Monsters and Goblins

Last week I was having quite a bit of trouble sleeping. As soon as I shut the lights off and closed my eyes I was wide awake rolling around like a six foot crocodile in a death roll. After three long sleepless nights I was fed up. I sat myself down and tried to think about what it was that was keeping me up at night. Now I know things have been a little upside down in my life lately and of coarse those kinds of things one can lose sleep over, but was that really the root of my torture? As I pondered about home remedies or prescription medications for sleep aid a thought crossed my all ready under functioning and oh so tired brain. “I don’t want to sleep.” What? “I’m tired but I don’t want to go to sleep.” What? This unusual epiphany caused a sort of chain reaction inside my head. I asked myself “why wouldn’t I want to sleep at night?” I also thought about what keeps other people up at night. I began to think about children and I began to think about when I was a child and how some children don’t sleep easy when they have thoughts of monsters in the closet or goblins under the bed. Obviously it’s not the monsters or the goblins literally keeping the kids up at night, it’s the fear of them.

Fear can keep us awake for many hours on end. As we grow older we shed our childish fears of monsters and goblins, right? Or do they simply take on another form. The monsters and goblins we all feared from our childhood no longer hide in our closets or under our beds. As we grow older they move into an even scarier place, our heads. They transform themselves into our thoughts and ideas. Our thoughts and worries of what tomorrow might bring or what our futures might hold in store for us. I don’t know about you but as for myself I am much more afraid of something inside of my head then something inside of my closet. So, it came to my attention that I never really did let go of my childish fears of monsters and goblins, those fears simply manifested themselves in a different way. I realized that I am just as afraid of those monsters now as I was when I was six years old, if not even more terrified. Being a man of action I decided it was time to end this fear once and for all, after all it was the fear that was keeping me up at night and by this point I desperately needed a good nights sleep. As I tried hard to think of a way to conquer my newly discovered fear of metaphorical monsters I wondered if fear was actually that bad. If it wasn’t for fear how would any of us be able to make decisions in our lives? Yes it is true, fear can be debilitating in some ways such as my lack of time spent in dreamland. Fear can also help us. Fear makes us understand that the decisions we make on daily basis actually matter and can make a difference in our lives. If we weren’t afraid of the monsters in our thoughts what kind of people would we be? I don’t want to know the answer to that question. So after reviewing all the new information I had just gathered I decided I wasn’t going to destroy my monsters thus destroying my fear, I was just going to put them in a safer place, back in the closet. Far enough away to get some sleep but close enough to keep me on my toes.

Jesse Roulette
Traping monsters One at a Time