Embracing Nightmares

We recorded a session of the BroadCast today, which will air on Wednesday. Myself, the Lovely Miss Rita, and Alyssa Casto all sat down together to talk about wonderment, daydreams, and life. It was a great conversation. Like these things do, it sparked me into thinking about something long after we'd said farewell and gone to our respective homes ahead of the oncoming thunderstorm. As I write, the storm is overhead, grumbling and rumbling, with the rain slapping and clawing at the window behind me. 

Dreaming came up in the conversation, and I'd mentioned that I'd used lucid dreaming as a way to deal with recurrent and frequent nightmares. Learning how to control my dreams helped me reclaim that subconscious self from the horror and despair. Later, I talked about the scene that I had written to start out a short story, of a woman dealing with the death of her husband. I game out the possible futures, in fiction, sometimes. 

I'm realizing that there is a power in embracing your nightmares. Drawing them in close, and looking them in the eye, and not flinching. When you come, I whisper, I shall know how to defeat you. 

I have learned that I am stronger than my fears. Some of them may come true - will certainly come true, with enough time. Life has an inevitable end. But by looking at it with unflinching resolution, I can learn how to handle it when the time comes. I've done this sort of thing in the past. I've participated in training for search and rescue, and for mass disasters, and I have taken part more than once in an actual search or rescue operation. You train for the worst to happen. When the time comes, you are confident and comfortable with your role, and that has the ability to carry you past the cold reality of what's happening. You can hold it together to do what needs to be done. Sometimes, that's all that can be asked. 

Which brings me back to fairy tales, because don't I always come back to them? We tell stories. In the telling and hearing of those stories, humans learn how to human. Folklore, mythology, fairy tales, urban legends: all of them have a root in some reason they exist and endure. Drawing the nightmare closer to look at it is one of those reasons. In a fairy tale we learn of the monster that keeps his heart outside his body, and how to find it and crush it, or we learn of Baba Yaga and how we can escape by keeping our wits and minding our manners, or we learn that fairies are not sweet and we must not make promises to them or accept their bargains. 

When you know the shape of the monster, you can defeat it. With knowledge comes  power, and the ability to plan. Plans rarely survive contact with reality, but having them - more than one! - enables us to act in a moment when we cannot think for fear, or sorrow. Draw the nightmare close, and perhaps in the cold light of dawn, it will dissipate into nothingness, a mist of the past that is lingering beyond it's usefulness. Rarely does such a banishing work in an instant, but having done it once, you can practice until it comes no longer into the darkness with you at night. The nightmare can be killed.