It's Only A Dream

My childhood nightmare

As a child I loved Egypt.  Specifically Ancient Egypt, I read as much as I could on the subject learning all about daily life, their Gods and Goddesses and their death rituals.

 

I was an odd nine year old.

 

The Egypt fascination though came at a price.  A recurring nightmare I had for more than a year.

 

I would be in a museum, dark and old and musty as part of a tour group full of people I did not know and whose faces have long since been forgotten.  There was music playing, but not music exactly; it was a CD of some eerie wind that chilled you to the bone.

 

We would explore the exhibits with polite disinterest, I would light up a little at their Ancient Egypt display with it mummy laying tight and safe behind the glass but we would only stay here for a moment.

 

Next would be a wax display of some sort of marketplace filled with artificial light and oranges that seemed so real to the touch.

 

At the end of the tour we would pass through, once again the Egypt section but with a notable difference.  The glass was smashed and the mummy was gone.

 

As a group we would turn and their he would be, standing before the oranges, the sweet smell of the fruit that was no longer wax mingling with the putrid smell of decaying flesh as the mummy would lurch unevenly but surely towards us and then me as the group was gone.

 

Frozen to the ground I could only watch as it got closer and closer to me, the brownish yellow of it’s ancient bandages wrapping it completely, he got closer and closer.

 

Just as he was almost close enough to reach me, to touch me I would come to a realisation.

 

I was safe, it was only a dream, dreams can’t hurt you!  Could they?

 

Seeing Nightmare on Elm Street by the age of 3 did not reassure me of this certainty and I could not seem to wake up, as the mummy reached out to touch me I turned and ran, I ran faster and faster, all the while the mummy falling me, getting closer and closer.

 

As I skidded around a corner I found myself suddenly in my living room at home.  The mummy was no longer in sight but I could still smell that unholy stench so I crawled underneath the indoor drying screen where the washing usually hung and hid in between a chair and a wall just as I did when frightened in the waking world.

 

I closed my eyes tight and muttered over and over “it’s only a dream, it’s only a dream” the smell was almost right next to me now and seemed to be coming almost from within when two rough hands grabbed my small legs wrapped in the pink pyjamas, I was dragged screaming into the harsh bright light of day and as I opened my eyes I saw my Aunty Cathy dressed all in black.  Hysterical I shouted to her “it was coming to get me, to get all of us but it’s ok, this is all just a dream, this is all my dream!”

 

The next thing I knew I was strapped to a bed in some sort of hospital, still muttering “it’s only a dream, it’s my dream. I am safe now” a woman in a nurses uniform leaned over me, it was my old nursery school teacher, she shushed me gently before injecting me with a green liquid, I was wheeled into a small cell and just as I lost consciousness I could smell the stench of death once again.

 

Then I would wake up, the words “it was only a dream” sounding hollow in the pale light of the morning.