Of all the available nightmare story lines, the getting shot by a crazy old man you just happened to run into on the street who is clearly mistaking you for someone else is one of the fun-ist.  Which is not to say I’ve ever had that one before, because I haven’t.  But I just woke up from it and I’m here to tell you it gets your heart beating.

I have nightmares on a regular basis…it’s a profile so I’m told, that creative types like myself tend to fall into…

THE novel ”Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” was based on a nightmare in which Robert Louis Stevenson saw a dapper Englishman change into a hideous monster. Mary Shelley’s ”Frankenstein” was also based on a nightmare, as may have been Bram Stoker’s ”Dracula.” New research suggests that such links between nightmares and creative vision may be more than accidental.

Nightmare sufferers, the new work indicates, may have a natural tendency to gravitate to the arts. Nightmares live with people all their adult lives, even though for most they are only dim memories from a long gone childhood. Nevertheless, nightmares evoke a fear so great that the memory of them can bring dread even years after they appeared.

Despite their power, nightmares are rare in adults. Researchers estimate their frequency at about one per year. Only one person in 500 has them as often as once a week. While nightmares are perhaps the most vivid of all experiences during sleep, researchers have found it difficult to give them systematic study. They are hard to capture: one sleep specialist says that during 3,000 nights of sleep studied in his laboratory, there was only one nightmare. Nevertheless, a group of sleep researchers has recently zeroed in on nightmares. Foremost among these researchers is Ernest Hartmann, a sleep researcher and professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine.

Dr. Hartmann has devoted much of the last several years to a series of studies on nightmares and the characteristics of those who have them often. Based on his findings, he proposes that some people have a genetic susceptibility that makes them more sensitive to experience in general, and leaves them with a lifelong proneness to nightmares.

If these people have a troubled childhood, Dr. Hartmann asserts, they appear to be vulnerable to schizophrenia as adults. But if their early environment is healthy, they are likely to go on to marshal that same sensitivity in the creative arts.

Most of my dreams are fairly benign…even the vivid ones.  They’re usually just slice-of-life replays, with perhaps a few interesting curve balls thrown in.  Like when I dream about taking a stroll through my old high school neighborhood, and I notice features in it from all the other places I’ve ever lived in all mixed together.  I dream about doing housework.  I dream about shopping for groceries.  I dream about hanging out with old friends who I haven’t seen in years.  If I don’t jot them down in my dream diary (I keep an ad-hoc one) they’re usually forgotten by mid-morning.  But about five times a month or so I have a really gut slamming nightmare.  When I was a kid they used to terrify me.  Now, at least once I’m fully awake, they’re mostly just a bother.  Dreams make sleeping worthwhile, otherwise I’d really like to have that time available to use for something.  Death comes soon enough…I don’t need to spend a third of my life playing dead too.  But nightmares make it troublesome.

In key research, Dr. Hartmann and Dr. Van Der Kolk studied 50 men and women who reported having at least one nightmare a week since childhood. Dr. Hartmann recruited his subjects through advertisements in Boston newspapers.

The most common nightmares involved being chased, or being threatened or hurt by an attacker. Unlike many ordinary dreams, nightmares were almost always in color and included other especially vivid sensations including pain, which is rarely experienced in ordinary dreams.

No, Yes and Yes.  I didn’t really notice this before until I saw it refered to in the research, but yes…my nightmares are all in vivid color, as opposed to my usual dreams which are mostly in black and white.  (Something else I’ve noticed about my normal dreams is that I can’t read in them.  I am utterly unable to decipher a printed page when I happen across one in a dream.  Sometimes, that’s very frustrating.  I can draw.  I can read gages and instruments.  But not words. let alone sentences…though I can discern individual letters.  I’ve actually tried in my dreams to read one letter at a time and try to make a word out of them and I can’t.  It’s like the part of my brain that assembles letters into words just isn’t online when I’m dreaming.)  And yes…in a nightmare I can feel pain.  In the one I just had, the crazy old man shot me first in my right arm and I felt it like a hammer blow.  When crap like that happens, I’m always a little surprised when I wake up to feel the pain completely gone.

But actually being chased by an attacker is rare in my nightmares.  Over the years I’ve come to divide them into three categories.  First is the simple, straightforward falling dream.  These almost aren’t dreams, really, so much as having a sudden sensation of falling.  They always happen just when I’m drifting off to sleep, and when they do they slam me back awake.  It’s really irritating. 

The second kind is the scary nightmare.  These are the ones where you’re placidly dreaming along and then suddenly something happens that scares the steaming shit out of you and you slam awake with your heart pounding.  Like the one I just had.  Yes, sometimes it’s being chased by an attacker.  But more often it’s something that just pops out at you.  You reach into a cupboard for something and suddenly something inside the cupboard starts chewing on your arm.  Or you step off a curb and instead of the road being solid its molten asphalt and you sink into it. Sometimes there doesn’t even have to be any scary imagery to go with the sudden fear.  I’ve had scary nightmares where I’ve just walked into an empty room and suddenly become completely and abjectly terrified for no reason I could figure after I’d woken up. 

The scary nightmare.  Just…out of the blue a nice pleasant dream suddenly goes bad on you and you wake up with your heart racing.  I hate it.  But they stopped terrifying me long ago.  At least, once I’m fully awake anyway.  I can live with them so long as they’re only once a week or so.  But there is a third type of nightmare that I would love to not ever have again, and that’s what I call the disturbing nightmare. 

They don’t scare you, they don’t slam you awake with your heart pounding.  These are the ones that really creep you out and you wake up feeling disturbed and that horrible disturbed feeling lasts for the whole day.  I’ll tell you about a recent one.

I dreamed I was a kid again, and working at a fast food joint.  I had the day’s cash in a box I was supposed to take to the bank.  Along the way I skimmed some of it into my own pockets.  I have no idea why I did that.  Understand, I have really strong feelings about stealing.  It comes from a longstanding family issue I won’t discuss here.  But this is important, I have really strong feelings about stealing.  I just won’t do it.  I won’t even touch something that doesn’t belong to me without permission.  Yet here I am in my dream doing just that.  And then I get to the bank and for some odd reason instead of counting the money, in this dream the bank just weighs the money box.  I get a receipt, and I take it back to the fast food joint I work at, and the boss says it wasn’t properly signed.  For some reason, this prompts me into confessing that I stole money out of the box.

So now everyone there knows I’m a thief.  The police are called in, I am arrested, and I’m sitting in the back of a police car feeling absolutely horrible.   For some reason they don’t handcuff me, just put me in the back seat where I can sit and feel like a crook.  I feel guilty, ashamed, miserable, I’m just wishing I could do it all over again and not steal that money.  And then I wake up and it was all just a dream after all.  But I still felt miserable.  All fucking day.  And…really creeped out. 

But more significant, in Dr. Hartmann’s view, is the general personality of the nightmare sufferer. Such people, in his view, are markedly open and defenseless, not having developed the psychological protections most people have. They have what Dr. Hartmann calls ”thin boundaries.” They ”let things through.”

Most of the people in the study described themselves as unusually sensitive since childhood: easily hurt, particularly responsive to the feelings of others, unhappy as children even though there were no overt family problems. They also had a high incidence of relatives who had been hospitalized for schizophrenia, and four of the subjects themselves were said to be schizophrenic.

I’ve no history of that in either side of my family tree.  Where my creative gene came from I don’t know, other then I am related on dad’s side to an important family of California artists.  My maternal grandfather had the geek gene, and in his day and age radio was a new thing and he started one of the first radio shops in western Pennsylvania.  I haven’t really developed any of it much, because of internal stresses related to my horrible love life.  The stereotype is that an artist can’t really create unless they suffer.  It’s a damn lie.  If a suffering artist manages to create at all, it’s in spite of how they feel inside, not because of it.  That internal stress, coupled with my inability during some stretches of my life to get any of it out of me creatively, may be what’s behind the frequency of my nightmares.  Mostly, I just deal with them, the same way I deal with loneliness.  I endure it.

So…in my dream just now…I was walking through a parking lot to my car…not the Mercedes, but for some odd reason a white convertible of some kind.  I’m carrying a box with a paint gun in it.  I notice two guys sitting suspiciously in a dark blue sedan watching me, and I worry for a moment that they’re going to try and rob me.  Perhaps that was the first hint that the dream would go bad, because otherwise it’s fairly benign.  I make it to my car, and put the box in the trunk.  Then I notice that there is a sign where I’ve parked, that limits parking to just two hours. 

I need more time, so I start walking around looking for another place to park my car.  I see a sign that says parking is available at Arlington TV.  Why a TV store would be renting parking spaces too I’ve no idea…dreams just get whimsical at times.  So I go looking for Arlington TV.  I can read signs in this dream, and see in color…in retrospect two more hints that the dream would eventually go bad on me.  I can’t recall now though, whether the dream started out that way.  I only vaguely remember being with some friends and we were walking around this shopping center by a park of some kind…and I started walking back to my car with this box with a paint gun I’d just bought in it. 

So now I’m walking around looking for Arlington TV.  I ask for directions and a friendly lady points me in the direction of a small strip shopping center.  See the roof with the TV antenna on it, she asks.  That’s the place.  So I start walking over to it.  I’m almost there when I see an old guy walking down the sidewalk toward me…and by old I don’t mean grandpa old, but middle age old.  A thing I am myself now I guess, but I don’t see myself as being internally.  In this dream I’m still in my mid-twenties or so.  That’s kinda where my mental self-image has been for ages.  The old guy on the sidewalk is wearing a dark brown hunting jacket and a cap, and work pants of some sort, and an old pair of leather shoes…not boots.  His clothes aren’t ragged or torn or dirty or anything, but they look…rumpled.  As though he’d been sleeping in them.  His face is worn and tired and lined with creases…I can still see it clearly.  He’s clean shaven but his beard is very heavy and you can see it as a dark shade around the chin.  He looks a bit upset, but not terribly angry.  Oh…and he has a .45 automatic in his left hand.  He’s not pointing it at me, or at anything else in particular…he’s just walking along with it in his hand.

There’s a moment in dreams like this, where you just know you’re fucked.  I try the old pretend you don’t see anything and walk on by trick and of course it doesn’t work.  The old man looks at me with that vaguely put-off look on his face and asks me if I’ve seen Jeff.  I don’t know any Jeff, and I say so and he raises the gun in my direction and asks again, more insistently where Jeff is.  I get the sense that Jeff is somebody this guy has issues with.  So I start running and he fires and I get hit in my right arm, just above the elbow.  It feels like my arm got slammed with a hammer.  So I start running and ducking and weaving through this empty parking lot with this old guy with a .45 right on my heels.  He’s shouting that I know Jeff and I’d better tell him where he is.  I take a turn and run into a grassy area beside the shopping center, that has lots of low scrub brush scattered all over it.  As I run and dodge around the bushes I’m thinking that if he kills me here he could just walk aimlessly away, still looking for Jeff, and my body could just lay there for days or weeks or months and nobody would find it and when they did nobody would ever know what really happened to me or who killed me or why they did it…

…and then I wake up.  Urrr!  I don’t think I’ve ever had both scary and disturbing in one nightmare before.  I can still see that guy’s face.  Nothing really remarkable about it…just a middle age guy with a beaten down look, as though he lived a hard, low pay life that he’d shuffled through without the slightest sense of wonder or curiosity.  You take one look at him and you just know his home has bare walls, no books or magazines, just a TV and an alarm clock and some basic furniture.  He punches the clock every week day and watches TV at night.  Maybe on the weekend he does the laundry, vaccums the carpet, washes his car and hits the neighborhood bar.  I can still see his face. 

I’m going to go through the entire day now with the sense that there is some dream me laying face down in a vacant lot in some distant dreamscape somewhere and my friends in that world are wondering what happened to me and my body won’t be found for months and when it is nobody will ever know what happened to me or why. Last we saw Bruce he was going back to his car with the paintgun he’d just bought.  We never saw him again.  We know he made it back to the car beause the paint gun was in it.  But months went by before somebody finally came across his body.  They found it in a vacant lot not very far away from where his car was parked.  The cops say his wallet was still on him and they don’t think it was a robbery.  Nobody can figure out what happened…   I’m going to be creeped out by this one all fucking day…I just know it…