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It's weird, but I still remember the first nightmare I had, when I was maybe four years old.
Throughout my childhood I had recurring nightmares about what I called "white balls." (Feel free to snicker at the name, lol). These were faintly-glowing spheres that bounced around under their own power. In my dreams they were carniverous, and in order to avoid being eaten, you had to climb up high enough to be beyond the reach of their bouncing.
The "white balls" nightmares began when I was pre-verbal and persisted clean into college (over the years their frequency waned and eventually, in my early twenties, they stopped altogether). They mystified my parents, who wracked their brains for what could have triggered such a strange and specific terror, but never came up with a satisfactory answer.
Fast forward 15 years. The topic of nightmares came up in conversation with a British friend of mine. I described the white balls and she said, "Oh, that kind of sounds like this old sci-fi show on the BBC called 'The Prisoner.'" I looked it up, and there it was, a minute or so into the video, my childhood nightmares brought to life, complete with the creepy noise they made when they bounced. The dates lined up too...the show was aired in the US around the right time period. I was like "Holy crap! The mystery has finally been solved!"
I forwarded the clip to my mother. Her response? "That looks like the kind of thing your father* would have watched when I wasn't home..."
*He passed away a few years before this discovery, so I couldn't rib him about it.
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