I wrote this on a forum in response to a lady that is concerned her 2 year old daughter cries nightly and is scared of a woman she "keeps seeing". I am not sure I believe a child that young can communicate in any meaningul way, at least I didn't even know what time or dates were until I was 7 and it was pointed out in class via a school room calendar that the year was "1980" - which was like handing someone a can of beans and saying "Tomorrow's red is puppy".
I remember a very vivid (well, it used to be, I'm 42 now) dream about a clown - I've remembered it for a long time so it MUST have been when I was very young, though I realize with remembered dreams, it's unreliable to factually state much about them, but I'd say I was probably 3-5 maybe?
This is possibly my earlier memory and was a typical clown but looking very scary and behaving, leaning and leering ominously - this was in like 1977 or so, I don't think I had any any cognizant knowledge or understanding of things like what a clown was. I've had some form of fear of clowns ever since this, and this *might* have been caused by something I happened to see on TV or a book (there was a killer clowns scare at some point, and John Wayne Gacy was around), but it could have just been dream imagery of something I had seen some earlier time (maybe Bozo on TV) that became a nightmare.
