When I was ten, I couldn't sleep one night, so snuck out in the living room and watched TV.

It was a movie called Night Stalker, with Darren McGavin. He portrayed Kolchak, who battled different monsters every week (and came out bruised and battered, but victorious)

This weeks movie was on vampires.

I watched the entire movie, in the dark, sitting about 5 feet from the screen.

Life was never the same after that.

Several nights a week for the next twenty years, I would have vampire nightmares. Screaming, detail filled, wake-the-house-up nightmares. Different stories, usually, but always featuring a vampire.

Now that's power of suggestion.

How did I overcome my fears? I have absolutely no idea. But I did read the Twilight series with great trepidation, and while I had a few night screamers, I've never again dreamed about vampires that way.

Did my brain finally just say hey! enough already! did I switch my fears to something else? (ok, there was the week when Vikings invaded my small town and raped and pillaged, but that only lasted a week.)

I still have screaming nightmares (my husband looooves those) about being trapped in a sinking car or falling off a cliff, things like that.

But for now, at least, my vampire fears have been laid to rest.

Oh, and Margie. Bungee jumping. 120 feet when I was 30 years old. Maybe that's what scared the vamp away? hmmm?

 =)

carrie
(who will, just in case, be deleting this vampire picture from her computer as soon as it's uploaded. Better safe than sorry!)

Comments

  1. I rarely have nightmares, so there will be no bungee jumping for me, funny girl. Actually, my nightmares these days usually involve daycare. See, I did daycare for like 20 years until I went to work seven years ago and now my nightmares are that I'm doing daycare again.

    ReplyDelete
  2. daycare is probably as scary as vampires...lol...

    ReplyDelete
  3. I remember a movie about giant tarantulas when I was too young to realize about fiction. I told everyone I knew that "out west" there were spiders bigger than buildings! I was scared to go west for years...well, not really, but I do remember being convinced about the spiders.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Terrified of the dark. I run to the car, mailbox or any other place I need to go in the night. Vamps?
    I think they're too stupid to be afraid of them.

    ReplyDelete
  5. An interesting test would be to watch a scary vampire horror movie - the complete opposite of something like Twilight. For me, the Freddie Krueger movies freaked me out - and still can to this day. I refuse to watch them - I'll have nightmares for days on end.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment