1) Forgetting my phone number.  I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I have a recurring nightmare where I’m being pursued by someone and I need to call home for help.  I arrive at a pay phone and, with trembling fingers, push in a coin, but I can’t remember my phone number.  I start to dial, stop, hang up, have to replace the coin, repeat over and over, as the person pursuing me gets closer and closer.  Now, I freeze up every time someone asks my phone number.

2) A nightmare I used to have but haven’t in awhile is where I’m in an elevator, going up, only the elevator doesn’t stop moving. I know it’s going to shoot through the roof of the building, I know it’s going to fly through the air, and I know I’m going to die.  Since we live close enough to the ground now and just take the stairs to get into the apartment, I don’t have that nightmare anymore… usually.  Yesterday I was coming up from the basement with a load of laundry, and of course that meant I was taking the elevator.  I pushed the button for my floor, but the elevator passed it and kept going up.  My gut flipped and my heart literally skipped a beat, because I was positive my nightmare was about to come true.

3) Buildings, or bridges, collapsing.  Seriously.  I’ve been afraid of bridges for a long time now, because once as a child, I heard about a bridge collapsing in Connecticut decades ago.  The fear of the building collapsing has only happened since we had Maia; now, every night when I go to bed, I pull the covers up to my chin and can’t fall asleep until I plan how we’d escape the building intact.  I don’t know if we could, and that terrifies me.  It’s not even that our apartment building is in disrepair, I just can’t stop worrying about it.  I wonder if we would die right away, or live just to die later, if I would have to hear my baby in pain or… ugh, god, my blood runs cold just trying to write about this.

What are some of your irrational fears?