As a child I had a recurring nightmare. I’d find myself crouched in a ditch or trench in eerie teal darkness. It was always hellishly hot. Silence held me in suspense for reasons I could not fathom but it felt like something was coming to get me. I was not safe. I was exposed. Danger swarmed invisibly.
With no warning or transition I was between warring armies, the sky above me a chaos of light, noise, and explosions, as if their missiles and bullets were all colliding over me. I’d huddle in a fetal position and it would stop. I never saw fighters, only explosions and fragments flying.
More dreadful silence struck like a hawk striking, then another random round of conflict and chaos would be around me, neither with any sense of transition. I went from being stranded dead in the middle of dread-filled silence to caught in the midst of mad violent conflict. It was terrifying, exhausting, and left me trembling and jumpy. One of the worst things was, I had no idea which side I was on, or belonged to, if either; no notion which direction to crawl for refuge. All I could do was stay huddled, hoping nothing came down on me but light and sound, which was bad enough.
This affected me in many ways, not all of them evident. One lingering mark is my abhorrence of my “nightmare color”, a particular shade of teal. Makes me shudder to see it, like a whispered threat of secret devastation. It has shaded my view of existential angst and existential isolation.
As a child I always felt watched, too. That has never left me. My entire life has been performed for an unseen audience with malign intentions toward me. They might erupt into chaos and violence at any moment. So the nightmare promised, and taught.
This nightmare tended to hit me when I had fevers, which I had often as a child. A part of me took it as a glimpse of elsewhere, as if I’d astral traveled to an alien planet and could not get back. This nightmare dates back to before Kindergarten and I had it regularly through my childhood and into my adolescence. It remains vivid and vertiginous.
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Steel Sky
