I used to have a recurring nightmare when I was younger.

I think after watching too much dramatic television with images of burning houses and people trapped within, I developed a fear of being trapped in a burning building. And for several years, once every month or so, I had a dream where I was trapped in a classroom of my primary school whilst a fire slowly approached from the corridor.

I wasn't trapped because the doors were locked; I was trapped in the dream because my legs were so heavy and leaden that I couldn't escape under my own volition. I usually woke up just before the fire reached the room, with a renewed fear of my house catching fire whilst my family and I were sleeping.

After several years of this steady nightmare, I had it again one night, except the outcome was different. Despite my legs still being heavy and leaden, I pushed through my movement difficulty and managed to escape the building out onto the playground. The building promptly exploded and the aftermath was pretty catastrophic, but I remember feeling a great sense of relief in my dream that I had escaped the building unscathed.

I have not had that nightmare since that night, and my fear of being trapped in a burning building, or my house burning down, was gone. Don't get me wrong, I still wouldn't want either of those things to happen, but I no longer had a specific fear of it either.

Now the only fear I have left is wasps. And they occasionally show up in my dreams, to be generally ****ish.

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These days, I really don't have many nightmares at all. The only ones I really have are more grounded; tragedy befalling loved ones in the form of car accidents, diseases, sudden death, that kind of thing. If I ever end up in a dream with a crazed murderer, I usually end up with some degree of lucidity which causes one of the following; a) I wake up, b) I get some form of weapon to take on said crazed murderer, c) I change the dream to something completely different, the aforementioned crazed murderer forgotten.