Every kid eventually comes face to face with their own mortality. Their goldfish or their great aunt dies. This is just a part of learning about how the world works and what it means to be human. I don't remember how it happened, but at some point when I was really young - younger than 10 - I learned it was possible for people to die in their sleep. Probably I saw something on tv or overheard a conversation about it. I'm sure I asked my mother about this ("Can people really die in their sleep?") and she confirmed it ("Yes, sometimes.") but I doubt she understood what I was really asking, which was: am I going to die in my sleep?
Most kids probably could have processed this information and moved on with their lives, but I have been neurotic for as long as I can remember, and this is the first thing I can recall having obsessive thoughts about. It became less of a question of not if I would die in my sleep but when. I knew that this could happen to people but I didn't understand that there were extenuating circumstances. That they were old, or had other health issues or were poisoned by carbon monoxide. For me the association almost instantly became that sleep itself would kill me.
I began to have a recurring dream; the imagery has still stuck with me even though it's been about twenty years. I would dream about a cemetery, one of those old gothic types with ornate headstones and giant trees. It was always night and everything was cast in a blue wash. There was nothing more to the dream than that, just this one image, like a painting or a photograph. My only experience with cemeteries at the time was through movies and television so it's pretty easy to see how this stereotypical, cinemeatic depiction ended up stuck in my head. I dreamt about this haunted house style cemetery just about every night for a while, after lying in bed struggling to fall asleep and afraid I was about to die. Even after the dream stopped this fear persisted.
I doubt my parents fully understood what was going on. I doubt any parent ever truly understands the inner lives of their children, especially at that age before they can fully articulate what they're feeling, but I don't think I ever even attempted to explain it. I've always had problems with anxiety at night; I used to have night terrors as a toddler. They knew something was wrong since I was obviously stressed out and was wetting the bed for so long they finally put vinyl covers on my mattress. But something had sort of ALWAYS been wrong so they didn't know there was anything new going on. This makes it sound like I was a total nervous wreck every single night and that isn't strictly true, I had good days and bad ones. I had a happy childhood. But memories of difficult time periods have a tendency to become embroidered over the years.
It was around this time that I was introduced to A Nightmare on Elm Street. My memory of these events isn't completely clear but I know I watched at least one of these movies with my older cousin Holli during a sleepover. The timing is about right for five of the movies to have been released so we may have watched a few of them. The important thing is that right there on the screen was a manifestation of the thing I feared most. The characters went to sleep and then died, horribly. I KNEW IT. Holli had a replica Freddy glove tacked to the corkboard in her room and when I slept over I would lay in bed and stare at it. I think I once even asked her to take it down because I was so freaked out. It cast its shadow down the wall and I was positive it was going to come to life and crawl under the blankets with me.
You might assume that Freddy Krueger heaped on top of all of this other anxiety might have caused me to have a complete psychological meltdown but incredibly the opposite happened. For me, dying in my sleep was such a confusing, nebulous fear that putting a face on that fear was almost reassuring. I hadn't before known WHY I would die in my sleep, just that it would happen and I wouldn't see it coming. Now that fear wore dusty fedoras and latex burn appliances. He dished out horrible puns before he stabbed you to death and sometimes you could even escape him, if only temporarily.
I began to dream about Freddy (of course I did) but he never tried to hurt me in these dreams. He was interested in me in general but he never chased or menaced me. These dreams were unsettling because he was in them but it was only because of his presence and never the content. Freddy Krueger was just one item on a laundry list of things I was afraid of at night. Ghosts, demons, the fear that my wall might grow a face and eat me (I think this came from an episode of the Ghostbusters cartoon). As I got a little older more realistic scares were thrown into the mix and I worried someone might break into our house and murder me in my bed or kidnap my younger brother. But the fear that I might die in my sleep for no reason at all still loomed very large and Freddy was its face. I don't know what the turning point was but after a while the dreams about him ceased to become disturbing and instead were just nonsensical and weird. I once dreamt I was at my grandmother's house and I looked down into the basement to see him standing at the bottom of the stairs in front of an easel he had set up. He was painting bright, childish flowers with a plastic palette of Crayola watercolors. Maybe it was the familiarity with the character since he was often on my mind. Maybe it was seeing Robert Englund out of character, without makeup. Whatever the case I realized he didn't want to kill me in these dreams, he never really had. He just wanted to hang out.
My fear of him morphed into a twisted affection and the older I get the more pronounced it becomes. Watching A Nightmare on Elm Street is like visiting an old friend. In an odd way the character sort of saved me from myself. I could transfer my very real (if overblown) fear onto Freddy and by the time I wasn't afraid of him any more, I had learned enough about the world that I had forgotten why I was so afraid of dying in my sleep in the first place. He has become a part of my personal mythology in a way that no other fictional character has. It is no coincidence that I chose to name myself after him when I started roller derby - a contact sport, a context in which I had no experience and felt afraid and unsure of myself and needed something to draw power from. I have the Nightmare on Elm Street theme song on my phone and MP3 player because on some strange level I find it soothing. For me, Freddy has become a symbol of how pointless fear can be, that being afraid of something is often about assigning it some power it doesn't have at all and that you can overcome it.
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