Conquering Fear Through Classification: A Study of Bedroom Monsters

Sebastian Drawing 'Squiggly', The First Bedroom Monster

Understanding your fear is the first step to conquering it. Fear of the unknown can be crippling, but uncovering it, inspecting it, classifying it, and describing it can keep that fear at arms length. So it was that my son, who had expressed his fear of monsters the night before, came to spend the morning drawing and describing them to me the next day. These were the creatures that kept him up at night, he insisted. He went into morbid detail about the worst of them. And tonight, he went to sleep without concern.

His explorations into the depths of his greatest fears can be found below.

Classification of BEDROOM MONSTERS:

SQUIGGLY: He is the greatest and most fearsome of the mosters. He is long and flat, and lives under your bed. He has very long, spindly, swirling arms that can wrap and envelope and grab. Without leaving his place, he can snatch you from your bed and drag you underneath to your doom.

SPIKEY: This monster hides in the closet, lying in wait should you escape the clutches of Squiggly. Then it chases you around the dark room, poking and prodding you with sharp prongs.

JAIL: This may be the scariest of the bedroom monsters. Jail lives in old armoires, peeking out of the door and terrifying children with his ugly face. As if that wasn’t enough, he has a human head tied to his ankle with it’s own hair.

TOILET: If you are unfortunate enough to have a a conjoined bathroom in your bedroom, the Toilet Monster, a filthy creature with three decrepit heads, waits for children with full bladders to approach the toilet and then bites them where the sun don’t shine.

COKE: Coke is a monster of forbidden, childish desires. It temps children to stay up late, putting them in perilous danger with other monsters.

BIG NOSE: He is a simple monster of brute force and pig-like expression, who likes to walk heavily about the room when you have the covers over your head.

SIX-LEGS: This extra-limbed horror live inside of every child’s mattress and kicks them whenever they are about to fall asleep, causing their bodies to jerk and jolt them awake.

These are but a few of the Bedroom Monsters, studied and classified by six-year-old Sebastian Xavier in his own home.

All Monsters Drawn and Named By Sebastian