I was around four years old when my night terrors began. Night terrors are like nightmares and dreams, but are not associated with them at all. My parents and I would go to sleep at night with no idea what a night it was going to be. My parents tucked me in and went to their room for the night. A couple hours later they were suddenly awaken by my screaming. They came running in to see why I was making such a racket and see me sitting up in bed looking like I had just seen a ghost. My mother would come over to me ready to give me a hug to comfort me, but I would just yell some more and squirm away. They soon came to realize that I wasn’t really awake. I looked like I was awake, my eyes open and I was talking, but I didn’t see my parents as my parents. They were seen as monsters to me, so whenever they tried to comfort me they would just be scaring me even more. After a while I would “go back to sleep” and my dad would carry me up to bed. The next morning they asked me about it and I would have no idea what they were talking about. This happened a few nights a week for months until I got over it.
My childhood fear relates to Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, because it shows fear of monsters just like the boys fear of the beasties. The boys are creating a monster in their heads that is creating a chaos over the island. We both had our imaginations going wild creating something that isn’t really there.
