By Andy Emantsal
Thank you for joining us here at Horror To Culture!!! In this installment, I will be telling the tale of a horrifying nightmare that haunted me for 3 years of my childhood. At the height of my affliction I was having this same dream daily, for 6 months straight. I was afraid to go to sleep. The doctors called it acute parasomnia disorder or night terrors. Several psychologists and psychiatrists over the years helped me defeat this particular diagnosis. There even were two sleep studies they performed where I exhibited the condition, while hooked up to all kinds of colored wires and beeping gizmos. The night terrors always ended with me screaming on the top of my lungs, hyperventilating, and night sweats.
My family raised me in The Bronx. New York City, the capital of the world, they say. I also had family that lived around Albany, New York. We often traveled to them to visit. It's a three hour drive north into farm country that contains a little sprinkle of a big city skyline and quite a bit of ghetto. For a 7 year old kid it's a forever drive. To avoid traffic and us, my parents would sometimes leave in the middle of night, so us three kids in the back would be sleeping for most of the ride.
I sat behind my mom, who was in the front passenger seat. My annoying older brother Bob was in the middle seat. He was irritatingly too close to me. My oldest brother Danny was behind my dad who was driving. Danny had a fancy new portable cassette walkman and was listening to something cool with his headphones. I had to suffer through the oldies station blaring some Beach Boys song.
It was in a dense fog, that we traveled that dark road. My brother Bob was doing his best to annoy me. This round of torture was the I'm not touching you game. He had his pointer finger half an inch from me. Every bump or jostling the car would make, provoked him into poking me. I hated this game the most because I despised being touched. I scrunched up against the door as far as I could move. I put my head against the window, and closed my eyes.
I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you, my brother repeatedly said. I tried to turn my head and open my eyes to see how close he was to me. His perfectly pointed finger poked me right in the eye. AARRGG!!! My eye I screamed. I pushed Bob so hard he bumped into Danny roughly. Danny being eight years older than me, was already annoyed he even had to come with us. Danny shoved Bob back towards me so hard he slammed me into the door and it popped open.
Out I fell into the foggy void of darkness. I locked my good eye onto Bob's face as I fell out of the car. It morphed. It changed into a horror macabre of distortions while he laughed and pointed at me. The next and last thing I saw, was the tire of the car driving behind us about to run my face over. AAAAHHHHH I screamed while hyperventilating, in a night sweat.
Unfortunately my horrors did not end there. In my next contribution to Horror To Culture, I will explain how that nightmare continued for years of torture.
To be continued...
