Just putting the kids to bed and my daughter showed me her box of nightmares. She is quite the storyteller and I think this is her source material. Apparently when she was really young and having night terrors, I told her to draw her dreams and put them in a box. She has kept this shoebox for years. It's full of cartoon drawings. Each page when unfolded tells the story of a nightmare. Now, looking back, she can recite them in detail. "This is a table filled with soup. More soup than any human could eat. But I had to eat it." Opening another one she said "In the blackness three things kept on walking towards me. A candy cane, a flamingo and a lions head that kept saying 'Hello Guv'nor' over and over again". One of the last drawings brought a smile to her face. "And this is me running to hide under a bed as my best friend was being levitated by a witch. While under the bed I struck up a conversation with a skull." She points to the skull next to the drawing of her under the bed. "He said 'Good evening' and told me that he was once a child just like me, but the witch killed him." She sighed in remembrance, folded the paper and placed it carefully back in the box. "I've not had dreams like this for a long time". Apparently, the more she drew her dreams, the less frequently she had them. She doesn't have nightmares anymore. Just a box of really cool stories. Stories that she treasures.
