BtVS: Nightmares / Nightmares

I don't have recurring dreams, no spiders spilling out of books or imagining myself naked. I do have nightmares, not often, and I very rarely remember them - I appreciate having someone in bed with me to reach over and touch just to bring me back down...

OK - this is going to get a bit heavy - so here's a pic of Willow's nightmare before we head into mine below... casual readers should probably stop here.

I have one enduring nightmare from when I was a child that involved relentlessly marching nazis. I started trying to think about why I might remember this - and still very vividly remember the feeling of my limbs being so heavy I could barely move when I woke - and remembered this was a feeling I had often... and then I remembered the little blue pills.

I think the pills were for my catarrh which I suffered quite badly from as a child... and maybe the allergies too. I was prescribed these tiny, tiny blue pills. They were sugar coated but acrid beyond the sugar so it was an art to time consumption so that you got a hit of sweet but had swallowed before the acrid.

The pills had a side effect of completely knocking me sideways - very heavy - scarily heavy sleep - sleep you can't easily wake from, sleep that doesn't give up any of its secrets - I imagine my nightmare, and my unmovebale limbs came from the little blue pills.

I don't want to cast aspersions on my mum but I do suspect that the side-effect might have been considered a bonus - sleeping pills for a child who was a troublesome sleeper (although I'm not sure I was that) - and suspect that they were used more for that than for whatever they were supposed to be for.

I built up a resistance... this was dealt with by introducing... slightly bigger tiny blue pills.

I don't expect that mum had any idea that the little blue pills would still be preying on me forty years on.

There you go - you hoped you get some wry commentary on Buffy - instead you got an introduction to my early pill popping!