Nightmares

Warning: This post contains some fairly graphic descriptions of nightmares, which might make you a bit squeamish.

I have always suffered from terrible nightmares.  Vivid, realistic, graphic, gruesome nightmares.  I can still remember nightmares I have had as a child. 

For example, I remember one nightmare I had where I was fighting with my cousin (1 yr older than me) and I slapped her on the face and her eyeball fell out of her head and rolled into a pile of leaves.  Then I was bent over rummaging through this pile of dead leaves.  I remember the feel of the wooden log next to the leaves, which I was using to steady myself.  I can still remember the feel of the wood. 


I know certain stimuli in my environment seem to make them worse: eating - particularly carbs - too close to bedtime; being too hot or too cold; being overtired; alcohol; sleeping in a room with too much light; and having a headcold. 


I have a suspicion that I may have passed on this trait to Bear.  He has a cold at the moment (as do I, urgh, just what I need with this STILL ever present headache).  This morning, he woke screaming.  He threw himself out of his cot, and raced over to the bed, with a terrifed look on his face.  After comforting him and trying to work out what had happened, he looked really confused, and started saying, "I hurt. I hurt.  I fall down and bonk a head."  At first I thought he must have fallen trying to get out of his cot, but I knew he had been asleep only a minute ago.  He then started pulling the blankets off me, and grabbing at my arms.  Inspecting my arm, he said, "Mummy hurt.  Mummy hurt a arm.  Mummy hurt a arm?"  He started out stating it as fact, and then looked really confused.  I told him that I wasn't hurt, and that my arm was fine. 

Even 20 minutes later, over breakfast, he still was looking at my arm, puzzled, and pushing the sleeve back on my dressing gown, as if checking I wasn't hiding a wound.

I think I was just as shaken as him though, to be honest.  I have a recurrent nightmare that I have had for years, where, through a range of various contexts (ranging from falling onto a star-picket to being attacked by a knife-weilding intruder), I end up inevitably being injured, slicing open my right arm, from wrist to elbow, between the two bones.  In my nightmare, I can see all the tendons/muscles, the veins and the bones themselves.  It is always my right arm, and always the same injury.

So the fact that Bear's first (well, first that was apparent to me) nightmare, was about me hurting that SAME arm, is just a bit freaky.