What happens when the space between nightmares and reality crosses over?
Have you ever felt that there is something pursuing you? Hunting you down?
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From a young age, I had nightmares of being violently kidnapped or attacked. There was always something after me. I would spend weeks begging my parents to let me sleep in their bed with them because I was too scared to sleep alone.
The terrors ranged from being in shallow water hundreds of metres out from shore with my legs feeling like concrete, running from sharks coming to get me.
Or they were of being in the backseat of a car on a steep bridge with no railings, and my mum, who was driving, would suddenly disappear.
And the classic of running towards something — a door that I knew meant safety maybe — and feeling my legs give way beneath me more and more till I was barely crawling on the ground, a paralysing invisible quicksand beneath me.
I didn’t have a traumatic childhood, except if you count the trauma of my parents divorcing when I was four years old.
I know, that’s nothing new or unique in an experience for anyone born in the last century. Oh, the only other trauma I experienced from a young age was watching things that I perhaps was a tad too young for at the time.
For example, Jurassic Park and The Sixth Sense. Great movies, just not such great movies when you are 6 years old…
Haley Joel Osment screaming in a cupboard with a disfigured ghost invading his space is still as vivid to me as many of my own most vivid, real experiences in life.
As I went through Primary School, I had separation anxiety and some form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I was never diagnosed, I just learnt this in hindsight.
For instance, on Saturdays I was convinced if I didn’t run past a particular line on the hockey field, something bad would happen.
Sometimes that vague sense of something bad happening was replaced with deeply specific and horrible imagery that no 11-year-old should have to imagine.
Think, being eaten alive by dinosaurs, or a behemoth snake(Thank you, Anaconda (1997) — yep 6 years old again). Or everyone in your family being disembowelled by aliens (This one I can’t put my finger on, but if I place it I’ll let you know). Mars Attacks maybe?
But it was around the time that I went into high school that I managed to challenge those thoughts for the first time.
And not only did I experience the freedom that can only be felt when you stop counting-telegraph-poles-because-otherwise-the-world-will-end, but even more liberating — the worst nightmares stopped.
The ones where my parents got back together, and we were a happy family again.
And also the one where I was chased down the street by Jim Carrey from The Mask.
Maybe the most impactful out of all the movies I consumed too young was The Terminator. I remember it so vividly; curling up next to my dad on the couch, too scared to go to bed but horrified by what I was watching. Yes, we’re still talking single-digit years.
I felt the eternal doom of knowing there is no escape from The Terminator, with his black glasses and robotic persistence beyond all human capability. I knew that he would pursue me endlessly. That’s right, he was pursuing me, as much as he was pursuing Sarah Connor.
It shook me to my core at the deepest level. And I couldn’t bear to look away for a single second.
But what was so much worse than experiencing that terror on the couch as I watched each scene of endless pursuit and fear unfold in front of me was the only other alternative — going to bed.
Because from bed, I could hear everything and see nothing. Even if I slept, I knew the nightmares of being pursued by a terrifying future robot-human who wanted to murder me were going to come. I was going to sink into the quicksand, unable to escape as I did my best to run away. I would never know if Sarah Connor escaped, and if everything was somehow, miraculously (how could it be?) okay in the end.
And I don’t know now if it was watching with my eyes wide open, or sitting on the couch next to my dad, but one or both of these things meant that everything was maybe going to be okay.
Still, even if in those moments, I felt that crushing dread of a goliath on my chest telling me that absolutely nothing was going to be okay ever again. As if I was a character embedded in that movie, and I would never escape that endless pursuit.
At 19 I joined the police, ostensibly seeking a stable job that mattered, and one where I could help people.
But there was something desperate and primal underneath the decision too. I had still felt something was chasing me down. I wanted to get ahead of it so it would never catch me. Reclaim and make my own, the space I was so used to inhabiting — the one where I was trying to run, but knew I would never be fast enough.
I wanted to be fast enough. And I realised somehow that meant going into dark places myself, by choice, and conquering them.
My confidence was, until joining the police, wholly underscored by bravado — I was still terrified of the dark.
And when I pushed myself to inhabit my new headspace — The moment I put on that uniform and wore that gun on my hip— I became a different character to the one I was before. I wasn’t the little girl sitting in front of the scary movie and experiencing it as if it was happening in her own lounge room. I was suddenly Sarah Connor and I could do anything.
I walked into the dark alleyways alone after offenders, I ran into the fights to break them up, and I wasn’t even afraid of searching abandoned buildings solo. Even when I didn’t wear the uniform at all, I suddenly had the confidence to walk out onto my street at night — yes, previously taking the bins out had shaken me.
And when I turned off the light to go to sleep, I felt the total absence of that insidious presence. The one that I had been so used to stalking me in the darkness and wanting me dead.
I didn’t have to run to my bed when I turned off the light anymore, and I didn’t have to tuck my toes under the covers. Because I knew that there was nothing there to grab me. I knew I owned the space around me.
But the respite was short-lived, and the nightmares seeped into my waking life instead, in the most unexpected ways.
It started with a recurring dream and a coincidence.
I was working, kitted up and attending a job. Someone became violent and attacked my partner with a knife, stabbing them repeatedly. And as my partner screamed for help, I raised my gun to fire at the attacker, pulled the trigger and…
‘click’
The sound of a stoppage — jammed bullets in the chamber of my gun. A noise that meant I needed to quickly pull the slide and release it, clear the stoppage, chamber a new bullet, then fire again.
‘click’
And that same click, over and over. As I watched people I was meant to protect be savagely murdered in front of my eyes.
And it was just a dream, until it wasn’t.
In our yearly operational training, I ran from cover to cover, firing my weapon towards the fake human paper targets, and I felt it.
‘click’
So I cleared the stoppage, a quick action, no problem. And I felt it again.
‘click’
The exercise was paused as I stood there dumbly, this was the very same gun I was using that day operationally.
The trainer took the weapon, checked it and found it was faulty. He decommissioned it for repairs and provided me with a new one.
Images flashed through my mind of what might have happened if I had needed to use that gun earlier in the day to protect someone. I tried to push them away.
My fearless character wavered as I dealt with the fallibility of the armour that made me into Sarah Connor. That police officer character, once full to the brim with confidence, wavered. A gaping space started to open up and suck me back in. The space that made me less Sarah Connor and more scared little Nikki sitting on the couch next to her dad, too horrified to look away from Arnie’s endless pursuit.
The nightmares continued. And it swept further into my waking dreams. We were chasing an offender through suburbia, he was going through backyards, jumping fences, but we had the area he was in cordoned off.
I flashed my torch into a front yard in the search and spotted the man hiding, crouched behind some bushes, I yelled to alert others he was there.
And when I went to run, my legs wouldn’t move. They sunk, slowly to the ground. As if in that nightmare-quicksand, until I was kneeling and then crawling on the footpath. I hadn’t tripped, I was simply paralysed.
Terror filled me as I felt suddenly I wasn’t the pursuer any longer. I was back in that nightmare world and I would never escape.
But lagging behind my peers, I pushed through and dragged myself off the ground to continue the pursuit.
This was not a dream. It was real, it truly happened. My film heroine character was shaken once again, and my layers of confidence were shedding away quickly.
In the next year, the quicksand caught me again. My partner and I had come across a car wrapped around a pole and quickly catching fire. The sole drunk driver was trapped in the driver’s seat, steering wheel so firmly pushed into his chest he would have clearly had broken ribs.
As we tried to free him, calling for police ambulance and fire service assistance, it became clear that he was so wedged into the crumpled driver's seat, that maybe the only way to buy him more time was to pour water over his legs that were very quickly, literally, going up in smoke.
So I ran across the road towards the nearest set of houses, screaming “Fire! We need water!”
And while my voice worked perfectly fine, my legs fell into the quicksand. I slow-motion collapsed to the footpath again, not tripping, just legs giving way underneath me. That sense of dread coupled with confusion filled my entire being. I was in a nightmare, I had to be.
Once I managed to get back up slowly, from a crawl to a walk, I was being outpaced by civilians who came out from houses.
Later I learnt that I fell so hard onto my right knee that I needed stitches, gravel embedded in the wound causing a nasty form of proof to myself that yes, the quicksand had been real. I had fallen to the concrete in this invisible goo that controlled my legs for a few seconds. Again. And I was awake the whole time.
Years later, I faced a string of real-life terrors all at once. A dreaded Coronial Inquest, an internal investigation, a promotion and a subsequent personal relationship breakdown with my long-term partner. I was recurrently sick, and ended up with a nasty virus that had me couch-ridden for two weeks and my mouth full of ulcers.
Recovering from that illness, I was never the same at work. My focus, attention to detail and wakefulness were obliterated. I felt that I was walking in a dream.
And when I wasn’t at work, through this whole period, I found it so impossible to watch TV or films.
Not just the scary ones, I had a new brand of horror.
Police dramas, procedurals, even buddy cop comedies. I felt ill if I watched a RomComs that featured police officers. And a surprising number of random genre films do. I was so horrified by watching the mundane stories of police come on TV, seeing myself in every scene, sucked in, just as I used to be sucked into my own horror movies when I was younger, and I was endlessly pursued.
These films forced me to be the weakest character I had ever been. Cemented my existence as not capable of being a police officer, not capable of functioning to a normal capacity, and not capable of living with the confidence I once had.
One film, End of Watch, I had once loved and almost idolised the blue camaraderie of the characters. Now it made me nearly throw up, totally overcome with that sense of being chased down by something that was after me. That insidious thing.
About six months later, I was diagnosed with Narcolepsy with Cataplexy. A debilitating sleep disorder — my brain is unable to get effective sleep, and even if I manage to get effective sleep (say through medication), my brain sends signals during the day to tell you to go to sleep. So I sleep.
Cataplexy is the secondary part of Narcolepsy and was the answer to my literal nightmares incarnate — The paralysis caused by extreme emotions, flooding the body with the same chemicals that freeze most of us from movement during sleep, to stop us from walking out the door when we dream. Except, for people with Cataplexy, those chemicals flood our bodies suddenly while we are awake too.
Like if you are shocked and flooded with adrenaline when you see an offender in a front yard in front of you, few metres away.
Or if you watch a trapped man burning alive in a car in front of you, and all you feel you can do is run to get water to slow the progress of the fire that is now licking his waist.
Through this period, I was dating a guy. He was lovely, and he was very into film. Like, he would place bets on all of the Oscar category winners with friends every year in-to-film.
And he had been pushing me to watch horror films, some newer ones he particularly loved, and some of the classics, trying to convince me that it was worth it for the amazing quality of horror that is out there now. He would rave about how much depth and meaning you can find in a great horror film.
I refused for a while, and then we went into the original Covid-19 lockdowns. What else was there to do but watch movies really? And what movies weren't going to put me right back in that weak little character that I had been living as for so long now?
So I did it, I faced the horror that I had been running from for years, I sat alone in my loungeroom with the lights on (my one condition), and we stayed on a video call while we watched the first film.
And then the second film.
And the third, fourth, fifth, and eventually we watched 33 horror films together, before that relationship ended amicably — long distance is hard.
Here are the films:
- The Host
- Parasite
- Cabin in the Woods
- Villains
- Halloween
- Nightmare on Elm Street
- Alien
- Midsommar
- Hereditary
- Ready or Not
- 10 Cloverfield Lane
- Loved Ones
- Get Out
- Us
- Silence of the Lambs
- The Perfection
- Texas Chainsaw Massacre
- The Evil Dead
- Freddie Vs Jason
- Train to Busan
- Babbadook
- Sinister
- It Follows
- I’m Thinking of Ending Things
- Evil Dead II
- Child’s Play
- Candyman
- The shining
- Chuckie
- Doctor Sleep
- The Wicker Man
And before we began, I had sworn I would never, ever watch Babbadook — a movie that was the epitome of everything that plagued me, my night terrors, sleep paralysis, cataplexy, losing touch with reality, not knowing wake from sleep, and that insidious presence that had followed me from such a young age, incarnate in Baba-Dook-Dook-Dook.
But in every film, including Babadook, I found a new headspace. And I realised that I was already living in the horror world each time a film finished.
The world I was living in was so stressful and terrifying; it had become the thing that pursued me.
Instead of nightmares of quicksand, the sinking paralysis was real.
Instead of helplessly watching the people that I was meant to protect and save being murdered in dreams, I was truly crippled and unable to work in any capacity.
Instead of the monsters chasing after me or hiding under the bed, I was pursued by that insidious presence, behind every phone call from a private number or veiled comment from a manager about the importance that I ‘get better’.
And those realisations, as I watched these horrors happening in films, that I had absolutely no reason to be scared of, saved me. They turned my world upside down, and I found watching horror became more of a meditation.
It was a time where I could inhabit another character, one that wasn’t me, wasn’t Sarah Connor, wasn’t the police officer, and wasn’t the person with Narcolepsy.
I could get into the headspace of completely living in that world. Experiencing that terror. Feeling that the was no escape.
And at the end, it was over.
And I would feel the greatest cathartic release, the kind that hits you all over your body with complete bliss and acceptance of the world as it is.
It was like winning against Narcolepsy, the police and all the stresses that I was facing every day.
Because after watching someone get torn apart, or be terrorised in their own home, I felt with such conviction in my being — these things relentlessly pursuing me my whole life. They really aren’t that bad.
