I have always been plagued with nightmares. I don't remember a time when I did not have nightmares. Monsters, predatory people, natural disasters have always plagued me in my dreams. My latest nightmares have been about driving. I have not driven an automobile since I was twenty-two. I dream of being on California freeways and being terrified. I do not understand the source of these nocturnal terrors.

Sometimes my nightmares are about being in a war. Sometimes it is a war from centuries ago in desert lands. Not like the deserts of the Western United States, but more like the deserts of the Middle East. We fight on horses and we use bows and arrows. It isn't the same dream night after night, but it is like a continuing story of some war that I am dreaming of. Sometimes, I dream the same dream, but not often.

Another series of nightmares is very strange. It isn't that anything horrible happens, but it is more that there is an overwhelming sense of doom or some such feeling throughout the dreams. They take place in an era gone by. I am female in this dream and I wear shoes with straps and very chunky heels. I smoke and I drink whiskey that comes in bottles with skulls and crossbones on them. I smoke, but I make my own cigarettes with tobacco from a cheesecloth pouch and some sort of device made from wood and metal. My kitchen appliances are all white and they are in the fashion of around the twenties or thirties, maybe the forties. In these dreams, there are sirens all the time, like those you hear when a tornado is in the area. The curtains are all closed all of the time and there are very dim lights. I don't have a clue what this is about or why I dream it. Like the war dreams, they seem to be coming like serials in old movie houses.

Dreams of violent death plague me of late, also. Falling to my death is a frequent dream. It is always the same: I am standing on an ocean cliff when suddenly, I find myself falling toward the rocks below. There is always some unknown entity with me and it is never clear in the dreams if the fall is deliberate on my part, if I am pushed, or if the fall is accidental. It always happens, though. In one such dream, I actually landed on the rocks below. I felt horrible pain and I could feel thousands of tiny points of pain where the rocks had been worn to sharp protrusions from centuries of pounding ocean waves. I have always been told that if you hit bottom in dreams of falling, you would die from a heart attack in your sleep. Obviously, that did not happen.

These dreams seem to be more intense and more frequent. I have been having them for many years, but in the past, they were maybe two or three times a year. Now, I have some kind of nightmare about this tobacco smoking, whiskey drinking person, or the warrior, or the damned driving every night. Somehow, I sense, though, that the driving is in some way connected with the woman in the chunky shoes.

I wish I knew why I dream such things. When I try to talk to a psychologist about it, they always come up with some elaborate sexual repression theory or some such nonsense. Maybe I read too many books.