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Shadows & Nightmares **Triggering**

Shadows have always been an issue for us – what’s in the shadows, what will come out of the shadows etc.  But one particular nightmare about shadows is the silhouette of a man in the doorway.  As far as I’m aware this particular image has always been the cause of nightmares for us.  It would be fairly easy to draw the conclusion that it’s to do with someone coming in through the doorway at night to hurt us – I’ve no idea if this is really the origins of the image and nightmare.  Maybe we saw a scary movie with this image in it, not sure.

What I do know is that this image plagues our nightmares.  It’s the reason why we have to have the curtains drawn totally over every window in the house once it’s getting dark – there can’t be any possibility of being able to peek outside and see a face looking in at us.  It’s the reason why we have to have the wardrobe doors tightly closed.  However we can’t close the bedroom doors, and this is the current problem.

We’ve constantly got this image of a man standing in the doorway.  We can’t just close the doors.  If you have a cat, you’ll know that the one thing they hate more than an unreliable feeder, is a feeder who closes doors.  It causes an interruption in their nightly checks and wanderings around the house – and what if they suddenly decide that they want to use you as a heat source?  They end up scratching at the door and make their displeasure well known.  The sounds of which are almost as bad as the nightmare image.

One particularly memorable time when this nightmare caused a problem was when the ex-husband was going off to work early in the morning.  He had turned on the lounge light and had come in to kiss us goodbye.  We were half asleep and just felt the bed dip and then this silhouette come towards us.  Well he’d never seen us move so fast.  We screamed and dove off the bed and tried to get under it.  It caused the neighbours to call the police we screamed so loud and with so much fear.  Other times when he’d done the kiss goodbye we would freeze, but for some reason we needed to escape that morning.  Rather embarrassing telling the young officer why we had screamed!

At the moment this nightmare image is particularly bad.  We’ve been averaging 1-3 hours sleep per night for the last two weeks.  We’re bad sleepers anyway, but this is becoming a real problem.  We had a migraine yesterday which was caused by a combination of a lack of sleep and being so tense while trying to sleep that we’ve pulled several muscles in the neck.  It’s now 5:45am and we’re sitting here with a warm milky drink imagining someone walking up behind us and putting their hand on our shoulder.

Hmmm wonder if this is a phobia or paranoia?  We don’t particularly think that anyone is out to get us.  It’s a very much the concept of someone coming to get us, rather than some organised plot to come and get us.  Either way, I really wish it would go away.  But the internal conversation did distract us from the image for a second.

Oh well, off to read for awhile…