Nightmares...

She had had the dream for as long as she could remember. 

Everyone has their own version of stress dreams. Showing up at school not prepared for a final exam, or in your pajamas, or less.

Needing to get to work but not remembering how to get there.

Driving in a car and then the road suddenly ends.

There are a million different versions of stress dreams. Everyone has them.

Hers had been with her so long that she recognized when it would start. Something in her subconscious would be awake enough to think, oh here we are again. She was never aware enough to stop it at that point, but she knew it was happening. Which made it worse. 

She guessed that was part of the stress reaction for her, knowing something was going wrong and not being able to stop it. 

And she could never put her finger on why it was so upsetting when she would think about it later. 

Like, some nightmares are clearly scary: when you were having them, when you woke up and thought about them, when you told someone else about them. 

And most stress dreams are understandable. Of course it would be stressful to show up for a test you hadn't studied for. We all could imagine that feeling. 

But her stress dream was a set of stairs. 

They were steep. That was true. And that could be a little much for people who didn't like heights, or ladders, but she wasn't one of those people. She had once done a hike up a "forbidden staircase" that was nothing but bits of rebar that had been nailed into the side of a rock face. Slippery, spaced oddly, only a staircase if you used your imagination. It had been awesome. 

But that set of stairs in her dream? 

It would make her feel uneasy the whole next day. 

The dream would start with her in a building somewhere. The building always changed but there would be a point where she would be faced with the stairs. Those steep, narrow, stairs. And even though she never wanted to she would always know she had to climb them. The feeling of dread would grow heavier and heavier the further up the staircase she went. The stairs would seem steeper and steeper as well. And so far apart. Like room for three or four steps for each one. 

Narrow, steep, hard to climb.

But she had to climb them. No matter how much the fear gripped her. No matter how much her legs would shake and her palms would sweat. 

She couldn't tell you what was at the top of the stairs. She'd never made it. Sometimes she slipped and would wake as she fell. Sometimes she just got stuck, couldn't move forward or back, just stood there panicking until she woke up covered in slick of cold sweat. 

She hated those fucking stairs. 

She had a psychologist ask her if it was a repressed memory. Something from her childhood that had happened up a set of stairs. Or on a set of stairs. Or around a set of stairs. She had thought, or near a set of stairs, or when she had first learned the word stairs, or maybe someone had stared at her and her mind had turned that into a set of stairs. In other words, she didn't really buy into the whole repressed memory thing even back when it was very popular. And if it were repressed, then how would she know? It would be repressed.

She never knew why she reacted to them. Never knew why they were so terrifying. But they were. And they were consistent. Dreams about them for as long as she could remember. 

But today was the first time she'd ever seen them in real life. 

Heart pounding she took the first step.