Posts from — April 2008

(Male, 40’s) In this nightmare, I was looking for my dog but I haven’t actually had a dog since I was a kid. It wasn’t in the house anywhere so I went outside. Our house now was on the edge of a very large park, one with mountains and pine trees instead of the suburbs that it actually is in. I yelled for my dog and then I saw it being carried in the mouth of a bear. This bear was on the edge of our backyard, just where it turned rough and started into the park. The dog, scraggy black fur, was obviously dead but I was concerned that if this bear was hungry or ornery enough to attack a dog, it wouldn’t think twice about attacking any of the people who seemed to be just standing around oblivious to the creature. I started yelling to folks to slowly move away and to get inside. There was one couple in the middle of the back yard who didn’t hear me or didn’t want to move or just didn’t understand. The man was wearing a black suit with a black bowler hat and the woman wore a full length white dress. She held a baby in her arms. I was foolishly brave and approached them. By the time I reached the couple, there was another bear within the same area, about 10 feet. These bears were large at least five feet from the ground to their backs when they walked on all fours. Their fur was long probably six to eight inches long and it was a rich golden color. It looked like honey, that same translucent color. I figured the couple were just panicking so I tried to make it easy for them. I said, “Just stand where you are and I will back away from you. I’ll get the bears to follow me.” No response from them. I started to back away, the bears followed me… and these stupid people started following me too! As I was backing up, I run into something incredibly solid which for some reason I know is yet another bear, this one much larger and more sturdy than the others. I am now literally penned in by these immense bears while two of them are sniffing toward the baby in the woman’s arms. Still this couple doesn’t seem able or willing to move. I say “Give me the child” so the woman handed me the bundle and about that time I realize that I can see through these two people, that they are actually transparent. They were ghosts. The full horror of my predicament flooded into me: I was surrounded by bears that were primed for an attack while I was carrying something like a ghostly supernatural baby. The last thing I remember is running purposefully and deliberately through a wooded area with pine branches lashing at my face. I knew I couldn’t outrun the bears but if I just moved deliberately toward the house I thought I could make it.

(Male, 30’s) My wife and I were walking into from town and we passed a tent that was set up as a vegetable stand. The canvas of the tent was printed with broad stripes, I forget what color and there were wooden crates filled to the top with odd fruits and vegetables both inside and outside of the tent. The inside of the tent seemed much larger than it could possibly have been by looking at it from the outside. There were also strange items on shelves, things that looked magical if not just new age-y like a porcelain wall-hanging that depicted something about a woman’s anatomy, perhaps the stages of development during pregnancy, perhaps some strange phrenology diagram. There was a man and a woman who tended the stand both of whom were very friendly but the man did all the talking. There was another person there who was just finishing up her shopping. The man took a 5 x 7 framed photo off the tent wall. It was a picture of a woods, a totally non-descript area of undergrowth and saplings. He explained, “There’s a place where the old Dexter Road splits. Down the wrong path is where men of a wolfish nature congregate.” I nodded like I thought I knew what he was talking about. My wife accidentally dropped something that was like a tiny porcelain bell. It rang but it didn’t break. The shop keepers didn’t seem to mind. The man was cutting into an onion, a strange onion because instead of a papery brown exterior, this had a thick mottled purple husk like the skin of a citrus fruit. He held out a sample to me balanced on the edge of his knife. The onion was sweet, onion-y but sweeter than any onion I’d ever tasted. We thanked them and went on our way to town.

When we returned from town, I wanted to buy some of those remarkable onions but we found the tent completely abandoned. The flaps of the tent were blowing in the wind and the wind chimes were sounding insanely. It had started to get dark and quite cold so we decided to drive the last part of the way home (? I know that part doesn’t make sense. Like we just had our car in our back pocket or something?) But we got a little bit lost. We were driving down a dirt road that had been torn up quite badly so we couldn’t go very fast. What was strange was that houses had been built right up to the very edge of this dirt road on both sides. There wasn’t room for a drainage ditch, let alone a front yard. The road was only wide enough to go in one direction. Then we came to the end of the road. The road dead-ended at a small woods, similar to the one in the photo. No one could tell whether it actually WAS the woods in the picture because everything was so dark by this point. I say everyone because by now there were several people in the car with us. The car had also shrunk to the point that I sat in the passenger’s seat and had to have the door open, with one leg dangling outside just to have enough room for everyone.

We started back and soon we knew that THIS was the fork of the road that the man had told us about. The houses were strange shacks and the road — maybe we have to call it a path at this point — snaked up and around the houses, back and forth, very VERY close to them. We had to get out and close the doors on some houses so we could drive past. The final section of the path actually drove THROUGH someone’s living room. We talked about what we should do but we decided we had to go through. Once we cleared the house, we got back up to speed and tried to drive as quickly as we could. Then someone said “If that was the wrong path, where were the men with wolfish nature?” Just then we felt something heavy land on the roof of the car, something that started scraping with nails hard enough to shred metal. I was scared but not for myself. For some reason, I knew that the onion the vegetable man had fed me would protect me, that it was wolfsbane or something. But I was the only person who’d eaten it. Everyone else in the car was doomed.

(Male, 30’s) In this nightmare, a friend of mine was directing a one person play and I was producing it. There was going to be one last rehearsal before the performance. There was a meeting of all the people who had done the lights and the set and that kind of thing. We all were meeting in a church, in the alcove off to the side of this incredibly large sanctuary. The sanctuary was probably a thousand feet tall and a half mile long. The ceiling was supported by these columns that were long strands of poured concrete. It almost felt organic, very beautiful, delicate and airy.

The alcove off to the side was rather dark. There were no lights. The actor was thick and brutish, with a massive jaw and heavy set eyes. His skin tone was unnatural as well, a green-ish tone. As I describe him now, he’s almost like a gargoyle. For some reason I knew that if this actor ever got the director alone, say at the rehearsal the next night, that the actor would kill the director and eat him, literally that the actor would devour the director, bones and all. The director was someone I know who’s a really carefree guy, totally oblivious to any danger and probably totally unable to deal with it if he did notice it.

I kept telling myself, reminding myself to mention it to the director my suspicion but other duties kept coming up. I had to meet with one of the ministers at the church. His office was in a curved room, shaped almost like a claw in that it started very narrow and got wider as it curved around. There was a bank of stained glass windows on the left — very modernist, colors and patterns but no figures — and a wall of bookshelves on the right — floor to ceiling, hard bound books. There was a large paper maché mask leaning against the wall at the far end of the room. The mask had bulbous cheeks and a broad contorted smile. I told him he should hang that up. He smiled like he thought that was somehow an indecent or at least impish notion.

When I went back to the alcove where the pre-rehearsal meeting was taking place, everyone was gone. I don’t know if the show went on.

(Male, 40’s) This was a nightmare just last night. In the dream, my son came to me quite terrified and said “The woman from my dream is in the basement.” My son is 22 and not scared by much so this was rather disturbing just on its own. I went to investigate.

We were in the house where I grew up. The stairs to the basement came off the kitchen. In my childhood home, there was a door and a normal set of normally sized steps leading to the basement. In this nightmare, however, there was NO door, just a gaping archway leading downward. The archway now took up at least half the room. I looked down the passage and saw just five or six steps, long steps that ran the whole length of the archway. The basement was much closer to the surface than it had been in my childhood. The steps were gray stone, like they were black marble originally but that something had rotted them and taken any firm color out of them. There was no light switch. I descended the steps without hesitation. There was still enough light coming down the stairs to see a little. The walls and the floor were bare, raw concrete. Furthermore, the floor was rotting away exposing the reinforcement bars just like in an abandoned building. There was a sub-basement in this dream and a sense that the basement snaked around curving on itself like a corkscrew going deeper and deeper. Something huge lived down there. I could get just a brief sense of it through the rotted holes in the concrete floor. It was at least ten feet by ten feet, pink and grey, glistening skin, without bone or face.

Then I became aware of the woman. She was standing just at the very most edge of where the light from above made a circle of illumination and where the deep velvety darkness obscured everything. I ran over to her and pulled her back into the light. Her blond hair was finger length, filthy and disheveled. She wore a one-piece gray jumpsuit that was also filthy. From top to bottom she was covered in a fine gray dust, like concrete dust but with the texture of finely shredded rubber. The woman was wildly insane. She kept saying something very specific about the work she did down there about art… and I know this must have been incredibly important but I just can’t remember it at all right now.

The next scene of the dream, the woman is all scrubbed up and dressed in nice clothes. She and I are sitting on the floor in a circle of high school students. One of them asks the woman “How can you tell if it’s art?”
She replied “I would never ask that question. You should listen better.” The woman then looked at me and gave me a scolding glance, like I should know better, like I was somehow responsible for the children.

(Female, 40’s) The other night I had this dream that I was riding in the back seat of a mini van with probably six other people. The person who was driving the vehicle was a colleague from work. I hadn’t been paying attention but he said to everyone “You’re sure you’re OK with this?” Everyone agreed. He had evidently asked if he could take us on a “little ride.” The next thing I knew the minivan was careening down the stands of a stadium. It was a very deep and steep brick stadium, far deeper than the big one at the University. We were picking up speed as we bounced over the seats. The person next to me yelled “We’re all going to die!” Everyone else was screaming. Except for the guy that was driving. He had a very amused smile on his face but I didn’t know if that meant he wasn’t worried or if he was just crazy. I decided that whatever was going to happen, the best thing for me to do was to close my eyes and just not worry about it. We finally reached the field at the bottom of the stadium and we crashed into these very large wooden blocks. The driver shouted “Yes! We gotta good score!” Come to find out this was all some adrenaline-junky game. We drove back up the side of the stadium where there was a small camp of other adrenaline junkies who were just waiting for their next run. Though this all sort of ties up nicely, at the bottom of the stadium on the field near the big wooden blocks was a daycare for severely impaired children. There was the sense that it was all OK because they weren’t mobile enough to climb on top of the wooden barricades. That was the part of the dream that stayed unsettling, that kept me disturbed all day.