Author’s Note: A dear friend gave me permission to write her true story as long as I omitted names and places to preserve her privacy.
I was alone in bed, the room in pitch-black darkness, when I rolled onto my stomach and felt a jolt of fear.
I sensed someone in the room.
My irrational hope was the intruder wouldn’t notice me if I froze and held my breath. Fear spiraled to panic when the bed gave way as a heavy weight crushed me into the mattress. Terror paralyzed me. I couldn’t even scream.
Later, my mother found me whimpering inside a closet. She assumed I’d been sleep walking. I was three years old, and that was my first encounter with a monster.
Now an adult, nightmares had tortured me as long as I could remember. I also suffered night terrors—detailed, repetitive, and realistic enough to flood me with adrenaline.
As a child, I tried to fight it by planning my dreams before I fell asleep. My vivid imagination would conjure storylines of adventure, romance, humor, and the requisite happy ending. I desperately hoped my subconscious would harness the pleasant images in a dream sequence.
Sometimes it prevented nightmares, although sleep usually arrested my imaginary stories.
Unfortunately, the night terrors haunted me into my early fifties. The monsters attacked under the cover of darkness when I was alone. They were so terrifying my subconscious blocked their faces from my conscious memory.
I was thirty-six, married, and snuggling in bed early one morning when the UPS man knocked on our front door. I rolled onto my stomach as my husband trotted downstairs.
That’s when one of the monsters sneaked into the darkened room.
I felt his eyes on me. My husband’s muffled conversation with the UPS guy drifted in. A scream would summon him. Yet again, the familiar terror paralyzed me as the monster’s weight smothered me. Then, the blessed blackness, like so many times past.
Why did this keep happening to me? Why did no one protect me? Why couldn’t I protect myself? Had I done something to deserve this?
My self-esteem had become a victim.
The next year, I was alone in bed late at night, after the divorce. As usual, I was restless, often surfacing from sleep. I rolled onto my stomach and froze. Did I hear someone?
I stole a glace. A dark shadow loomed. I prayed I was dreaming as I reached for the pistol under my other pillow.
Too late.
The monster’s heavy weight imprisoned me as he breathed on my neck. The terror, overwhelming. This time I managed to squeeze out a squeak.
Paralysis.
Blackness.
By age fifty, I had lost hope for any refuge from my night terrors. I didn’t know why the monsters were so relentless or how to stop them.
Five decades of this.
I tried not to think about it and never told anyone because I didn’t know who the monsters were or how to explain it.
My secret horror. My secret shame.
In my mid-fifties, I embarked on a rejuvenating journey that began with a three-week stay at a spa clinic where I cleansed my body with wheat-grass juice, vegetarian meals, enemas, salt-water pools, ice-water pools, infra-red heat, and yoga.
The program included health classes and one session with a world-renowned psychiatrist. I made an appointment with the doctor mostly out of curiosity. I didn’t expect him to accomplish anything useful in one hour.
“How may I help you?” he asked.
For the first time, I divulged the monsters, the night terrors.
“I’ll put you in a state of deep relaxation,” he said. “We’ll discover the identities of your monsters, and we’ll stop them forever. No worries, you’re safe here.”
I didn’t believe him for a second, but I decided to try it. After all, what did I have to lose? I invested my trust in him.
The psychiatrist transported me back to age three and asked me for details on what I saw. We progressed in age until all five monsters’ identities had been exposed. Finally, the truth too terrible to face.
The monsters were real men—relatives—all dead now. The attacks had stopped four decades ago, but my night terrors made it seem as though they were still happening. Half asleep, half awake, my subconscious reproduced the monsters in such vivid details, I believed they were really there. I could hear real sounds, like my husband chatting with the UPS guy, while also feeling the monster on top of me, his breath on my neck. Terror.
The doctor helped me confront my attackers and express my hurt and anger over their evil abuse.
How could they?
The very men who should’ve been my protectors had betrayed me. Why had my female relatives done nothing to protect me? Apparently to conceal the family’s disgrace.
The doctor explained the women in my extended family were trapped in shame and denial because they had been victimized too. Through understanding, I was able to forgive them.
My hour with the psychiatrist proved to be the most valuable of my life. It gave me the closure I needed to end my suffering.
Good-bye, monsters.
Good riddance, night terrors.
Thank you, Doctor!