Being
a twin

I have a twin sister.

That must be weird!

Actually, since I don't have any other siblings, it seems perfectly normal to me. It's very natural for me to have a sibling my own age. It would be weird to have a brother who was four years younger.

The main weird thing was that we had largely overlapping groups of friends in high school, so we would sometimes get treated as a unit for purposes of getting people together. But we kept our individuality pretty well.

Are you very close?

We're pretty close. I think more of that is attributable to going through the various phases of our life simultaneously than to being in the womb together.

Do you have any crazy twin stories?

Just one.

When I was maybe seven years old, I had a nightmare. In this nightmare, our family was at the beach. The beach itself was a very narrow strip between the ocean and a very tall (over 100 feet) cliff. As we were doing the standard beach stuff, we saw a huge tidal wave approaching. We all started frantically climbing the cliff to escape. I lost track of the rest of my family, but just as I was about to reach the top of the cliff, the tidal wave came and swept me away.

It was a terrible nightmare. I had it almost every night for a week. I was afraid to go to sleep because I knew I would have this dream. Eventually, though, I stopped having it.

Many years later, when I was in high school, I had the same dream, for the first time in ages. It wasn't as scary this time, maybe because I was older, maybe because part of my mind was saying 'Oh, it's this dream again.'

The next morning I was walking to school with my sister, and I mentioned that the previous night I had had a specific nightmare for the first time in around ten years. She said, "Were you at a beach, and there was a cliff, and a tidal wave?" Turns out she also had the dream as a kid, and had just had it again.

Wooooooooooo.


Last updated 10 September 1998
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