(Female) I’m afraid this dream won’t make any sense or that you won’t find it scary at all. It was frightening to me, the person having the dream, so I think it qualifies as a scary dream, because I felt like maybe I was losing my mind. So if it’s not a scary dream, at least it’s a weird dream.
I was meeting my best friend at a retreat centre of some sort out in the country. She was there for a meeting of some organization of which she’s a board member, and so I came to see her and spend some time with her after her sessions were done—something that we’ve actually done several times in real life. I was so very excited to get together because she lives very far away hence our real life meetings are far between.
We were staying in a little two room cabin, sort of rustic and woodsy. The place had a sort of Japanese style, with few furnishings and wooden cabinets, a very peaceful Zen atmosphere. She came into the room, and we hugged and greeted each other and talked about our lives and our families. It was so nice to see her again and so cozy in the cabin. We were going to have a good time.
…I’m afraid this dream won’t make any sense or that you won’t find it scary at all…
Then we were going to go out, I think, to dinner so we started to get ready. She got her shoes and her jacket and stepped out on to the porch to wait for me to come outside. I went to the closet where I’d left my coat and shoes, and I took my coat off a hangar and put it on. Then I slipped my foot into one of my shoes, but I couldn’t see the other one. I looked around in the closet, which was basically empty, but my shoe wasn’t there. It wasn’t like my closet a home that’s full of stuff so a shoe could be hiding under something else. No, this closet was basically empty but I still couldn’t find my other shoe. Still, I looked from one end of the long narrow closet to the other and back again, because, after all, where could my other shoe be?
Wearing just the one shoe, I limped out to the other room and threw open the closet doors there. There were shoes in the bottom of this closet, maybe a dozen, left behind by previous guests, I suppose, but my shoe wasn’t there. There were a lot of single shoes in fact which seemed like a strange situation. I rummaged around and found a shoe that would fit me, but it didn’t match my other shoe at all and it had no mate. I couldn’t go out to dinner wearing two different shoes! I was starting to panic—what was I going to do? How could I have lost a shoe in a closet?
I started back into the bedroom because I was certain my shoe was in there, but I couldn’t find the door. It was a two-room cabin– How could I get lost? How could I not find a door in a two room cabin? I could feel myself getting more and more panicked, and a blush of shame spreading across my cheeks. What was going on? Was I going insane, or was the cabin trying to confuse me? I turned around slowly, three or four times, studying each of the walls, looking for the door. Oh, there was the right door over there. I went back into the bedroom and opened the closet. There were different things objects inside the closet now, a set of folding chairs that hadn’t been there before. But still not my shoe.
My friend was outside on the deck, talking on a cellphone and waiting patiently for me. She waved at me through the window, unworried and unaware of my trauma. I turned toward the closet again and got down on my hands and knees, and systematically began to search through the almost empty closet once again. I started at one end and moved to the other, looking at each item on the floor of the closet, and then going back to the other end again. Over and over, I kept looking for my missing shoe until I woke up.