November 5, 2002:
Something is in the air above your crib. It should not be there in the air. It's a frightening thing and you struggle to sit up. You know what it is: the furniture tag which dangles from a string below the bottom of the little wooden crib-bed where you sleep. It's now swaying in the air above your head with an eerie back-and-forth motion like a Cobra snake. You're terrified by its presence in the air where it should not be.
You try to run for help, but you're immobilized. You're caught in sticky threads which tie your feet, and deaden the sound of your screams. A spider's web, all around you in a dark space where only the sticky threads give light. You must break free to escape. You pick up your canister of Lincoln Logs and hurl it with all your strength into the center of the web, where the indistinct dark shape of the spider waits. Instead of freeing you, the web collapses onto you from all sides, cocooning you head to foot in binding silk. You're unable to scream as the spider advances toward you, in that terrible dark space where only the sticky threads give light.
This is your earliest nightmare.
Some people use dream-catchers to protect themselves. My good friend found a different method which works well for me. After a long search she bought a pair of superb stuffed animals who, before sleeping, I respectfully ask to protect me. By day they're charming: a floppy-eared brown bear she named "B-Bear," and a lovely, dignified wolf cub called "Woof." At night they transform into fierce guardians of my sleeping spirit, razor-clawed and fang-toothed, ferocious, utterly implacable. In the six or seven years they've lived with me I've had only one or two bad dreams, both mild.