“…I was alone. Alone with them…”
I’m still shivering as I write this and my heart is still racing.
It was a Christmas party at an aunt and uncle’s house. Two of my favorite people, I might add. This wasn’t their actual house, though. Rather it was the house of a piano teacher I had back in high school. It’s a little strange that this was clearly a Christmas party with a Christmas tree and everything when it’s not the Christmas season now.
I lit some candles and when I looked up, everyone was gone. The party was over. I had come to the party with my partner but now, all of a sudden, I was a child. The person who was my partner – or who maybe was just playing my partner – had become my mother. She was asleep on the couch in another room, all bundled up like she intended to sleep there all night. My grandmother was asleep on yet another couch in a room farther back, a much darker room. Both my mother and grandmother are dead, by the way.
When I went back into the front room, the people who were playing my aunt and uncle – because by this point it was very clear it was not really them – they were standing by the door saying goodbye to guests.
I was alone. Alone with them.
The man who wasn’t my uncle just lurked, silently. The man who was pretending to be my aunt had greasy gray hair. He said “You won’t like staying here with us.” I tried to play along, tried to pretend that I hadn’t seen through their disguise. I said “Why wouldn’t I like to stay with my aunt and uncle?”
“Because we might kill boys from the neighborhood and make you eat their parts.” There was a ghastly threat of both bizarre sex and cannibalism in what he said.
That was enough for me. I rushed over to the Christmas tree and I threw it at them. The tree had those old-fashioned light bulbs and several of them smashed. I knew I had to kill these evil men before they killed me or did even worse things to me. I wrapped them up in the strings of lights while they struggled to get their balance. I stuck one of their fingers in a socket of the broken bulb. They lit on fire and started to howl. But I wasn’t completely certain if they were actually in pain, or if it all was an act.
Then they changed into children, twins, maybe 2 or 3 with curly golden hair. For some reason they reminded me of the son of a friend of mine – this friend has been dead for over a decade. The twins started a temper tantrum as the flames grew around them and the Christmas lights continued to arc.
I went to the other room to wake my mother. In the dream, I started to have the sense already that my grandmother in the back room might actually be dead. I helped my mother up off the couch and out past the two tiny monsters. Except at this point, they looked like children. I took pity on them. For some reason, I though that electrocuting them and setting them on fire might have taught them a lesson and that they might have returned to being normal people again – which sounds pretty funny writing down.
I unwound the strings of lights Then the twins stopped crying – were they faking all along? – and started dancing something that seemed like an Irish jig. It was like they were leprechauns or something. I tried to get mother out of the front door to safety but as we reached the door, I realized that this had only been someone or something pretending to be my mother. It was a large muscular creature – another one of these monsters in a different form.
It tried to pick me up and throw me out into the snow – which in the dream would kill me for some reason. Maybe I’d freeze to death? However, I was able to wrap my arm around the creature’s neck and get it in some kind of a head lock.
Maybe this big and terrible thing might eventually win, but I wasn’t going out without a fight. I woke myself up actually flipping myself over in bed. I’d kicked off off the covers and I was freezing.