“…everything was shut off. We weren’t supposed to be there…”
(Female, 40’s) I was reading some of the nightmares on your site and a couple of them reminded me of this dream I had recently.
The nightmare took place in the house where I grew up. I haven’t even seen this house in a decade. I was there with my daughter. She was a child of grade school age in the dream even though she’s grown up and on her own now. The house was a mess. Most of the furniture had been moved out but there were still lots of small items — memorabilia, junk, souvenirs, decorations, pages, photos… It would take hours and hours, probably days to clean it all out.
It was getting dark. I expected my partner to meet me here but she never showed up. Our daughter and I had just looked in the bed room. For some reason, I thought the power would still be turned on, that Mom’s old TV would still be there, that maybe we could watch a couple hours of her cable. I should mention that we don’t own a TV in our real-life house.
But of course everything was shut off. We weren’t supposed to be there. Not just because my Mom didn’t live there any more – or for that matter because my Mom is dead. We were trespassing and it felt like we were trespassing on a cosmic scale.
I looked through the house quickly. Down the staircase from the kitchen to the basement, I saw a crack of light around the door. We weren’t alone. We were in danger. I tried not to panic, tried to act calmly but with purpose. I kept my daughter distracted while we made our way to the driveway where I’d left the car. Incidentally, the car we’d been driving was the car that used to belong to my mother – a black station wagon.
We made it to the driveway and my heart sank. The car was gone. We were trapped.
Then I realized that the car had just been moved. But who else had keys? The person standing next to the driver’s side wore my Mom’s yellow windbreaker, wore glasses like my mother and like my mother had red hair.
But it wasn’t my mother. She had an aura of quiet foreboding. I didn’t recognize this person who was preventing our escape.