Posts from — March 2008

(Male, 30’s) I was trying to spend the night in what everyone thought was a haunted house. I knew deep down in my soul that there was just someone trying to scare myself and the other person who was there with me. I don’t think there was any reward involved, just the sense that if the place wasn’t really haunted that some kind of curse would be lifted, not like a supernatural curse but more like a psychological curse.

The house was dark but not entirely pitch black. We decided to try not to sleep at all that night so we just sat up awake in the dining room. The dining room opened into the living room through a large doorway but it was so dark in there that we couldn’t see what was going on in there. We could make out various whispy gray shapes moving but nothing more distinct. They shapes looked like window drapes and I for one wasn’t certain that wasn’t all they were. The guy I was with was pretty sure they were ghosts, though. There were also strange sounds coming from the other room. I thought they sounded like people knocking into the furniture as they walked around in the dark but my friend, as could be expected, thought they were ghosts. The hauntings seemed to come in waves, like there would be twenty or thirty minutes of nothing but boredom punctuated all at once by something happening. It drove my friend crazy but it just started to make me angry. I wanted to rush into the other room and catch the people in the act but my friend became hysterical at the idea of us separating. But one time, when one of these haunting assaults started, I picked up an end table and threw it into the living room. It didn’t seem to hit anything or make any difference. If anything, it just un-nerved by buddy more.

I was getting desperate to get rid of any sense of ghostly intervention, and angry and perhaps a bit scared. And this is where I literally don’t know what I was thinking in the context of the dream. I knew that there was a crack house next door, actually in the same building. The haunted house was like an attached brownstone, a brick building built into a long line of buildings. This one happened to be “haunted;” the next one happened to be a crack house. I knew that crack dealers and crack addicts could be dangerous in ways that fake ghosts and the people behind them can’t be. So the plan, I guess, to the extent that I had a plan was to alert the attention of the crack addicts next door and get them to terrify the people behind the haunting. I crawled down the staircase that connected the two parts of the building and somehow got the attention of the dope fiends. They ran out of their house and into the haunted house. The crack addicts flipped on the lights (why hadn’t WE thought to do that?) and there was gun fire going every where. I was hiding under a table with a table cloth on it. There was a guy with a semiautomatic weapon standing less than a foot away from me. For some reason, thankfully, he didn’t see me. There was yelling and shooting and eventually they just left.

That’s about where the dream ended, with no resolution. I don’t know what happened to my friend. I don’t know if we lifted the curse on the building. I don’t even know if the gun-toting crack heads killed the “ghosts.”

I can cope with fear. I’ve got rational categories and ironic perspectives all set up to deal with even the most disturbing nightmare or distopic vision. To be honest, I *enjoy* a good bit of white-knuckled terror because it wakes me out of the complacent greyness of my everyday life. But recently I’ve encountered something worse than nightmares. [Read more →]

I just spent a few enjoyable minutes playing a game at this site:

http://us.mms.com/us/dark/dark_game.jsp

The premise is that there are the names of 50 “dark” movies hidden as allegories and symbols in a painting. Click on the picture, type in the name. Some are pretty obvious; some had me scratching my head… that is, until I slapped my forehead “D’uh!” It’s well worth a look even if the site is a blatant promotion for dark chocolate.

I love how visual puzzles make the brain link words and images in ways that aren’t mere illustration.

By the way, if you need help, post which part and I’ll give you clues.

(Male, 40’s) I had this dream three times last night, that is, I woke up twice and fell back asleep into this dream. I wear one of those breathing masks for sleep apnea so I suspect that figured in there.

In the dream, I was wearing something like diving gear or like a very light weight space suit and I was inside a very futuristic school. The school was held inside an eight sided room. The walls were thick at the bottom, probably 3 feet thick, and gradually got thinner as they approached the ceiling. They were some kind of dark metal. I got the sense that there might only be four rooms aboard this school. I say aboard because it felt like we were floating, maybe in space, maybe in water. The whole craft would sometimes shift a little to one side of the other like a boat on a lake.

But there was nothing sinister about any of that. The strange part was that we had been boarded by darkness or something that gave off darkness. I know that sounds crazy but darkness poured into the room initially almost like a fluid, like a gas. But it didn’t behave according to gravity, that is it flowed up along the walls at times and it also didn’t seem to dare enter the whole room. The darkness would flow upwards and fill areas of the craft. The hallway outside was filled first, perhaps before we even knew what was going on. We heard sounds inside the dark, loud scraping sounds like extremely heavy metallic chairs being dragged along metal floors. The darkness was inside the room too. Everything seemed discontinuous, like different moments had been cut and pasted together. We kept losing people. They would be there one instant and entirely gone the next. We had no weapons, no way to defend ourselves but as of yet there was nothing to defend ourselves against: there was just nothing there. This was pretty much how things were for the first two parts of the dream: an evil foreboding darkness that crept ever closer with some unclear but evil purpose.

In the third part of the dream the school had changed. It was now immense but the same geometry of the rooms hadn’t changed. It was almost as if that small school I had been inside before was just a cell that had just started to grow and divide and now it was full grown. The floor didn’t move anymore so perhaps it had anchored itself on something. The hallways were much larger and the darkness no longer roamed the halls and rooms; it had grown into the structure of the school itself. The hallways were patrolled by tanks, actual armored tanks with gun turrets though they to were shaped to be overly broad on the base. In this part of the dream, there were more people, not many maybe a dozen, but they were offering absolutely no resistance to the darkness. I was trying to sneak along one of these hallways and get access to a library. I could see the room I needed to get to. It was filled floor to ceiling with actual books on shelves which felt kind of strange because everything else in this dream was so high-tech. The only thing keeping me from there was the patrolling tank that seemed to scan the halls erratically, randomly. The dream faded just as I slipped inside the library.

(Female, 40’s) I was standing washing dishes in my kitchen sink– not an unusual situation at all, unfortunately. I heard the loud zoom and roar of a car engine. I moved to the window, looking down toward the street, assuming the noise was coming from there, and suddenly this golden Porsche raced down my relatively-short driveway, going extremely fast and somewhat out of control, tires spinning in the gravel. The driver’s side of the car scraped along the side of our beautiful new garage as the driver slammed on the breaks, and the car came to an abrupt halt. I went out the backdoor of my house and approached the car, bending over to see if the driver was all right. His head lolled back and forth, like he was fighting to gain consciousness or like he was on drugs, but he didn’t appear to be hurt at all. No blood. He was glaring at me through his heavy eyelids.

I went back inside to call the police. But first I called to my son. I asked him to sneak outside and get the license plate number of the car in the yard. Then I started looking in the phone book for the phone number for the police. I thought about calling 911, but I remembered reading a public service announcement that asked us not to call 911 except for true emergencies, not for car accidents. Whatever. So I got the yellow pages and started looking for the phone number there.

Meanwhile, the driver of the golden Porsche was attempting to flee the scene of the accident. He’d turned off his car lights and was slowly backing down the driveway, careful to avoid scraping any more buildings. I went to the front door and looked around, but I couldn’t see the car any where. I asked my son if he’d gotten the license plate, but he said “No” very loudly. I felt annoyed with him — “What the heck?” Then I noticed he was winking at me– he was covering, pretending he hadn’t gotten the license number because the golden Porsche was now parked in front of our house, among all the cars parked on our street. We went inside and my son jotted down the license plate number. His handwriting was terrible and I had to ask him what the numbers were!

Then I called the police station. I was routed through a series of push-button requests and put on hold, listening to musak. Then I heard the noise of a dozen car engines, racing and zooming in my driveway. The Porsche driver had returned with a bunch of his friends and they were driving 3 cars wide into our yard, making a terrible racket with their cars and their shouts. I went to the second floor, still holding the phone to my ear with the long cord trailing behind me, and I looked out on the rutkas. I leaned out of the window to see better, and I lost my balance and fell out, a whole story down, but I didn’t get hurt. The hooligans laughed at me. One produced a pair of shears and made a show of cutting the telephone cord.

I scrambled up and ran back inside the house, locking the door behind me. Then I got my cellphone and dialed the police again. I waited patiently on hold again, musak playing in the background, wondering who was going to pay for repairing the big scrapes in my new garage.

(Male, 40’s) Now that I write down this nightmare I realize that nothing really horrific happens in it but there was a terrible sense of foreboding, like something extremely bad was just about to happen. I was at an indoor amusement park with someone else’s family - a mom, a dad, a couple really small kids. It was night time and the sense I got was that this place was open all around the clock. We were in the middle of this huge indoor plaza and we were going to take in one of the shows. The older kid, the one about 4, wandered away from us as we stood getting out bearings. He got on this escalator headed down. I scooped up the other kid, who must have been about 2 and ran down the steps to catch up with the first kid before he totally disappeared.

The escalator ride was almost entirely dark. There were sheets of black canvas hung so that they’d nearly hit your face as you descended. At the bottom was the lobby for the show. It appeared to be some kind of rather terrifying vaudeville show, a sideshow nearly a “freakshow,” not something that would be obviously appropriate for children. I decided to stall for time until the children’s parent’s arrived. They couldn’t be far behind us on the escalator.

Some kind of rather terrifying vaudeville show…

In this lobby area were booths devoted to each of the stars or attractions in the show. There was a busty blond woman in a flimsy white chemise who turned into a werewolf, supposedly at some point during the show. There was a thin man in a black suit that was a bit too big for him, as if he’s been wasting away from life on the road, who wore an immensely tall stovepipe hat. He seemed lost and badly preoccupied. The strange thing about these booths at least from a marketing perspective was that the actual stars of the show stood behind the booths. We were free to talk and interact with them. The children seemed to be rather scared of some of these performers so I started talking to the performers, joking with them, trying to make them appear OK. I don’t know if it worked. Some of the acts sounded pretty intriguing like this person who worked turning snakes into swords. We waited longer and longer. The children’s parents never appeared. Furthermore, there was no escalator that would take us up out of there. The exit must be on the other side of the show. We had to go through it all.