Everyone has at one point has stayed awake at night, not able to sleep, thinking about a monster that haunts them. It would always be at night when you’re lying down, most likely overthinking the idea that there is something or someone under your bed waiting for you to fall asleep. Meanwhile, you’re hoping to make it to the safety of morning when the monsters can’t some out the light. Whether it’s in your closet or underneath the bed the monster never ceases to scare the living daylights out of you. These monsters, as we get older, start to evolve. They no longer become the grotesque thing under you’re bed, but they take a human form.

As a youngling I was scared of a lot of things. In fact I didn’t stop sleeping with a night-light until I was 12 years old (if that’s considered normal). Some stories were told to me as a kid like the Boogieman. As scary as that may be for some kids, that was not what scared me. In fact I never once thought that the boogieman was scary, in fact he was a joke that my dad would always tickle me to. What I was really scared of constituted things that I didn’t know. Sometimes, I would walk in on my older cousins watching a movie and I just sat in the corner watching. And that’s how I saw my first Saw movie. So at night for a month straight I couldn’t fall asleep without thinking about that Jigsaw looking feller. At one point I even had nightmares about Spiderman 3 because I was scared of black Spiderman. No it wasn’t even Venom, it was the black Spiderman. The points being that these were the things that kept me awake as I lay in my bed at night. These we the kinds of things that sent me from my bed to either my parents or my brothers bed when I was young. My brother didn’t even like me though, he used to kick me out and call me some mean names. Seems kind of silly. Everyone laughs or smiles at it now because it’s silly to remember the things that used to scare us, especially me.

However, time goes on. As we get older and become more aware of our surroundings the things that used to scare us don’t anymore. The idea that someone can live in your closet or under your bed is impossible. Maybe there are some concepts of what we where scared of still in the back of our heads, but we don’t stay up waiting, all night, for someone to grab us. The fears of monsters take on a whole different shape. A human form soon replaces the animalistic visions of monsters. We know of things scarier than the Boogieman. We know about things like weapons of mass destruction. We know about people who will hurt other people for no reason and without remorse. Sometimes, we are too scared to even go out on our own because we know that the world is a dangerous place. These monsters are now terrorists, rapists, murderers, and weapons. The list just gets larger and larger.

This sense of danger that I felt as a kid lying in my bed and thinking about monsters is still with me to this day. Only this time the danger doesn’t come from folklore, it comes from real life. It comes from the risks that many people take everyday in order to live a full and happy life. I think the reason I fear these things is because they are out of my control. I have no idea when the world will go to nuclear annihilation, or if a terrorist attack will kill me. The truth is that when I lie down in my bed at night, I have way too much time to think about these things.