Author: The Grim Gnome

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #90 – Outlaw Biker

(Male) It was twilight, nearly dark and my wife and I were digging up the last few roots of a tree in the yard of the house where I grew up. The roots were thick and pale, more like horseradish roots than that of a tree. A helicopter flew over head slowly as if it was inspecting was we were doing. I ran up to hide under the porch. I think it didn’t see me. My heart was pounding.

…These folks definitely had the death’s head insignia of the Angels. The sound of their bikes shook my heart and belly like a good Harley does…

Later, camping with my family, one of the entertainments offered is medieval re-enactments. I’m to be shown how to shoot a bow and arrow. The bows come in two pieces, both long, spindly sticks that will be held together somehow by one hand while the other hand draws the string. I get what I think are two parts of the same bow, some arrows and join the others standing in the yard. Just then a motorcycle rumbled by and somehow it is PULLING a van. The van is like a commercial delivery van and it’s obvious the guy had stolen it for the tools that are kept inside. Someone mentions that it was a Hell’s Angel but I didn’t see the guy’s jacket. A moment later, several police cars and a low flying helicopter scream down the same dirt road obviously in pursuit. Then several people desert the re-enactment, hop on their bikes and zoom off down the road. These folks definitely had the death’s head insignia of the Angels. The sound of their bikes shook my heart and belly like a good Harley does.

We left the park ground to visit my dad who was an elderly widower. (Oddly enough in waking life, it’s my Mom who’s been a widow now for nearly 20 years) He was older and slower than I remember him, thinner too and paler. He lived alone in this very small brick house. Dad seemed more interested in listening to a baseball game on the radio than in talking with us, even about the possible danger. He lived near the park and I was afraid for him given that there was an outlaw biker on the loose, one made desperate by police pursuit. My plan was to sit around at his house until the guy was caught. But the police helicopters were swarming overhead which suggested the suspect was somewhere really close by. I didn’t want to worry Dad but I wanted him safe too. I tried to check around a little in the backyard but I just kept finding more and more places where someone could hide and escape detection. I gave up and started checking the front yard. Then I realized that I’d left the car unlocked and for that matter that one of the kids had left the back door wide open. The guy could be in my very car. Or under my car waiting to slash my ankles with a knife at that very moment. My heart was hammering inside my chest. I think that’s what woke me up because it still was beating heavily as I lay there in the dark.

When I went back to sleep, I continued the dream, sort of. Somehow we got home to a neighborhood of extremely small houses, like trailer homes made of brick, tidy, compact. There was no grass on the yards, only dirt. There were very few cars but in front of each was at least one shiny Harley Davidson motorcycle. They ran the gamut from Sportsters to Electra Glides, very old ones to new ones, all very well kept, nothing overly fancy or customized, just honest working bikes. These were what folks road to work. And I was stuck riding down the street on the same bicycle I had as a kid with the banana seat and ape hanger handle bars. I wonder whatever happened to the guy with the delivery van?

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Nightmares

Nightmare #89 Murder Art

I was walking through a suburb very much like the one where I grew up except at the edge of a cluster of houses instead of a woods, there was a wide expanse of water, possibly an ocean, possibly just a Great Lake. Leading up to the water was a long flat sandy beach and on this beach were houses just like those of the suburb though much farther apart. From one of the houses, I heard cries, then screams. Someone was being beaten, then murdered. I recognized the assailants but since there were three of them and only one of me I didn’t intervene.

Later, I was at a small bookstore, so small it was the living room of a house. They were having an art exhibit and when I looked at the names of the artists, I recognized them as the three young men who had killed that person. Evidently everyone seemed to know that they were guilty, but that no one seemed to care too much beyond the fame it brought them. The artworks weren’t extremely compelling, though they used some materials in slightly novel ways. One of the artists for instance seemed to paint with melted wax crayon and to paint inside old cooking pans. Interesting perhaps but his brushwork and composition were barely competent. The bookstore owner noticed my attention and said the artists themselves would be stopping by later. It was as if he didn’t know how dangerous these young men were. I was afraid and I left.

I was walking home from the exhibit, angry and scared, through the suburb I grew up in, in fact just a block or two from the house where I lived. I passed a liquor store and two men started following me. They were twins, slender, brown-grey, in ragged suits with crumpled hats. They talked as if they were drunk, or more precisely as if they were pretending to be drunk. They were following me rather closely. I tried to let the pass but they jumped me instead. One held me while the other kicked and hit me. It wasn’t like they wanted to rob me, just to beat me to death. I struggled and broke free but they chased me. I ran up to the house of a neighbor. Oddly enough, I didn’t try to run to the house where I once had lived. No one came to the door. I woke when the men reached the porch where I was standing.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #88 Ghostly Inspection

I was in a tiny bedroom. It felt like a second story bedroom, the kind just under the roof in an old house where the ceiling slants inward to make the room feel even smaller. It was poorly lit, possible near night. I was packing up an old satchel for a journey. The satchel was one of those old leather bags like doctors might carry in the olden days. It was sitting on the bed. Every time I turned around to get something else to put into the satchel, when I turned back whatever I had just put into it had been taken out and placed next to the satchel on the bed. It was both irritating and pretty creepy.

At this point, somehow I was able be inside the dream and also look at myself in the dream. From this vantage point I realized that there were also two other people in the room with me. These men were dressed in boring brown suits. They were some kind of police men, some kind of detectives, I guess. They chatted aimlessly about the personal life of one of them while they picked up and examined every item. They weren’t particularly interested in the items nor were they doing a particularly careful job of examining things. They had been cloaked somehow with some kind of technology that allowed them to be in the same room as someone even to talk in a normal voice without that person seeing or hearing them.

Not only were these two fat detectives in this tiny, private bedroom the door posts were these weird sculptures. They were a roiling mass of snake-like forearms and hands. They were able to reach out and grab at you if you tried to go through the door. One of the hands had been painted gold and for some reason, that one was the most terrifying of them all.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #87 – Zombie Potluck

…”We were living in this sprawling country farmhouse and had invited the neighbors and basically everyone we knew who were still alive for a potluck.”

Continue reading “Nightmare #87 – Zombie Potluck”
Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #86 Ressurection Virus

zombies
I dreamed about what I guess was a virus or something. It would affect people without any warning. One minute the person would be fine and the next, horribly afflicted. The symptoms were horrific and disgusting. The sufferer’s skin would break out in huge sores that would pop like bubbles on the surface of boiling water. Literally, the skin would turn liquid and the person would dissolve in front of your eyes. The whole course of the virus took only a couple minutes so you could very easily watch someone melt away while you were, say, standing side by side, waiting for an elevator. The most horrible part came next, though. Within a couple more moments, the sufferer would be reconstituted, better than before, even their clothes would be cleaner as if the virus used every bit of matter even the dirt when building its monster. I say monster because this beautiful creature that appeared resembled the person but it would attack and devour whoever was standing closest to them, all with this wide, terrifying grin.

I witnessed this transformation at a wedding. It must have been in the early days of the outbreak because people didn’t know enough to avoid crowds. The virus struck the father of the bride. One moment he was standing at the altar with this daughter, the next he was a puddle of goop on the floor and the next he was radiantly dressed in a glowing white suit, his gray hair now slightly tinged with yellow blond. He reached out into the audience and grabbed someone at random whom he started to rend to pieces and devour.

We didn’t know how the virus spread but we knew it was susceptible to microwaves of a very specific frequency. I had a small, hand-held device that would neutralize all the of the virus within my general proximity. The hypothesis was that we might be able to kill the virus in the resurrected person and that the person might be OK, maybe a little messed up in the head after what they’re been up to but physically OK. This was an untested hypothesis though. I was sent in to the place where the wedding had been, or maybe it was just where an outbreak had occurred. There were still pockets of the crowds huddled around the grounds of the hotel, maybe a very glamorous church. I located the area where the target was. It was up a soaring flight of stairs that had no railing and that opened into the very spacious entry area of this hotel. Sunlight streamed in the plate glass windows that ran from the floor up several stories. I carefully walked up the stairs. At the top of the stairs were two preachers I knew years and years ago. They had their arms reached out in blessing. They spoke to me as if I would be doing some kind of exorcism when all I really was going to do was a scientific test. A test that would result in me being torn apart and eaten if it didn’t work. But the gist of what they were saying was that it would be the patient’s choice to get better and if it didn’t work, I shouldn’t blame myself.

Then I saw the creature coming around the corner through a pair of open double doors. It wasn’t the father of the bride I had seen before, it was actually a woman I knew. She looked statuesque, immense, regal like some of the portraits of Queen Victoria I’ve seen. But instead of a sceptre she held a tiny baby, her daughter even though her actual daughter is much older. She seemed to float instead of walk which was particularly uncanny for how large she looked.

She approached. I didn’t know what to do.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #84 Bees and Spiders…and Nazis?

I was at a summer camp area for grown ups with those typical uninsulated, wooden cabins and a large meeting building that had lots of windows. The person in charge of the camp raised bees, normal, safe, honey-producing bees. They seemed almost domesticated, peaceful. But there was some kind of threat from up the road, or further out in the county from more violent, invasive bees. The person in charge of the camp could tell this somehow by a little crust of honeycomb he found on one of the paths. The bees knew there was something up too since they all took to flight and there was a very loud and intense buzzing sound everywhere. We all gathered in the meeting hall – probably two dozen men and women – and kept looking up the road for the invasion to happen. But I looked behind us, to the garden area where I saw these huge spiders advancing on us in huge hops. The spiders were probably two meters across with hairy arms striped black and a vivid yellow green. I yelled to alert our troops but the spiders had already started to spray our building with web. But either it was a strange kind of web or it dissolved when it contacted the honey because the webs dissolved and the liquid poured down the windows, trapping the dead soldiers in a clear wall of something that felt like liquid glass. As it hardened, this glass-like substance gave off fumes that sort of drove people crazy. Everyone who had survived stripped off all their clothes and started running around naked, yelling with great excitement about the important things they were going to do with their lives, now that they’d survived this attack. One by one, they ran out of the building, which I didn’t think was a good idea mostly because I wasn’t certain that the battle was over. Then a marrionette entered from the back of the building, from the door where the survivors had exited. He was probably three feet tall and was dressed like an SS Nazi field officer. I knew that couldn’t be good so I jumped on him and easily over-powered him (killed him? Can you really kill a marionette?) Just inside his jacket I found a folded up piece of heavy paper that had the invasion plans. But before I could open it up, I woke.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #79 – Hungry Ghosts

(Male) I’m embarrassed to try to explain this nightmare since it sounds so wiggy but I have to tell you that I woke up in the middle of the night too scared even to turn on the light! I was at my Grandmother’s house which still had to be straightened up and sold, which is a little strange because she’s been dead for 20 years now. The house was never in the greatest part of town and in the dream at least, it seems to have gotten worse over time.

…It was near midnight and we were also waiting for a friend of mine to arrive…

It was near midnight and we were also waiting for a friend of mine to arrive. He was passing through town and needed a place to stay just for that night. We wanted to keep the front door open so we could see him when he arrived but we didn’t want to leave it all unlocked. Around midnight a car pulled up across the street and this very tall man gets out and walks up to my grandmother’s porch. I say “Craig, I’m so glad you found the place. Sorry I forgot to leave the porch light on. Come on in.” The man enters and said something about “We knew right where to look.” I noticed that the car across the street hadn’t pulled away yet.

But that all became of second importance when I remembered that one of the reasons we hadn’t cleaned out my Grandmother’s house was that it was haunted. I didn’t want the ghost to embarrass me in front of my friend so I started to say a prayer — in my dream, the ghost was very pious and obeyed God — and in the middle of my prayer, the ghost started talking to me, trying to interrupt me. It even told me its name which it just said over and over and over (and which I have forgotten now that I’m awake.) I became immediately afraid for a daughter I had in the dream. I actually have a daughter who is much older but in the dream my daughter was only 9 years old and peacefully asleep in an upstairs room. I was afraid that the ghost would hurt her even more than I was afraid that the man I had let in the house wasn’t my friend at all. When I got upstairs, I discovered the place crawling with creatures who liked to eat human flesh. They were very calm about it. They strolled through the rooms looking at the furnishing like they were window shopping at a store while they casually talked about their favorite ways to cook people. They didn’t seem to recognize that I was a human yet so I thought I could slip amongst them and get to my daughter’s room. But as I passed close enough to a pair of them, the squirted some kind of poison in my mouth. As I collapsed, I heard them say “And you’re the kind we like to roast.”

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Nightmares

Nightmare #83 The Sick Scavenger Hunt and The Fall-Apart Car

I was doing this scavenger hunt with a couple friends, though the clues seemed particularly demented and sick. The whole plot of the scavenger hunt was that we were looking for a child that had been kidnapped by a serial killer which even inside the dream seemed a little tasteless as a premise for a scavenger hunt. There were ransom notes written in crayon in a child’s hand that we had to decipher, etc.

There were three of us on our team. We each drove our own cars for some reason which seemed stupid to me because that just meant we could get lost. My car was the strangest thing but in the dream, it was normal. The car came in two parts, the front half had the motor and the steering wheel and foot pedals, and the back half started with the front seat. The way it worked was that the driver would get in, lift his feet and grab the steering wheel and pull until the two halves clicked together. We were in a hurry, I guess, because when I tried to fasten my car together, it didn’t quite click. There was a wide gap between the sections. When I got on the expressway, snow started to blow inside the car, mounds of snow that drifted up on the dashboard making it difficult to see. I turned on the heater to melt it which helped a little. Then I realized that the car really was not fastened together at all, that if I let go of the steering wheel the motored part would shoot off down the road out of control and the passenger section would smash into the car behind me. I drove along trying to keep up with the others because I was in an unfamiliar town but eventually I got lost and had to maneuver the car into a parking structure.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #82 Train and Typing

This dream just started strange but got scary.

I was at a farm that belongs to one of my relatives. It was twilight but I was still playing catch out back of the farmhouse with someone. A train went by remarkably close to the farm. Inside the train were passengers and they were all sitting like they were on a subway car more than like they were on a train. Through the windows of the train I was able to recognize one of the passengers. He was a long-time friend of my dad’s. His car whizzed by and I looked inside another car. This friend of my dad was in that car too. This happened again and again while the train passed. There were probably a dozen instances of my dad’s friend in that train. By the time the train passed by, it was fully dark, that deep black kind of in the country dark. I was alone. I ran alongside a row of bushes in this pitch blackness. I knew where I was and that soon I’d be near the house but I tripped over something and landed in a gravel path.

I woke up. This was such a strange dream that I started to write it down so I could remember it in the morning. Except as I wrote it down, as soon as my cursor moved away from the words it had typed, the words started to change. It was sort of like that annoying feature on Microsoft Word that automatically corrects your words but this had some kind of intelligence. It changed my writing to the present tense and started to describe how I was being stalked by a creature that wanted to tear me apart. I kept typing and it kept correcting me until the final words were “Look behind you.” I kept trying to wake up for real.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #81 – Ghost + Cat

I was in someone else’s house, a bright modern style house, on the second story in the bedroom the owners were letting me stay in. I became aware of the fact, somehow, that there was ghost lurking behind this small, gold painted door in the wall. The door was probably no bigger than 9″ or 10″ but it opened up into another full-sized room. I couldn’t resist opening the door and taking a peek. That’s how I learned both about the ghost and the full-sized room. I quickly closed the door and said some kind of prayer that God would keep the ghost on the other side of the door. It made perfect sense in the dream.

But then I realized that the family’s housecat had snuck into the room while I had the door open. I had to come up with a way to open the door, lure the cat out and keep the ghost locked away. At that point the dream became less a nightmare and more an anxiety dream, one verging on slapstick.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #80 – Doll of Death

(Male, 30’s) The other night I dreamt about a doll, maybe 18 inches tall with the proportions of a baby. It was heavy for a toy and the surface of it’s skin felt like dirt, like soil with a high content of clay. The doll fell like it could have been made out of earth but it was solid like a like any other doll. It’s face was a cheery smile but it’s color, both of its fleshtone and its clothes were ashen grey. It was a doll that somehow represented death. Maybe it actually was death.

Its clothing was distinctive as well. Grey corduroy over-alls with a small satchel that it carried around its neck. The satchel represented a traditional item worn my people in my family (in the dream) an item that we received when we joined the family. The satchel is supposed to contain a few handfuls of seeds, some special variety of grain that the family had perfected over the centuries, I think it was a kind of rye that grows in particularly rocky terrain at particularly high altitudes. (I should mention that I don’t really come from such a family!) I think the idea here was that if you had that satchel, you’d never go hungry because you could always grow your crops again.

But the doll was dead. Somehow it had been allowed to die, as if dolls can die. I looked into the satchel and it only had lint and a few hardened clumps of something. There didn’t appear to be any seeds left.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #77 — Shuffled Computer

(Female, early 40’s) My partner and I were visiting a friend of mine and her girl friend in Chicago. We went out to this strange restaurant that had a menu as thick as a phone book and it was all arranged by, for instance, the cut of meat that would be used. When the waiter took the order, he said something like “I shall do my utmost to insure your satisfaction” or something hokey like that, like that phrase was the tagline for the restaurant, something that all the waiters said.

At some point during the meal, I tried to open my laptop computer and I discovered that all of the screws holding it together had disappeared. What’s particularly weird is that the computer started to fall apart like a huge deck of cards, y’know, like a stack of computer chips and the case and the screen all sliding around. For some reason I thought the monitor might explode and even worse, I didn’t want my partner to know that the computer was falling apart. The laptop is where I have all my doctoral research stored and since my partner is the “computer-person” in our relationship I didn’t want this little mishap to spoil dinner.

So I went to the bathroom and there was a tiny, kid sized toy washbasin with an old-fashioned water pump that was bright blue, red and yellow. I decided to hide my computer in the cabinet underneath because I thought no one would ever find it there.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #76 – Sucker Bats

(Male, early 30’s) I don’t know if this is exactly a nightmare but it was really annoying. I was outside trying to cross this yard to someone’s house and there were all of these huge bats swarming around trying to attack me. Their wingspan was probably three feet across and they were covered in short, dark colored hair. And the weirdest thing about them is that their entire face was one big suction cup. Somehow I knew that they wanted to affix that suction cup right over my face and then drain out my vital fluids. I kept swatting them away and that seemed to be good enough to keep them out of my face. In the dream, I didn’t get to the house but then I didn’t get the life sucked out of me either.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #75 – Snakes and Straw

tentacles
(Male) I had my own farm which is something I’ve wanted for most of my life. I was just out wandering through the fields when I came across a gray tarp. Underneath the tarp were eggs that were white and roughly the size of watermelons. I thought to myself “This can’t be good” and I thought for a second about smashing them. They were so large they looked like dinosaur eggs. However, before I could act, one of them hatched and hundred of tiny snakes came out. They weren’t much larger than earthworms but they were black and there were hundreds of them, maybe a thousand or so. I knew they weren’t good.

I retreated to an outbuilding. It wasn’t quite big enough to call a barn but it had bales of straw all stacked up. The snakes followed me which was my plan. I took down a hunting bow and nocked a piece of straw in it and sent it sailing off into the mass of snakes. I skewered one right through the skull like I was an archery pro. In fact, in the dream, I think I was supposed to be an archery pro. I kept shooting off pieces of straw that kept killing the snakes, one by one. The area in front of the barn looked like a weird patch of grass because there were all those tiny snakes in their death throes struck through the head with pieces of straw. The straw stuck up straight and waved gently back and forth like it was blowing in the wind.

Though it was impressive and though I was able to shoot just about every second, it became evident that the whole strategy was flawed. If I kept killing them only one at a time, I wouldn’t be able to kill enough of them fast enough to keep them from over running me. The mass of snakes kept advancing, closer and closer.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #72 – Disposable Children

(Female, middle-aged) It was so scary and so sad. The dream was one of those visions where I could only see things; I couldn’t interact or stop them.

…I couldn’t stop them…

There was a woman, blond, slender, relatively young. She had five small children of different ages. She wanted to go out or do something that wouldn’t have been possible with them so she handed them each a clear plastic bag and told them to crawl inside. The children were all very obedient and they did as they were told even though a couple of them said they were scared and started to cry. She told them they could poke a little hole in the bag but not too big. It was clear she wanted them all to suffocate.

Then the dream just faded.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #71 – Snakes and Chain Fence

(Male) Two chain link fences ran up and down this green yard. They were only probably 6 to 8 inches apart. My conscious mind figures that there must have been a property dispute. The owner on one side erected a fence where he thought the boundary was and the owner on the other side did the same. Trouble was, a nest of snakes had taken up living in this “no one’s land” between the fences.

They were relatively small snakes like garter snakes, black and there seemed to be dozens of them. For some reason I thought these were the young and that there must be larger adults still hiding in the nest. But I just didn’t know exactly where the nest was. It was my job to kill them all though. Someone considered them a deadly pest.

I climbed the fenced and eased my way down between the fences. It was extremely tight. I was wearing my steel toed boots which are a little larger than my street shoes so I had to splay my feet out to fit in the narrow area. And I started stepping on snakes. I crushed their heads with the heel or the toe of my boot. I’d kill a couple with my right foot and a couple with my left foot.

And then I lost my balance. I fell over between the fences and got myself wedged in there pretty well. I was wearing cloth gloves so they weren’t going to give me any protection. And I started to panic because I couldn’t get myself back up to a standing position and I was finding it hard to breathe as well. Just then I looked down and saw an opening in the grass. I had fallen directly on top of the snake’s nest. Inside it were two huge snakes at least as big around as my wrist with heads the size of my fist. I started to yell but I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare # 70 – The Crime Scene

(Male, 40’s) This dream had the feel of a film noir, especially the whole sense of “what have I gotten myself into now?”

I was going through some papers that I think my father left and I discovered a file cabinet full of what appeared to be quite rare stamps. I called someone who worked with my dad who happened to be a stamp expert and he came over to evaluate them.

Next thing I knew, this expert had called someone in to help him. They were bent over this one page from a stamp album. Neither man wanted to say definitely whether the stamps were authentic or fakes.

They came across an address of an office nearby. I said that I’d check out the office because I couldn’t be any help with the stamps. My wife and I went to check out the mysterious address. It was in a college, an old European kind of college where all the buildings look like churches with carved stonework and soaring arches. When we found the office itself, the door was locked but we could see through the windows that it had been ransacked. We tried another door along the side and it was unlocked. We let ourselves into the office where we discovered it wasn’t only ransacked, it had been a crime scene. There was blood caked into the furniture and the walls. Papers were strewn along the floor. And the weirdest detail was that a small, disposable camera hung from the ceiling strung from twine. I took this all in at a glance and I knew I had to call the police. I found a phone in the office and dialed 911. A voice answered that said “This 826-4531 how can I help you?” I asked if this wasn’t the police and the voice said that it was the police but that they were doing some remodeling and he didn’t want to confuse people. I told him that he might want to say that it was the police or 911 or something instead. I started trying to explain what I saw and where I was but I had lost the slip of paper with the address. I tried to describe the crime scene and the buildings in the area. Then I asked why they needed me to tell them all that, couldn’t they just trace the call. The voice said of course they’d already traced the call and he was just trying to keep me on the line until the police arrived to arrest me. I tried to explain again that I was just discovering this scene when a man arrived, highly distraught. He looked vaguely like an undergraduate humanities professor I’d had. His blond hair was wind-blown and his jacket — a dreadful wide plaid of pastel colors — was disheveled. He ran toward me saying “No, no” And that’s when I woke up!

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Nightmares

Nightmare #69 – Unexpected Embalming

(Male) I had this one just last night. I woke up with tears in my eyes.

Two of my friends came along with me as I stopped at a funeral parlor for some errand. We went into a moderately large room where the funeral director was. He said my friends could look around while we did business and he told me to sit down. My friends looked at one of the coffins but it already had someone in it. They joked with the director “You do good work” which was a joke because the guy in the coffin was horribly burned on one side of his face. The director explained “He was in a terrible car crash.”

The director got down to business with me. “Have you considered the funeral?”

“Oh, yes I consider them very important. It’s like my chance to say good bye to everyone. And I’d like to plan it in more detail but not now of course.

“Of course.” He replied.

“I mean there’ll be plenty of time for that.”

He had wheeled over a tray with many things on it. “How do you see yourself?” (by which I took him to mean how did I want to appear at the funeral.) I told him I didn’t know. He said sometimes it helps people to look at themselves in a reflection. He handed me something that looked like a stainless steel crow bar, polished to a great shine. “Look at yourself in that.”

I did but the reflection was distorted. I held it close up to my face to get a better look. Then I started to cry. “Take it away. Take it away! It’s a trochor. It’s what you use to… Get it away from me.” The funeral director didn’t want to make me upset but he called his assistant to talk to me. By the time she appeared I had stood up and was near the doors. She put her arms out and grabbed me by the shoulders. “You don’t understand,” she said “You have to stay here now.” She was treating me like I was dead. I didn’t know why my friends hadn’t come to my aid during my struggle but they couldn’t seem to hear me. I pretended to go along with the assistant, hoping she would take her hands off me long enough for me to make a run for the door. But soon two other assistants arrived, large bouncer-types in black suits. One of them had a large heavy metallic circle they were going use to weight down my legs. I stood up and started wrestling with them. I lost any sense of dignity and I cried and I begged like a child. I thought it was interesting how I was starting life and ending it as crying infant. I tried to bargain. I tried everything. I didn’t want to be dead.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #67 – Protestant Trespass & Stigmata

(Male, late 30’s) I was visiting the church that I attended while growing up.  I was there with my wife but it wasn’t a Sunday morning.  It was a Saturday afternoon or a Sunday afternoon. We were in the basement which was traditionally used as a large recreational area. It was entirely dark.  On the floor every foot or so were piles of fabric which we figured were child-sized sleeping bags — probably hundreds of them.  We figured the church youth group had a sleep over. But where was everyone? Most of the sleeping bags seemed empty but the room was also filled with that hushed sound of slow breathing, like all around us, people were sleeping.  We tiptoed through the area and gradually came to an area where there were adults.  They were mostly very old and very awake and for that matter, pretty mean.  They said “Who are you?” “We don’t recognize you” and “You don’t look Methodist to me.”  I explained how I had attended this church as a child, how my father had been the choir director but they must have called the police. As we were leaving, a police car arrived. I raised my hands and turned to face the policeman and I saw he had a rifle aimed at me.  He must have been startled when I turned because he shot a bullet clean through the palm of my left hand.  I looked over at it and thought to myself, “That son of bitch just shot me” and while and I looked at the blood coming out of my hand, the police man shot me again in my right hand. I don’t remember the pain so much as the force of the impact and then the sense of the tissues giving way and being torn aside by the bullet. Finally, the policeman shot me in my belly and I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #66 – Floating, floating

We had survived a shipwreck, me and two other people. We were just floating in the middle of the ocean, all alone, with no wreckage or raft or anything to hold on to. We faced each other to keep from getting freaked out by the fact that we were in the middle of the ocean, miles from anything. But we each knew that if we looked out onto the horizon we’d go crazy thinking how far away it was, about how slim our chances of survival were. We suspected there were sharks underneath us but no one mentioned that possibility.

Our skin was very pale, nearly white, like a cave salamander or maybe like flight suits. It almost glowed under the water. And each of us held onto something that we had rescued from the ship before it went down. Like I had this small parcel that some how was supposed to be used for navigation but none of us knew how to use it. It also wouldn’t have been very much use to know WHERE we were if we didn’t have the ability to move anywhere else.

So there we were, treading water, all of us on the verge of insanity, waiting to drown. We knew how it would happen. One of us would not be able to take it any longer, either from exhaustion or from fear or craziness from the waves constantly hitting against our chests and heads. The one who goes crazy will start to freak out, and grab on to the others. We’ll struggle, wrestle in the waves, gulp water. It’ll be easy for us all to be pulled under, for us all to drown. We’re just waiting. Watching each other. Putting it off.