it's like a train wreck, only fluffier

questionoftheday asks: Did you have a monster under your bed when you were a child? What did it look like? Was there any "ritual" you went through to get rid of it?

My answer:

I went through a lot of monsters, couldn't tell you what they all looked like, which might sound a bit weird, but my version of a "ritual" was that I had an imaginary friend who ate monsters.  His name was Spiggy, and he was mostly invisible to me too (occasionally I'd catch glimpses out of the corner of my eye, and he was sort of a shadowy mass, with lots of tendrils and different coloured eyes; I feel like this is where my feelings of 'octopuses are soft friend' originated, and also why I was drawn to WTNV fanon).  He smelt like seaweed; that was usually how I knew if he was around.  Our gig was that if we suspected a monster was lurking I'd play hapless victim and lure it into range so that he could pounce on it and eat it.  Then we'd go back to me reading him stories - I can't remember why he couldn't read for himself, but it was something to do with being unable to see something flat on a flat surface.

Basically I was a weird kid, with a very pragmatic streak.  Also, my reading age was always far in advance, and I was always the narrator for the school play because I could read aloud so clearly - not because I was particularly smart, but because I was in an imaginary friendship with some kind of nursery boggart, who would splot dramatically across my legs if I didn't read to him for a couple of hours every single night, sometimes longer, and who would whinge if I mangled any words.

I do feel like there's an idea for a kids' book there, but even though most of me is like "LOL, what the fuck was I like, such a bloody weird kid,' there's a small part that thinks about Spiggy being read that book by his new kid and I'm not sure whether he'd be pleased or not - hundreds of kids reading the book aloud might mean the monsters figure out his scheme.  I know it's insane, but that little niggle still bothers me.

In related news: Monsters, Inc. had very different undertones for me as a movie than it probably did for other people.