A Nightmare on Trouble Street: What Problems and Freddy Krueger Have in Common

My son and I went to see the new Nightmare on Elm Street, a remake of Wes Craven’s 1984 horror classic.

It wasn’t that great; we gave it two slashes down, but I walked away with an interesting thought: when it comes to solving problems, you could learn a lot from a monster.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the film, it’s all about a nasty fellow named Freddy Krueger. He wears bad sweaters, he tells bad puns, and he likes to cut people with his blade tipped glove, all of which he does inside their dreams.

That’s the thing about Freddy. He only exists in people’s heads, and he’s cool with that, because, while he’s there, he can do some very serious damage.

In his victims’ dreams, Freddy is sinister and shapeless and impossible to overcome. As long as he’s in their heads, he can use their imaginations to do them in.  And that, I realized, is the way it is with problems. When they’re sinister and shapeless and rattling inside our skulls, they can really muck things up for us.

Like Freddy, they can exhaust us by day, keep us sleepless at night, and use our imaginations to fill us with dread and hopelessness.

But in the movie, the heroes figure something out. If they can pull Freddy out of their heads and into the real world, they just might have a chance to conquer him. It works that way with problems, too.

To deal with a problem, you have to pull it from the murky world of murky thoughts and bring it into the light of day. You have to define it and get it down in black and white. Only then can you tackle it head on.

I’ve been struggling with a problem of my own for several months now, but I only recently put it down in black and white. Almost as soon as I did, I saw the solution, an easy one to implement. I wonder how much turmoil I could have saved myself if I had simply done this sooner.

I’ll tell you more about that particular problem and the solution I came up with in an upcoming post, but, for now, I’d encourage you to think about anything that’s been bothering you and ask yourself if you’ve clearly defined it.

If not, try your hand at doing so.

Try to describe it in a sentence or two, no more than a paragraph; use short, direct sentences and simple words; and be sure to put it in writing. Once you have it on the page, I bet it won’t seem so dangerous.

Fail to do this, however, and your problems could remain scary, little boogymen. And who knows when they’re going to strike next?

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