It's a nightmare

I don't know if it's a symptom of anxiety or simply goes hand-in-hand with it, like strawberries and cream or methadone and a crippling heroin addiction, but I seem to suffer from an ungodly amount of nightmares.  I would assume it is not a symptom, as this has been a lifetime curse and anxiety has not, even if I have been of an uncommonly pathetic disposition since the day I was shot screaming from my mother's womb.

On the upside - if there is an upside to this - there doesn't seem too much Freudian grimness about them, because they're often concerned with the most generic of monsters.  Often witch-like things with hanging faces and rotting skin, which pursue me until, in dreaming, I consign myself to death and give myself over to the creatures.

Evidently I even take my cowardice with me to the dreamworld.  I'll likely still be frightened when I'm dead.

But of course, once I've woken I can't possibly return to sleep in case a monster pops out from under the bed or slithers down on me from the ceiling.  Once I was convinced one was staring at me from the wardrobe, and I was on the brink of tears until I switched on the lamp and realised it was just my straw hat propped at a jaunty angle.  This is not the first time that a straw hat has frightened me nearly to death, but that is a tale for another day.

Unfortunately, I think there's little I can do about them.  That said, I've lived with them for years with no terrible side effects, unless you count the debilitating mental problems, but I'm not sure I can exactly blame the nightmares for those.  Not sure I can really blame anything for those.  But if you have some sneaky trick for coping with nightmares, do let me know.  So far all I do is make sure the straw hat is safely tucked away.

Alarmingly, I do live quite near an 'Elm Street.'  I never go.