Trigger warning: this piece discusses self-harm, suicide, and hospitalization.
A young woman thrashes under her bedsheets. She screams out in pain as she’s attacked by an invisible assailant who slashes at her skin and carries her up to the ceiling as the frenzied attack continues. Terrified and out of control, she calls for help as the air itself seems to render her powerless and in pain. Finally, she falls to the floor dead, covered in blood that makes no sense. I understand Tina, Freddy Krueger’s first onscreen victim, very well. Just like her, I know what it’s like to be sliced open by things that no one else can see.
I was diagnosed with depression at age 18. That wasn’t the whole story though, and I’ve since been diagnosed with a lot more than that: anxiety, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and complex post-traumatic stress disorder — to name a few. One of the many things I’ve learned over my mental health journey is something that Tina and Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street know all too well: the monsters in your own head can be just as dangerous as the ones outside your door. Sometimes they’re even one and the same.
A Nightmare on Elm Street and its sequels explore the line between fantasy and reality, obliterating the arbitrary boundary between “real” things that scare us — things that society says we shouldn’t be ashamed to fear — and imaginary things that we should just ignore and pray they go away. In theory, mantras like “you’re not real” and “this is only a dream” sound like great defenses against terror. But when the monsters are in your own mind and there’s no true difference between the real world and the dream world, escape is impossible.
When my depression got much worse in my late 20s or early 30s, I went to my primary care physician for help. Since one of my symptoms is that my memory has more holes in it than a spider web, I’m an occasionally unreliable narrator of my own biography, so please forgive any vagueness on the details. He prescribed a new antidepressant on top of what I was already taking, and a couple of things happened: I stopped sleeping and I started hearing voices. I could never make out what the voices were saying, but it was still terrifying. I couldn’t trust my mind or my senses; like Tina and Nancy hearing Freddy Krueger whisper their names in the dark, I didn’t know what was happening but I knew that I wasn’t safe.
Shortly after the voices started, I was diagnosed as bipolar. I stopped taking the meds that made me hallucinate, and for several years the voices were silent. Lately, though, I’ve started hearing whispers again. And on one bizarre day at work, the action figures on my desk started moving on their own. A plastic Cylon waved its robotic arms back and forth to the music I was listening to, and a Captain Marvel bobblehead offered to pick up a paperclip I had dropped on my keyboard. I was fascinated by their sudden sentience but I don’t remember being surprised. I just accepted that my reality was different from other people’s realities. Just like Nancy, I occasionally walk between two worlds. She can grab a serial killer’s hat in a dream and wake up holding it; I can have dance parties with Funko Pops.
Not all of my symptoms are quite that harmless, though. I eventually got to a point where I didn’t trust myself around sharp objects. I think it’s really interesting that horror’s most iconic slashers all use blades — even the word “slasher” implies cutting, slicing, metal carving through flesh. But Freddy’s glove is the most intimate and most disturbing of all the slasher weapons. The knives he slashes with are extensions of his own body… more so than Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers or Leatherface, the act of tearing someone open is a part of Freddy’s nature. When I held a knife or a box cutter to my wrist and tested out the pressure, I was afraid that it was going to become a part of mine as well.
So I asked for help. It took quite a bit of persuading, because my psychiatrist at the time was, well, she was terrible. She reminded me of Dr. Simms in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, who judges her patients harshly, ignores the kids’ accounts of their own lived experiences, and continually steers her patients down the wrong treatment path. Dr. Simms doesn’t want healthy kids; she wants quiet and cooperative ones. I finally persuaded my own personal Dr. Simms to send me to a hospital to get some help, and it was scarier than anything I’ve ever seen in a horror movie.
Group therapy is a double-edged sword — after all, everything comes back to blades with Freddy Krueger. Just like “the last of the Elm Street children” when they undergo hypnosis to join Kristen in her dream and become fantasy versions of themselves in order to fight their communal demons, the people participating in group therapy are inviting one another into their respective nightmares. It can help a great deal to unburden yourself of painful memories or intrusive thoughts, but you also have to take on other people’s burdens. There’s one story that I heard during group therapy that I will never repeat because it was too horrible and too traumatic to bring back to life by telling it. Thinking about it years later, I still get overwhelmed with nausea and grief. I also feel immense shame, because I feel selfish for wishing that the girl who told the story had never said it out loud.
Sometimes the group is all you have, though, and it can make you feel less alone to find out that other people see the world the same way you do. The kids in Dream Warriors feel validated when Nancy confirms that Freddy Krueger isn’t a symptom of “mass hysteria” or some shared delusion caused by guilt over their supposed failings. “Somebody else gets it” is an incredibly powerful tool against your own demons. There was another bipolar woman in my therapy group who gave me a word to describe my mixed states, which are hellish episodes that combine the worst aspects of depression and mania (or in my case, hypomania, since I have bipolar II and therefore don’t suffer from full-blown mania). She described mixed states as making her feel “brittle,” and it was such a perfect description that I immediately felt seen and understood. Just like naming a demon can allow you to have power over it, naming this horrible feeling made me feel like I might be able to deal with it a little better.
That’s part of the beauty of Dream Warriors: the kids take the fight to Freddy. They know they can’t win in a world that denies his existence, where everything is safe and boundaries are clear and men with knives for fingers don’t murder children. No, they have to walk between two worlds like Nancy and deal with Freddy in the realm of nightmares. I can’t ignore my mental illness or pretend it’s not there; I can’t look myself in the eye and say “Stop imagining things” and suddenly be sane. I have to work with the world as I know it. I have to take advantage of the frenzied energy that comes when I’m hypomanic and channel it into something productive. Like Taryn, one of the Elm Street children who turns into a switchblade-wielding punk badass as a dream warrior, I can become a version of myself that I like: someone who has the energy and the ability to accomplish things in life. Taryn doesn’t survive, though. So when I come down from that hypomanic rush and plunge into depression, I have to take care of myself. I have to make sure I still do things like eat and brush my teeth and go to work. Just like the Elm Street children, I have to keep fighting the things that other people can’t see.
Slashers always come back. That’s part of the fun of horror movies. It’s also part of the hell of mental illness. No matter how well I manage my symptoms, I’ll never be cured. At the end of Dream Warriors, Kristen has all the talismans she thinks she needs to keep Freddy Krueger at bay. But that light still comes on in the tiny model of Nancy’s house to let us know that he’s still lurking in her subconscious. Everything will always lead back to the boiler room, to the innermost part of yourself that’s unbearable from the heat and pressure and all the things you wish would stay buried.
I understand the terror of fighting with your own mind. I know how Tina and Nancy and Kristen and Taryn feel, struggling to face demons that simultaneously live inside them and swallow them whole. I know that the odds say I might not make it. But I draw strength from these warriors and from the moments when I feel good despite everything that’s going on inside my head. I don’t know what my nightmares will look like tomorrow or next month or next year, but I’ve reached a point where I think I can live through them. It’s been a long time since I’ve held a blade to my skin. I’ve had some long and scary years, but now I can finally say that I’m into survival.
