Gosh not only has Leila written an enormous entry about my last topic, and proposed the new topic that I'll get to soon, but she's forged ahead and written a post on the next topic already. Wow three posts in two days from her, that's fairly impressive. I've deliberately avoided reading her post on the current topic until I complete mine - I'm not quite sure why, perhaps because I won't feel quite as much behind if I write mine before reading hers.

Anyhow, let's get into it. There are clearly two distinct parts of this topic: childhood fears and childhood nightmares. I think, quite fortunately, that for me to two didn't generally coincide particularly often, as it would have been rather horrible. Generally my nightmares were about stuff that didn't consciously freak me out particularly much in my general life, although obviously they did unnerve my subconscious enough to make it put them into my nightmares. But anyway, which shall I start with... hmmmm.... how about childhood fears, that's a little more interesting probably.

When I look back at things, I was definitely a pretty damn timid child. For years I slept with the light on (or at least went to sleep with the light on), and while I don't remember the age I was when I finally made the transition to going to sleep with the light off, I know that it was probably older than I'd really want to admit to. So obviously 'the dark' freaked me out reasonably much as a kid. But it wasn't just 'the dark' in general, there were definitely specific elements to it that terrified me as a kid. The most obvious, was this fear that there would definitely be something out the window: perhaps a person, perhaps a weird monster, perhaps some sort of witch. Once it got dark, I'd be enormously keen to get the curtains shut on all the windows as quickly as damn possible, and I'd hate it when I would end up forgetting and having to draw them shut before getting into bed. Luckily once I switched the light on in my room the outside world would go much darker than it was before switching the light on, so my chances of actually seeing anything out the window would be reduced.

I'm not quite sure where this fear came from, but I think Scooby Doo had quite a lot to do with it. As most people know, Scooby Doo started off as a kids cartoon (subsequently made into terrible movies) with four people and a dog investigating all these scary monsters/ghosts/etc., who always turned out to be people in masks at the end of the show. While it was pretty harmless fun, and in my later teenage years I actually quite enjoyed watching the programme, as a kid it really freaked me out. In fact, I'm not quite sure why I continued watching it. But anyway, it wasn't the scenes of the monsters chasing the characters that scared me, it was the situations where someone would be standing next to a black window, there'd be a flash of lightning which would illuminate some scary monster/ghost/witch outside the window, which would then go black again. Heck even thinking about that now freaks me out a bit. I became convinced that there'd be random scary stuff outside the windows at night, even if I was a fairly rational child who didn't particularly believe in ghosts and other scary stuff. The other thing I remember particularly freaking me out as a kid, was the Wizard of Oz movie. Now, strangely enough, this movie was one of Leila's absolute favourites as a kid, and it didn't scare her at all. But for me, even as a reasonably older kid, I remember being totally freaked by it. It wasn't just the scenes of direct confrontation between the witch and Dorothy, but more indirect stuff that would get me. The scene where the house is flying in the air from the tornado and they see the witch outside (those damn windows again!) particularly scared me, as did situations where she'd wander off the yellow brick road (I remember my mind pleading with her not to leave it.)

Of course there were other things that freaked me out as a kid: thunderstorms in the middle of the night, ghosts in the general, the Witches movie, the movie "IT" which I saw when I was 12 and got totally fucked over by, but in general nothing else came close to my "windows thing". I think it's interesting to see how that's manifested itself these days, in that I'm never particularly keen to open curtains during the day (although I will do it sometimes) and I'm also still keen on turning lights on whenever I enter an empty room at night. For a very long time I found it extremely difficult to deal with the concept of having a window open at night, and I also still very much prefer the bedroom door to be shut when falling asleep.

OK, now for nightmares. Oddly enough there's not a huge crossover between my general childhood fears and what I seemed to have nightmares about as a kid. I think I vaguely remember having my first nightmare at around aged 4: it wasn't particularly exciting as all I remember was that there was a fire and the whole scene looked like something out of DangerMouse. A while later I had a much much more intense nightmare, which was about me getting lost in a shopping mall. This dream turned into one of the most epic ever, and I still remember scenes from it incredibly well. There were parts when I seemed to visit someone's house and watch their TV for a while, before remembering I needed to find my Mum again, and I always remember my utter relief in coming across her in what seemed to be a supermarket, in the fruit & vege section. After that, my nightmares tended to be about fairly mundane subjects, but were freaky for me all the same. I think the most common one was about the plughole in the bath messing up. I had a lot of baths as a kid, and obviously some significant sub-conscious fear of the plug disappearing and things getting sucked down the plughole (though generally my dreams involved me being more freaked out about my bath-toys going down there than me going down there). This wasn't exactly a totally freaky nightmare, but I had a great deal of very similar dreams over the years, and they always were fairly unpleasant.

As a teenager my nightmares generally revolved around trying to get to school on time, or exam stresses. The trying to get to school on time was a particularly common one, especially when I was riding my bike to school. These were more like "frustration nightmares" than "fear nightmares", but still were rather unpleasant as I'd always be aware of the time ticking on, but for some reason found it impossible to leave the house as there'd always be something that I had forgotten. Pretty similar to exam nightmares, where I'd always freak out about my pens running out and similar stuff. In more recent times, I've freaked out about missing flights & trains as my most commonly themed ones, although I have had a few rather disturbing ones where there's a really dangerous person that I keep on having to beat the crap out of (I'm often really strong in dreams for some reason) to stop them from harming people. Occasionally I've also had freaky dreams about giant spiders and the like, but they're pretty damn uncommon.

OK, well I think that does it. The next topic is to blog about blogging. Not so much why you blog and why you forget to blog (something I seem to write about more than anything else), but rather what makes a really good blog, what annoys you about blogs and (most importantly) what do you wish your blog was like?