What Did That Dream Tell Me?

I've never been one to remember my dreams. But for some reason I can always vividly recall a nightmare that I had when I was five years old. 


It was about my worst fear at the time: skeletons. I had an irrational fear of them. I don't know what this fear sparked from. It could have resulted from a scary show that I saw on TV, or a bad experience on Halloween. The world will never know. 


In my dream, I was laying in my bed, and everything was normal. Everything in our house looked the same. All of a sudden, I saw a skeleton walking up the stairs toward my room (in my old house you could see the staircase from my room when the door was open, and for some odd reason my bedroom door was open). I panicked and ran as fast as I could to my walk-in closet, shut the door behind me, and tried my best to hide behind my clothes. It was obvious that the skeleton saw all of this since I was able to see him when he walked up the stairs, so in no time, he was there. For whatever reason, there was a barred window on the door of my closet that wasn't there in real life. The skeleton looked through this window, slid a piece of cloth through the bars, and began to laugh. It was an evil laugh, I can even still recall the way it sounded. It terrified me, and I thought that whatever cloth he dropped in my closet was poisoned. I was sure that I would die at any minute. And then I woke up. 


I remember going downstairs to breakfast the next morning and telling my mother about my dream. Her response changed my world, "Honey, you are a skeleton." I couldn't believe it. But then she explained the anatomy of the human body in the best way that she could to a 5-year-old and suddenly I felt relieved. I was relieved that skeletons weren't actually monsters and instead were the explanation for why my body was solid and not squishy. After that day I was no longer afraid of skeletons. 


What the meaning of this dream is, I'm not sure. Maybe it was it was an underlying hint for what I should really be afraid of. In the grown up world, there are no monsters to be afraid of, despite the many myths we heard when we were children. The only thing to fear is humankind itself. The human race has the power to change the world at any given moment. One person can play the hero and find the cure to cancer, while another person can play the villain and drop a nuclear weapon that would expunge life on Earth. And when both of these people get an X-ray, they both end up being nothing but skeletons. 


But, who knows. Maybe it was just a 5-year-old having a bad dream.