“… if the folks there didn’t like you, you just might disappear….”

(Male, 50′s) I had a nightmare last night that was really unnerving in addition to having a couple really scary moments. I was riding around with my Dad. My Dad has been dead incidentally for a good 20 years. We were trying to get an old radio or something that belonged to him from someone in this dangerously small town. It was dangerously small because there was a real sense that if the folks there didn’t like you, you just might disappear. Like the gasoline in our car seemed to disappear, like it had been siphoned away and there of course were no gas stations in this town. And the vehicle we were driving kept getting parked in. You know, there would be someone parked at either end of it so we couldn’t get out. We ended up taking the radio which was immense. It was easily three foot by three foot by four foot tall. We strapped the radio on top of a scooter / three wheel motorcycle thing and headed out of town. I was riding on TOP on the radio. I told Dad that I really hoped he wasn’t planning on driving on any expressways. Even when we turned corners on the side streets, we’ve leaned like we were going to tip over. There were some scary moments on that ride. I just had to relax and hold on.

We drove through this industrial wasteland, factories that were shut down and rusting. Windows grey and smashed out. It was an urban hell. Finally we arrived at my grandmother’s house. My grandmother also has been dead for upwards of 30 years. She did used to live in a pretty run down and decrepit part of an urban factory town. In the dream she was dead but her house still lived on, so to speak. It was much larger than I remembered it and I mean the ceilings of the rooms were easily twenty foot tall. It was still filled with furniture. I asked Dad what he had wanted with the radio for, why we had to go to all that effort to retrieve something that we was just going to deliver to a house where no body lives. He didn’t reply at all and that was strange because in life at least he was a rather talkative person. I could tell that this was something big but hard to put into words, something like honor or the “principle of the thing.”

“…It moved silently so it would sometimes just walk into the room on those silent, deadly cat feet and it would start tracking….”

The scariest parts of the dream happened inside Grandmother’s house because it was haunted not by a ghost but by a panther. The panther was large, half way between the size of a real panther and a velociraptor. It only seemed to be able to see movement and even that movement it could see best from the corner of its eyes. The beast was also almost entirely deaf. It moved very quietly so it would sometimes just walk into the room on those silent, deadly cat feet and it would start tracking. Once it was right on top of me snuffling at the soft inner parts of my throat. One bite and I would have died immediately in a spray of blood. I threw something and distracted it enough that the creature moved away. It also got very interested in an empty plastic bag that was being blown around by the wind. Another time though this blood thirsty monster came up right between my legs and started to sniff at my crotch. It growled low. I figured that I could probably survive if the monster bit off my penis if I didn’t bleed to death before help could arrive. –where was the nearest hospital in the urban wasteland?– but all things being equal, I would rather keep all my parts attached. When it wandered away, I yelled at my Dad. “Why is that thing still here? Why didn’t you call a professional exterminator or something to get rid of it?” Again, Dad was silent like I was missing some very obvious point.

I wish this retailer had an affiliate program because this is a product I can really stand behind: an electronic ghost repellant.

Ghost Repellant

Rest assured that this device uses complicated electronics, ones that can distinguish good spirits from bad spirits — which is good because you wouldn’t want it accidentally emptying your liquor cabinet, right?

I’m intrigued by the whole relationship between ghosts and technology. For awhile, there were many reports of “phone calls from the dead” which perhaps says much about how mysterious telephones were to some folks. Demons require exorcisms but ghosts… they can be dispelled with transistors. It reminds me a bit too much of a certain electronic mosquito repellant I saw at a friend’s house last summer.

(Female, 80′s) I’ve been on some pretty serious medication recently. The injections just make me feel so light, like I’m floating. It takes a couple days until I come back to myself.

I tried to tell her I wasn’t dead

In this dream, I was laying in my recliner, rocking back and forth. Since I got sick I have been sleeping in my recliner because it’s easier for me to get up out of it than out of a bed. I gradually realized that I could hear voices. The voices were loud enough that I could make out what they were saying. I was very curious. One of the voices was one of the preachers from my church. She was talking about someone who had passed away. “She was just sitting there rocking away in her recliner.” I felt sorry for this person and then I realized that the preacher was talking about me. I tried to speak, tried to tell her I wasn’t dead but I wasn’t in my recliner anymore. I was floating up by the ceiling. There was nothing I could do. I felt so powerless.

(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) 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.”

(Male) I was in prison but a weird prison, an ancient European kind of prison, dark, inhumane. It was a tower that was partially submerged in the ground. Prisoners entered through the top, through a door in the roof and walked down a spiral staircase to their cell. The cells were all wedge-shaped because the tower itself was circular. The walls were stone, thick, dirty stone with a very small window slot cut about eye level that let in air. The place must have been built when people were shorter because my head grazed the ceiling of my cell.

But none of this was the really terrifying. There were no other prisoners, at least none that I could see but as I walked down the stairs I heard the sounds of others in the cells. Furthermore, the cells didn’t lock at least not at night. This was to allow prisoners a chance to shuffle down to the very bottom of the prison to where the bathroom was. As I descended there, I found it harder and harder to breathe. There were no windows because this floor was underground. Down there was also the warden’s office, a thick wooden door with the word “Comando” carved in it. The sense very much was if you offended the other prisoners then they would be the ones who punished you. I told myself never to use the washrooms in the middle of the night but even then I realized that nothing would stop the other prisoners – who let’s face it were ghosts – that nothing would stop them from coming into my cell whenever they wanted and brutalizing me however they wished.