As my mother would kiss my forehead and turn toward the door, my heart would begin to pound.

By the time she would turn out my light and bid me goodnight as a silhouette in the doorway, my heart would be in my throat.

The cause? A roaming disembodied eyeball that scoured the country, peering into darkened windows in search of little girls who were attempting to push the boundaries of respectable bedtimes.

In other words, The Eye was looking for little girls just like me.

Who knows what planted in my imagination the seed that flowered into the stuff of nightmares.

Maybe my father _ a sci-fi buff of the first order _ allowed me at too young an age to watch "War of the Worlds," with its terrifying cyclops spaceships.

That couldn’t have helped.

Maybe I was a little preschool civil libertarian, fearing a day when unchecked powers might extend tentacles of unethical surveillance into every corner of citizens’ lives, even little girls’ bedtimes.

Or maybe I was just a normal kid with the normal capacity for scaring myself silly. There is a reason, after all, that Halloween, with all its chills and frights, is a holiday for children.

Compared with children, the rest of us are mere pretenders in the world of fear. Oh sure, we have worries. We worry about illness, maybe. We fear that we have not prepared well enough for winter. We’re afraid of bankruptcy and Alzheimer’s disease.

We think we know fear. But we don’t know anything like a child’s fear.

Just last week, my daughter and I were reading a new book in which Dora (the explorer!) is agonizing over the crucial choice of a Halloween costume. My daughter is three; we know that particular agony.

On one page, Dora receives a pointy witch hat from a scarecrow, and my daughter informed me that she doesn’t like scarecrows one little bit.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because they’re sceery and they wave around and they flap outside my window!"

Scarecrows. Flapping outside the window!

Are you kidding me? That’s some seriously scary stuff. It may be even scarier than a bedtime-enforcing eyeball. I won’t lie; I pulled the curtains a little tighter that night.

Fear must have been stewing in her little head that night, because the next morning she relayed a nightmare to me.

"There were underpants in the potty. And a SHARK? ATE. Them."

(It’s okay to shiver and hug yourself a bit. I won’t tell anyone. And if you feel like you need to bring a tire iron into the bathroom with you the next time you go, it’ll be our secret.)

So children have a natural talent for fear.

Thank goodness they also get Halloween. One night of the year, they get to put on their scariest faces and drive all those scarecrows and toilet sharks shrieking into the darkness.

Or maybe they put on their funniest faces and turn all their fears into belly laughs.

Or, like my daughter, maybe they put on their most sparkly ballerina outfits and turn their darkest nightmares into a starlit stage.

Come to think of it, we can all use a little Halloween.

Elizabeth Trever Buchinger is a freelance writer who’s going to be a princess- no, a vampire _ no, a pirate. She can be reached at VillageWordsmith@hughes.net.