You wake up in your childhood bunk bed. It’s still dark, too dark to make out the time on the clock on the wall (remember, the one with the wooden Peter Pan penduluming out the bottom of it). You allow your eyes to focus on one of the only things it can - the luminescent stars you stuck to the ceiling above your bed as a kid. As you emerge from the bog of sleep, you become aware of a few things: one, that you are sweating profusely; two, that your heart is pounding; and three, that you cannot shift the sense that something is in the room with you. You lay still for a while, waiting for both sensations to ease, but your mind keeps tripping up on the thought “there’s something in my room”. Icy goosebumps ripple over you. You jam your eyes shut and try to bring your breathing under control. You will yourself to fall asleep again, but you are stuck: in your room, in your body, in your fear. Time stands still. Peter Pan paralyzed mid-flight. Your eyes are simultaneously wide open and screwed shut. Your heart is held mid-beat.

Your mind is drawn to a memory of you sat behind your shed when you were very young. You had snuck away to play video games at your neighbours, and had returned only to find your parents distraughtly looking for you so, in fear of the repercussions, you’d hidden behind the shed. Every so often, you’d hear them pacing around outside shouting “︎︎︎︎, where are you?!! ︎︎︎︎!!! It isn’t funny anymore!”. You were sad to hear them so upset, but also scared of how much trouble you’d get in when they found you, so you focussed all your energy on imagining yourself elsewhere, pretending their voices were just birdsong or passing cars. You got quite good at it. Instead of fear, you just felt nothing. You didn’t even hear your dad scrambling down the side of the fence to grab you from where you were hiding.

You blink your eyes open. The image of an ice suspended Mr Tumnus flashes through your brain, then Han Solo in carbonite. It becomes apparent that your freeze response is not working, that you can’t dissociate yourself out of this one. You get the sense that if you carry on like this, you'll never be able to unfreeze.

With the creak of a big door-knockered door opening, you heave yourself up to sitting. You want to run, or pull the covers over your head forever, or be sick. But none of those are practical solutions. You mentally work through every corner of your room. The blinds are down over your window, undisturbed, your wardrobe door closed, the door to the landing too. Still, the presence presses up against you somehow. Your tongue feels like a toad in your mouth, swollen, croaking, pulsing. You reach your arm to the blinds and part them slightly. Nothing. Just the amber light of the lamppost and the empty street. As quietly as you can, you reel in the blinds cord to open them, letting in some of the street’s glow. The room is pulled from shadow into dark sepia. You list the places you need to check (lists always make things better): the wardrobe, the landing outside your bedroom, under your bed. That last one prods at a throbbing in your head. There may as well be smoke and red light seeping out from the curtain covering the bottom bunk. You slip your legs out from under your duvet, manoeuvring yourself to the edge of the bed, but as you place your foot on the first rung of the ladder, your mind is pierced with images of hands creeping through cloth to grab at bare ankles, and so you just jump the rest of the way. The thud of you landing echoes through the room. You wait, teeth gritted, for whatever it is to jump out and grab you. You hold your breath to check for any noise, but hear nothing. You grab at the sheet hanging down beneath your mattress, and yank it aside. More nothing! Just your old teddies, the big blue bucket thing, discarded shoeboxes. Giddiness creeps under the fear. Maybe you are safe. Next is the wardrobe, which you open quickly with newfound confidence. You’re briefly startled by a school jumper tumbling out, but relief laps over you once again as all you find are hung up clothes. The bedroom door is easily conquered as the last hiding place, sweeping it open with no problem, no danger. That’s it. That must be everything checked, you think. The thumping in your chest feels more like the thrill of victory than the terror from before. You take one last scan around the room, holding your breath again to check for any strange noises. All is clear. You exhale in relief, feeling almost silly for your brief episode. Maybe the pulsing in your chest was just a pulsing in your bladder. You head to the toilet.

Whilst you sit on the loo, you think about all the times you used to wake up here after your night terrors: having gotten up and stormed into your parents’ room, speaking in tongues, terrified out your skull, as they calmed you, saying “It’s fine ︎︎︎︎, you’re fine. Go to the bathroom”. You wonder why you never remembered the dream part, or the bit with your parents, why your consciousness only seemed to blink into existence mid-piss. Now, as an adult, you never get night-terrors. You think of all the times you’d blacked out drinking. You remember being told about kissing that guy in the loo that time, the story of you slipping over and thwacking your head on the bathroom tile after being sick, waking up to photos of you passed out in your work’s toilets. You remember how, as a teenager, you always seemed to end up getting invited in to have wees with other girls at parties even though you were ︎︎︎︎. Bathrooms always seemed safe to you. Small, confined, a clear purpose, nice acoustics. Maybe all those times being sent here to recover from night terrors made them a safe place for you, a place fo-

“GAME OVER” flashes up in big black letters over your vision. Although it’s not your vision, it’s you looking at yourself sitting on the loo. You try to move your body, the body you’re now looking at, but you are frozen in place. You look on in horror as your field of vision zooms out from the physical you, out of the bathroom, and pans down the hallway. You try to blink, to wipe away the words like windscreen wipers but no blink comes. The screen of your vision turns slowly, to reveal your bedroom, door still open, and then moves in. You scan the room for any source of the fear, now screaming at you from all corners of your brain. You are beginning to panic, like you need to take a breath underwater. Your vision creeps across the bed, sheet pulled aside. Frantically you search for what it is you're missing. Your sight lands on your open wardrobe, stops turning, then slowly creeps towards it. You do everything you can to stop your imagination conjuring a figure to creep out from behind the heap of clothes. You force yourself to think about your dad reading you the Narnia story, when Lucy goes through the fur coats and the trees. You desperately need to know what’s happening. Once again you begin to turn, to where your wardrobe door lies open against the wall. Your vision pans down. And all of a sudden, you are washed with dread. A voice in your head is yelling at you to run. Your descending sight reveals a pair of legs beneath the open door. The GAME OVER in your vision seems to pulse, like the electric buzzing of a migraine. You cannot tear from this image of these legs. It stands horribly still. You try to scream. You want to flee but you cannot move. Time is frozen once again. You will yourself to wake up. You’re asleep. Of course you are. This is just a night terror. And you’re already in the bathroom so you just need to wake up. The GAME OVER taunts you. Wake up, you tell yourself. Wake up.

You wake up in your bed. It’s grey and cloudy outside, but light. You reach for your glass and take a big gulp of water, throat desert dry. You sit up in bed and rub your eyes, pulling them away when you realise you forgot to take your makeup off so you’ve probably just smudged your eyeliner everywhere. You think about the dream you just had, how often you used to have it as a kid, how you haven’t for so many years. Reaching for the estradiol pills on your bedside table, you think how much it used to scare you. Now, you think, as you swallow the little white tablets, it kind of makes you laugh, the melodrama of it. You always did scare easily as a child. You make a mental note to watch a slasher movie later, as you get up, and trudge to the bathroom.