathed. I was happy, she would finally meet me, the one who watched over her… taking care of her… repositioning the quilt around her small body whenever she turned… But for all my excitement and anticipation, she wouldn’t look at me. Many times I outstretched a friendly hand, came close to whispering a greeting in her ear so as not to frighten her, but stayed, certain she would, eventually, turn around. Then, finally, so jerkily I almost sprung up and would have terrified the poor girl, she kicked back on the mattress and twisted her body to me. But why? Why, tell me why? Why were her eyes filled so with such dread and terror? Why did her hands shake and clamp down on the quilt for protection? Though I smiled so widely, so earnestly, in order to secure her trust enough to introduce myself as her night guardian, why did she not see this? Such contempt was in her eyes then that my voice could achieve nothing, not a letter nor a syllable until fear had rendered me utterly paralysed and incapable even of escape, until either the dawning glimmer of sunlight or the heavy weight of sleep overcoming her might once again release me from this nightmare.
Grumpy Cat 