I'm comforted knowing I'm not the only one

Miss Fish, here, talks about the sound that her heartbeat makes when she's falling asleep. She says it sounds like soldiers marching. And I agree with her. When I was a child, I used to be terrified of going to sleep. For a few years as an adolescent, I needed glasses but I didn't know it. At night, my eyes would try to focus in the dark but they constantly moved in and out of fuzzy focus. As a consequence, everything in my room either moved or looked like it was breathing. I used to imagine all sorts of things waiting in the dark for me to fall asleep. One of those items was a large white toy box with soldiers on the sides. These soldiers all stood at attention with sharp bayonets raised high. This toy chest was located in the basement in the romper room and at night, because I could hear my heartbeat thumping over and over, it wasn’t hard to imagine these soldiers marching up the stairs towards my bedroom. I imagined these little one and a half foot tall men marching with wooden legs, mean sneers, and bloody bayonets. They never made it to my door, but that didn’t stop me from being afraid.


I was such a weird kid. As further proof, my favorite movies when I was five were Flash Gordon, The Dark Crystal and Stephen King’s Children of the Corn. At five, I remember being instinctively drawn to that particular horror movie with its premise that children killed their parents (and anyone over the age of 16) and tried to run a small Kansas town all by themselves with some supernatural psycho religion overseeing everything. My father finally taped over the movie, claiming that it was a bad influence, but the damage had already been done because I had memorized every scene and could reenact it playing any part. I read almost everything else King had written by the time I reached high school.

Even though I try to read and watch as much horror as possible and the toy chest is long gone, the thumping never went away and to this day, I'm still afraid of the dark.