Broodhollow

I’m curious… what’s the first nightmare you remember having? How old were you? Does it still frighten you a little, or can you view it abstractly after all these years?

I’ll go first. The first dream of any kind I remember, I wouldn’t call a nightmare exactly — I must have been three or four years old. My mother was rocking me in this red velvet rocking chair, and I was drifting off to sleep. From the chair, I could see out the back door. I clearly saw two men in overalls, moving a tree across our yard like a piece of scenery. The tree had glowing fruit in its branches. While it wasn’t a nightmare, it rattled me like I had witnessed some behind-the-curtains event of reality; a prop being moved from one set to another.

Other nightmares I remember are just fragments. But I had many dreams about deep water from a young age. I was afraid of the deep end of the pool as a kid, and I remember having a dream where I saw the depth tiles at the waterline — the tiles that have numbers on them to tell you how many feet — and it was like a nine-digit number.

What about you?