Your most unusually traumatic memory - or the night you heard your dog say "Chaos reigns."

[ES 148]

There was this road safety advert going around when I was fairly young where a man goes through everyday life but there's this dead child he sees everywhere, and at the end he sees the child lying in bed next to him or something like that.
It really messed me up for a while, because I'd see the kid too whenever I tried to get to sleep.

And when I was even younger than that, I played The Sims and I set off a firework inside the house. I didn't think it'd actually kill anyone. Nightmares for several months.

I also had recurring nightmares (yeah this is a theme) about the Walkers, a race of thumb-headed people clad in Walkers' crisp packets, who would walk by the living room window and if I wasn't quiet and still, they'd jump in and grab me and take me away. I remember that especially vividly, because as long as I slept with my ear off the pillow I'd never dream about them: if I didn't, the sound of my heartbeat would make me imagine them marching, and then it'd start.

TL;DR - Young Me was incredibly impressionable and I would make an excellent poster child for not letting children play violent or scary video games.

 

[March Hare]

When I was a kid, there was birthday cake and I wanted to eat some really badly! Yummy white vanilla cake.
I grabbed a fork and when I took a bite, an explosion of spice mixed with cake became quickly apparent.

Turns out the fork I grabbed came from a pickled jalapeno jar put with the clean silverware.
I wanted to be polite so I tried to tolerate the jalapeno juices colliding with cake... I ended up throwing up in the sink. The disgust, embarrassment and flavor from that event has stuck with me ever since...

 

[Bugaboo]

I had a dream as a child about some creepypasta-esque video game with a wolf who turned into a skeleton after running through a cave full of cave paintings. Thinking about the dream as an adult it wasn't really scary but I was so terrified of that dream and it stuck with me ever since for some reason

 

[Dovahshit]

i saw a maggot in the toilet. never looked at spaghetti the same since.

 

[polonium]

i saw a maggot in the toilet. never looked at spaghetti the same since.

That was a reflection of your junk in the water.

 

[El Garbage]

"3 days ago there was an explosion at a Soviet nuclear power plant in Chernobyl."

My father and me measured radiation levels around our apartment building with a bulky, Fallout-esque radiation detector. The meter went off the charts around the downspouts, where most of the radioactive material had ended after the rain. The kids' sandbox had to be dug out and the sand replaced, it was so polluted.

Yes, the detector made the screeching, crackling sound those devices always make in games. Every time I hear it takes me back to 1986.

In hindsight the panic was overblown and the health effects of the radiation negligible, but at the time it felt like the end of the world.

 

[Raptor-chan]

Brother and I grew up in a small town, often played in a baseball field about a block from our house. We were about 10 and 7. On our way home one afternoon, some disgusting old fat guy with a beard pulled up and asked us to help "look for his puppy". I was like "no", he immediately got mad. We ran through a cemetery to get away from him. We never told anyone (dumbshits).

About four years later my brother tears ass into my room and demands I come watch the news. There was Ole' Beardy, standing in a court room convicted of raping a thirteen year old.

 

[Antipathy]

I once got kicked in the balls.