My imagination boths helps me and frightens me.

Greetings from Finbarpurpleton!

And his brothers...

I stayed up till 3 a.m. this morning. Why up so late? It’s safe to say that over the last couple of months I have been quite the night owl, partly from undying fear of financial proportions, confounding decisions and partly because night owl-like behaviour is somewhat hereditary. My dear mom is one as well. I dislike it because it means sleeping in furthering the process of staying up to ghostly un-humanlike hours…sometimes till 4 am sometime even till 6 a.m.

Staying up late is a somewhat lonely experience. Because the world is asleep or at least the part of the world you reside in is splendid slumber. One is often left only to their thoughts, resulting in constant turning in bed and near insanity because for some reason memories from the past, both good and bad decide to come popping into the mind.

But I digress it is also calming because I rather enjoy being in my own mind if it means creative bliss, for instance writing my story, which scarily enough is almost at 70, 000 words. READ MY STORY!

Anyways…my experience with night time has changed since coming to Australia. What is now insomnia was at one time paranoia. I used to be afraid of the dark. Make that terrified. I slept with a nightlight.

The precarious quiet used to terrify when I was younger. I somehow let my imagination which is supposed to help, run amuck and it usually did so at night.

My earliest fears of the dark are when I was seven. There was the boogedy man and his trusty boogedy dog. In order to make these fearsome imaginations, most of them resulting from nightmares, I amalgamated them into my on going list of imaginary friends. I had hundreds. Yes hundreds!

When I was eight that defence went away, because my mom’s nosey, apparently well meaning friends wanted me to dispose of my imaginary friends because they thought there was something abnormal about it. My mom agreed. So one day while traveling over a bridge in Ashcroft I dumped them over. Most of them drowned. I’d imagine my old imaginary friends coming back wanting an explanation for my meanness. I made friends with the survivors and more friends as well and when my mom found out they came back I had to flush them down the toilet.

Most of my fears came from nightmares when I was nine. It usually involved a man with razor blades for legs, hooks for arms and metal teeth and when he came for me he mad a scary sound. I also remember a guy who was trying to make me believe in reincarnation and a cannibal as cannibalism used to scare me.

When I was 14 being a Star Trek nerd in training I often watched Star Trek Next Generation or Star Trek Voyager with my mom. These shows were alright except for the fictional antagonist the Borg. They scared the crap out of me. I would often imagine them coming into my room intending on assimilating me. But I would point out Captain Picard and they’d leave me alone.

When I was 17 years old my imagination would run wild. I would often imagine Alien from the movie abruptly smashing in my bedroom door, lifting helpless me out of bed, tossing me in the air and consuming me in on gulp, then just for humours sake picking his beastly alien like teeth with my glasses. I also had a fear of sponteanously combusting and alien autopsies while I slept. These fears usually came after reading such stories on the net.

I some how developed an imaginative combative approach, that I used since I was little to beat the fear out of nightmares. When I was 17 I imagined Alien wearing a cowboy hat, while Wild Will my imaginary rottweiler and his team red and purple monkeys beat him with baseball bats. Unfortunately sometimes they would beat me instead and Alien would point and laugh, forgetting his Melissa eating type mission. The imagination combat never work, the fact I imagined Alien in my room was frightening enough. Not to mention stupid.

When I was 20 living on my own. I thought perhaps my fear of darknes had disapeared, but then I was stupid and imagined Alien popping up every once in awhile as always. Sometimes he would give up because my house was so pathetic and small Alien decided to terrorise some other over imaginative nerd.

How odd it is science fiction something that I find rather entertaining also used to frighten me.

Then miraculously the first night in Australia no fear at all, it hasn’t come back since. Perhaps the brave journey of the Pacific helped or maybe I began to grow up.

P.S. Wild Will says Captain Bottle Pop are the greatest!