I’ve been told before that my dreams are both stunningly entertaining and mildly unnerving, often at the same time. This, as best I can gather, is for two reasons: I have the untethered imagination of a six-year-old, and the storyteller in me enjoys relating my dreams to others. My dreams run the gamut from charming to ridiculous to something that Salvador Dali and the surrealists would feel perfectly at home in.

Of course, that gamut includes the macabre. The spine-chilling. The terrifying.

In short, the nightmare.

The most vivid dream of my childhood, and one that has stuck with me from about the age of seven to this very moment, plays on my lifelong fear of ancient Egypt. At some point in elementary school, my teachers decided that it would be a good idea to teach young, impressionable children about the mummification process, including exactly what tools were used to extract the brains, the eyeballs, and the entrails of the newly deceased. I’d like to have a word with our curriculum director, but it’s too late. The damage has been done.

In the dream (which was stunningly choreographed for a seven-year-old, really), an ancient ritual was taking place in the deep inner vaults of an Egyptian pyramid. The officiator of the ritual was the archetypal wise man, albeit from a different genre: he looked more or less like the emperor from Disney’s Mulan, except dressed in Egyptian garb.

Lines of Egyptian men and women flanked the edges of the vault hallway, and the scene was practically monochromatic, painted in dark brown, gray, and brick-colored tones. I remember these colors and the feel of shadows pressing in from all sides as the old man, his Fu Manchu rippling in the indoor breeze, stood on a throne at the end of the hallway. He raised his hand, clutching a large red orb in one hand.

Time stood still for a moment. Nobody moved. Nobody said a word.

The wise man, slowly and deliberately, let loose the orb as one would a bowling ball.

It careened down the hall in painstakingly slow motion. The dream focus zoomed on the face of an Egyptian princess, standing on the other end. Her eyes widened, and she tried to pull away. She reached out one hand to the man next to her, as if asking him to protect her.

But it was too late.

In the kind of stop-motion restricted for the most dramatic of films, the ball connected with the princess’s chest. Instantly, the look of horror still frozen on her face, she began to fall backwards, as if she had been struck by a cannonball. By the time her body hit the floor, she had been transformed into a stone sarcophagus, staring up at the ceiling in fear and knowledge of her doom.

The coda to the dream, as if designed to ruin the dramatic tension of the moment, featured a cartoon version of Pocahontas urgently rubbing the princess’s legs in an attempt to bring feeling back to them, calling for John Smith to rush forward and perform an emergency medical procedure to save her. I have no idea what this was trying to tell me.

I don’t know why this dream was so vivid fourteen years ago, nor why I still remember it to this day. Something in the staging of the events, the color palate and the use of stop motion, hearkens back to a B-list adventure film, but the drama and the fear were real. I recall awaking in the middle of the night with a scream, though I did not get out of bed and seek my parents out for reassurance. I would have liked to, but I didn’t.

Maybe I knew the reaction the average person would have to a nightmare of this description: you just dreamed of a man turning a princess to stone with a red plastic kickball? Not exactly the sympathetic listener I had in mind.

But that’s the nature of nightmares. Our fears are as highly personal as our hopes, and just as difficult to articulate. There was something in the shadowy vaults of this pyramid that struck fear into seven-year-old me, something forceful enough to remain lurking in the back of my mind until this very day. What it was, I might never know.

We cannot understand ourselves until we understand our demons, and the journey to self-understanding is one I have certainly not finished.