Is Today the 13th?

Today was one of those fast-paced, mouse-running-on-a-wheel kind of days. All motion, no progress. I started the morning by being awakened from a bad dream, the same recurring nightmare I have. Don't we all have one? Mine is of a creepy, crazed, part-supernatural man, coming after me to kill me or for some other unknown evil purpose. It's not ever the exact same man, and it's never a man I already know. He changes in looks, but the evil chasing part is always there. Half my co-workers had some sort of bad luck on the way to work: one being locked out of the house; another one thinking he had locked himself out of the house but finding out his back door had been unlocked for weeks; another's car stalling on a bridge. Friday the 13th, delayed reactions, five days later. I've been OK, so far, except for the visceral belief I had this morning that the scary man was chasing me, popping up anywhere I was (I think he could read my mind) to kill me. Just like in the Friday the 13th movies. Just like it. I was traumatized, caught a temporary case of post-traumatic stress disorder, as a result of watching my first Friday the 13th movie, my first full-length horror movie, at the theater when I was 11. That might sound kind of old to have not seen a horror movie, but I was sheltered in the movie department in the 1980s (or just sheltered, in general; I didn't have cable TV in my house until I was 10). I was brave, in the sense that I was excited about seeing a horror movie, and always excited to do new and different things, like ride roller coasters and jump into the deep end without testing the water first. In the weeks after watching the Friday the 13th movie, in 1984, I couldn't sit with my back to a window darkened by the night, paranoid Jason was going to come crashing through it with a giant knife. People just got stabbed, over and over and over again, through the entire movie. When Jason wasn't stabbing innocent people, he was crashing through windows to get to them. I would try to comfort myself with the thought that Jason wasn't real, but that didn't help. I thought someone might have been inspired and affected by the character. It did give me ideas that I'd never had before; why wouldn't it do the same to some evil-inclined person ... ? I wonder how I can conquer my fear. I wonder if watching the same Friday the 13th movie from 1984 would help. I have a feeling my children would laugh all the way through it, like they did this past summer, when they watched "The Shining," released in 1980.