Nightmare: A frightening dream or horrible experience.

The term “nightmare” is one we are all familiar with. We are used to hearing it used in phrases like “I had this terrible nightmare last night,” or, “That math test was a complete nightmare.” However, with some reconsideration, it can be seen in a different light. To us, a nightmare is really more than a frightening dream or horrible experience. Nightmare is our life, it is an omnipresent, constantly challenging, perpetually damaging entity, and we have to bear the weight it drops on us every single day. The effects of our nightmares are evident on all scales, from everybody in the world as a whole, to the people we care for, to ourselves. Dealing with these nightmares are a part of being human.


Society can be an absolute nightmare. To begin with, mankind is at war with itself all the time. Be it over old beliefs, land, material things, or crazy theories, mankind is always fighting. War is the very representation of the problems in mankind; it is the accumulation of all the negative aspects of people, rolled up into a murder fest all aimed at proving something. There is a simple golden rule: don’t do unto others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself. War takes that rule, slaps it in the face a little, kicks it in the ribs, gives it a wet willy, throws it down some stairs, and asks its girlfriend out on a date. It would seem gold in the bank is worth more than gold in a rule.

Now is this being said to bash humans and imply that we are all hopeless monsters? Why of course not. Human nature can’t be changed. Human nature calls for a strong belief in something, and it has a strong urge to want to fight other people’s strong beliefs, because they’re wrong, and how dare they. It’s in this way that the term “nightmare” is pertinent to war, it is something we will always have to deal with, and it’ll always be a challenge we have to overcome. Another matter regarding the questionable ethics of human nature is the ordeal of crime. It is apparent that humans love to hurt and steal from each other. Jack and Jill are prime examples. Jack was late on his rent per usual. It seems that the hours toiling away on Facebook as opposed to looking for a better job than his current employment at “Mom’s House” as “Lawn Cutter” had finally caught up to him, and this is where the human nature kicks into Jack. Jack knew that finding a job was going to be tremendously difficult. So, sensing difficulty and challenge, he immediately thought of an alternative, and that alternative was mugging a helpless woman. It seemed like a solid business decision. Jill was walking down the street after her hard day at work when, in one terrifying incident, she was bogarted of her purse by a man who smelled of freshly cut grass and Cheetos. Furious, Jill rushed after the perpetrator. So Jack and Jill ran up a hill to settle a domestic dispute, when the cops burst in and boxed them in, knocking Jack unconscious. Jill went home, and all alone, cried herself to sleep.

Stories like that of Jack and Jill are symbolic of two key obstacles we all face that make our society a nightmare: greed and laziness. This doesn’t mean greed like you stole a bite off of Brenda’s sandwich, or laziness in the sense of you don’t want to get up to get some water so you have your sibling do it. It’s far worse than that. It’s the greed that makes us steal, or the laziness that makes us want to avoid working our fair share. When our greed and laziness accumulate to a point, we hurt ourselves and we hurt others. This is usually in the manner of crime, just like with Jack and Jill. This is an active part of our society, and this is another example of how society is a nightmare. Our own greed and our own laziness are things that are always there, and things we have to overcome. It’s important to acknowledge that things of this nature, war and crime, have dastardly effects on the foundation of mankind.

You don’t have to be a soldier or a victim of a crime to realize society’s most rampant, most shared problem: heartache. Heartache isn’t fun, it isn’t something anybody wants, it isn’t fair, and it isn’t avoidable. Heartache comes in many flavors. There’s the kind that rips your heart out, like when a friend dies. There’s the slow acting poisonous kind that eats you up for an unavoidably long time, like when somebody breaks your heart. There’s the type that’s like a raw punch to your chest that breaks you and leaves you shaken, like witnessing a tragedy. Heartache isn’t easy. Heartache leaves scars. It could be said that it shows up at your door at inconvenient times, but the truth is that heartache is what makes inconvenient times. Heartache is different than the others in that there is no choice in the matter. You can choose to rob a bank or be a soldier, but you can’t choose whether or not your heart will be broken. It just happens, and it’s in this way that heartache is both something that brings us together and is an absolute, ever present, always challenging nightmare that we simply have to overcome.

These issues that are part of our society: war, crime, heartache- they are obstacles that disrupt what could easily be a perfectly happy life for us people. The problem is that nothing is perfect, and we are not nothing. When our problems and our issues accumulate, we get things like war and crime and heartache. They are unavoidable, and they are a pain to handle, but they are our life. It would seem it’s the fact that we cause these problems that make us human. It seems much more preferable though to look at it differently; perhaps the fact that we overcome these problems -these nightmares- is what makes us human.

When you think of the word “nightmare” as it pertains to our personal self, many things come to mind. Nightmare is a symbol of our fear, and nightmare is what brings out our weakness. When we know there is a task ahead of us that will surely prove to be difficult, our fear kicks in. This fear can be minor or it can be major; sometimes you need just a little boost of confidence, or sometimes it takes insane courage to accomplish what you want to accomplish.

Say you are a comedian. You want to go up on that stage and make people laugh. That is your passion, and you want it more than anything. You’ve prepared for a long time to achieve this end. Everything is set, you’re looking good, you have your material, and you know you’re funny- but you just freeze. That is a nightmare. There is no amount of preparation that will completely get rid of all fear, of your personal nightmares. This is what you have to overcome if you ever want success.

We will encounter fear. Through our fear can come two things, our most glorious strength or our most desperate weakness. Nightmare brings out our weakness; it’s the challenge we have to accept and overcome that makes our hearts quiver. Weakness strikes at inconvenient times; and giving into it will cause many more inconvenient times. If you are standing on the starting line right before your big race, and you let your fear weaken you, you will not run your best. When you don’t run your best, you lose, and not necessarily literally. When you lose like this, regret kicks in, and regret stings.

Nightmare is like this. You absolutely have to overcome that fear, or that weakness, because there’s no running away. In short; weakness begets suffering. Another way to look at this, however, is that where there's fear, there's potential for courage. Where there's weakness, there's potential for strength. Nightmare is a teacher, and it teaches us the most important lesson. The lesson is that we have to be hurt to gain anything. You learn a lot about yourself when you suffer. An excellent example of this is a distance run. When you run for a relatively long amount of time or distance, your mind does some crazy things. If you analyze these things, you'll understand what kind of person you are. You might be the kind of person who shuts out all of the pain and moves forward, or maybe you're the one who thinks about every aching muscle and joint, and think of how to make it feel better. Maybe you purposefully distract yourself, or maybe you don't do anything like any of the aforementioned. In any case, a long run is symbolic of life’s problems and solutions, and it’s an excellent way to realize what hardship really is, and how you choose to deal with it. No approach is better than another, as long as the result is victory over yourself.

This is exactly how any kind of hardship works. From forgetting your coffee in the morning to having your heart broken, you learn a lesson about yourself. It's in this way that nightmare is a teacher, life itself is a classroom, and you will always be a student. So through fighting through your fear, to marching past your weakness, to accepting an important lesson, nightmare is a part of our lives, and that will never change.

It's one thing to have to witness things like this on a mass level such as society, or to have it happen to you yourself, but it's different when you witness these nightmarish things happening to people you care about. There is a significant effect dealt upon us when we see somebody or something we care about and love hurt in some way. When we witnessed 9/11 and saw those people die, it caused our thoughts to race, and the process was a nasty one. We were in disbelief; somebody walked all over our country, destroyed two important landmarks, and killed thousands of people. This is unheard of. Then we were angry; we did nothing to deserve this, and this suffering shouldn't be ours. Next we were miserable; because whether we deserve it or not, the simple fact was that our country had just been desecrated, and our security severely compromised. Finally though, after all of this pain and confusion, we were motivated, and we were successful in overcoming our problems, and as a nation, we came out stronger than ever. This is the definition of nightmare- it's a massive hindrance, fair or unfair, that slows us down and makes life hard, but it's something we have to conquer. Even more significant than the feeling we get witnessing people in pain, is when somebody truly close to you is suffering from this nightmare.

Ideally, life would follow a plan for everybody. We should all wake up in the morning, stretch out, maybe do some exercises, tell our parents or kids we love them, drive to work, get there safe and sound, have a productive but enjoyable work day, and repeat this for however many days a week, and we should all get our fair share of time off, and it should all be spent doing what we like. Life seems to go a little differently sometimes. Sometimes, we wake up, stretch out, do some exercises, get in the car, and get blasted by a three thousand pound vehicle going 65 miles per hour seven miles away from our own house. Sometimes “we” is your friend Jerry, and sometimes Jerry is paralyzed from the waist down. The world crashes in around Jerry, and he can’t work, he can’t play, and he can’t relax. Jerry is no longer Jerry.

Life should be like a good cake. It should all be good and enjoyable, with some parts that are especially bright and shiny and excellent. However, life is more like a bad cake. Like the kind grandma makes, when grandma is intoxicated. It’s a mostly tolerable existence spattered with catastrophic incidents that happen to our loved ones. When you eat bad cake, you get a bad feeling in your guts. The same goes for when your buddy’s house gets foreclosed; there’s nothing nice about it.

Again, this is the nature of nightmare; and perhaps this is its worst feature. It doesn’t just make your life hard- it goes for your friends and family. It’ll ruthlessly attack Aunt Suzy or your cousin Alvin, and all you can do is sit and wish you could bear their difficulty for them. It’s in these ways that nightmare is a problem in all aspects. You think you may have it under control, but before you know it, it’s going after people you love. The same way they can’t protect you, you can’t protect them.

Nightmare, described as it has been above, seems absolutely terrible. And it is. However, it grants us people one thing that is far stronger, far more meaningful, and much more important than any amount of pain and suffering. Nightmare means togetherness. Nightmare can’t be prevented; bad things will happen, and life will never be an easy road: but that’s just fine. In the same way that human nature permits us to make mistakes, human nature allows us to correct them, and we do that through finding strength in each other.

If you are alive, you have experienced hardship, and if you have experienced hardship, you have experienced companionship. There will always be somebody there for you, because the fact is that some things are much too heavy for just one person. You’re permitted to have a hard time, and no one can judge you. Nightmare is horrible, it’s painful, and it’ll always be there to beat us down and cause us problems. However, nightmare is an obstacle and a means for us people to find triumph. It’s through this process that we find strength through others, and completeness in ourselves.

Nightmare is our life. It is our teacher, it hurts us, it hurts our loved ones, it crushes our bones, it breaks our hearts, it destroys people, it makes our soup too cold, our coffee too hot, and our life very difficult. But nightmare is what keeps us together. Things like war, born of man’s insistent need to prove ourselves right, and things like crime, created from our laziness and greed, those are society’s nightmares. Our own fear and weakness, created from a lack of belief in our self or our abilities, those are our own nightmares. Witnessing fellow man’s pain, or watching your friends or family suffer, those are mutual nightmares. However, even with war and crime, we all have the same heart, and we all come together to fight through such problems. Even with being crippled by our own fear or weakness, we find the strength within ourselves to persevere. Even though we can’t stop nightmares from hurting our friends and our family, we can help them through. People experience nightmares on all levels, but even more noteworthy is that on all levels, people fight through them. People come together through them. In the end, as long as we believe in each other, believe that everything will be alright; we will always conquer them. A candle casts a shadow, but it still brightens the room.

Nightmare: An ever present challenge that will never stand a chance.