nightmares from childhood

I must have had the cruelest friends in the world.

Once they got me up in their treehouse, locked the door, and forced me to listen to stories they made up about my family getting slaughtered and me coming home alone to find them. I screamed and cried until finally they let me go and I could run home again.

The images haunted me for years, and they still make me sad, though for different reasons now. I still periodically even have the nightmares again. They don't bother me as much now, of course. Now I know where they came from. And that helps. But they still make me sad.

What inspires this kind of cruelty? I'm pretty sure I hadn't done anything, except had the hard luck to live next door and to be only eight years old. They were all twelve.

Those memories, in fact, were the strongest inducement I could come up with against having children of my own. And a very strong inducement they were. They very nearly prevented me from taking the risk. I just never wanted any child of mine to ever go through that. I spent many moments of my growing up years thinking of how I could manage to protect a child from something similar, and realizing that, if the child is cruel enough and determined enough, there's probably nothing you can do.