The nightmare begins in Iceland: well, not in Iceland, but at the house where I lived when I was very young, a house I only remember enough for it to appear in dreams.

The nightmare originates in Iceland: it comes from a 1995 storybook titled Áfram Latibær, which grew into a 1996 sequel, Latibær á Ólympíuleikunum, which became a stage adaptation, which became a third book—which makes a full series—which became a television adaptation, which traveled from Iceland to Australia to the U.S. to me. The show was called LazyTown, and it ran in the U.S. from 2004 to 2007.

 Infants begin to produce fear-based behaviors between 8 and 12 months of age (Parlakian, 2019). They first develop logical thinking skills between 2 and 5 years of age, leading, on occasion, to the establishment of permanent or semi-permanent phobias and fears (Parlakian, 2019). This is when those “irrational” fears arise – they’re only toddlers, after all, so we don’t think much of it when a preschooler weeps at a pigeon or screams in the face of the poor student inside the Chuck E. Cheese costume – but their fears are as real to them as ours are to us.

 So I was maybe about three years old when I had my first recurring nightmare. It went like this: Sporticus, the LazyTown protagonist, is stung by a bee, dies, and is inexplicably tied to a fallen tree. The Sporticus-tree begins to roll across the yard of my childhood home, and the LazyTown narrator describes his progress. “Sporticus has entered the house,” the narrator says, and the Sporticus-tree defies the limitations of my doorway and enters my home. I stand on the stairs and suddenly become aware that the Sporticus-tree will continue to roll in pursuit of me until it has rolled me over. And this is the whole dream: I run away, the narrator announces that Sporticus has made it to wherever I am, rinse and repeat until, blessedly, the narrator says “Sporticus is going home,” and I’m safe.

 From my earliest memory until the time my older sister and I stopped sharing a room, my father came in every night to tuck us into bed. He may have read a story or two, although I don’t think we were that kind of household, but he did occasionally say a prayer at our bedside. And every time he did, he prayed for “sweet dreams.” He didn’t wish them to us as he closed our door; he knelt by our beds and asked that God would grant us that safety. And that steeled me against the Sporticus-tree, for a while. On nights when he prayed, I would quickly fall into a restful sleep. When he didn’t, though, I would lie awake with stubbornly open eyes, dreading the moment when they’d eventually close and Sporticus would leap at the opportunity to haunt me. 

 But I never said anything about these dreams to my parents. Had I, my father might have remembered to ask for sweet dreams more often, or maybe he would have explained that forgetting to do so was not going to open the floodgates to the night’s many demons. Had I mentioned how long I lay awake, they might have limited my television time, or asked my pediatrician for advice, or done any number of things. Perhaps there’s a world in which I would not still remember the nightmare in vivid detail, in which the rooms that Sporticus entered would not be the only rooms of my childhood home that I can still picture. Perhaps I would not, at the end of my latest nights, demand that my partner pray for sweet dreams, half believing even now that some intercession could keep me safe from the fears that chase me now. But, for reasons unknown to me, I never said anything about it. I still haven’t.                                                          

G. W. Fox (she/her) is a Ph.D. student based in Houston, Texas. Her research concentrates on Victorian women poets, but her own writing is all over the place. Her work has appeared in Thimble Literary Magazine and the Avalon Literary Review.

References:
Parlakian, R. (2019). Childhood fears. Zero to Three. 

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