The rainy drive to work this morning triggered a memory of my first really scary nightmare.

I don’t know how old I was, but probably 2 or 3. In my dream, I was in my dad’s gold Pinto in our driveway, and my dad had run inside to do something and left me in the car. The car started going by itself and took off uncontrollably, veering down South Duff Avenue (a pretty busy street in a commercial area of Ames). It was raining, and the traffic lights were drippy, stretchy blurs, and I remember passing the McDonald’s and seeing the lights and sign all deformed. Everything went blobby, and it was very scary for little me.

I suppose it was a very early manifestation of abandonment anxiety (not that my parents would have ever let such a thing happen to me) and a fear of being out of control. Either that or it was just a random scary dream. I generally subscribe more to the theory that dreams are our brains trying desperately to contextualize the signals that are always getting bounced around. That doesn’t mean they can’t give you quite a fright, though.

The Spanish word for nightmare is pesadilla, or “little heavy thing.” That seems like a pretty good descriptor; it’s heavy in that it can really drag you down, even though you logically know it’s not real, and thus, small.

It’s funny that something so seemingly inconsequential from when I was a toddler can still elicit that kind of response in me. It makes me think of my toddler friends, like Maxwell and Daphne and Ava and Aidan, and I wonder what kind of experiences they’re having that will influence their entire lives.