In Class Assignment, Dobby the House Elf Runs By Jacob Bothell

I really like scary things: movies, pictures, Halloween houses, etc. They are actually thought to be good for you for several scientific purposes (increased heart rate, being able to face fears in a ‘safe’ environment, self-awareness to name a few) but I just enjoy being afraid and the feeling of triumph of being alive after the scary event. I like these things so much that I intentionally try to induce night terrors, scary dreams, by eating spicy foods thinking about certain things before bed and other home ‘remedies’ that are said to help bring scary dreams up. A recurring dream of mine that instilled fear on every occurrence was of Dobby the house elf from the popular movie title Harry Potter. He would crash into my second story bedroom window and run through my house and for some reason I would follow him. He then proceeded to jump out of a second story window of my house and without thinking about possible consequences I blindly follow him. Then I would find myself dead/paralyzed at the bottom of the drop where there just happened to be a pad of concrete and I would see this from a birds eye view. Occasionally my body would be missing from the picture all together and simply a chalk outline of me would exist on the concrete. And that is where the dream ended. Sometimes I would wake up sometimes it would remember it when I woke up later and other times it would go on repeat until I woke up… those were the worst.

What does this mean... only a trained psychologist could take a guess at. The thought of Dobby has never frightened me and death has never been something that I really fear, this is because of my religious beliefs probably, but perhaps I was afraid of the running/physical exertion in the dream… probably what it is. Interestingly enough the dream stopped occurring somewhere around the time that I read the seventh book where, spoiler alert, Dobby dies. That, I think, allowed him to live in the past and the movie to be just a remembrance of him. He no longer lived in the real world, not that he did I guess, and he physically could not be somewhere. Who knows though.