Category: Nightmares

(Male, 40’s) It’s my own fault. I ate a couple slices of pizza right before bed. I just can’t handle green peppers anymore. This nightmare was an EPIC length ghost story. I hope I made it sound half as scary as I thought it was.

It was night and I was waiting for my girlfriend at a church. I was inside the church, an old style, stone church, not much different from the one I grew up attending in fact it felt like that church even though there was no room in that building like the one in my nightmare. It was getting late and I couldn’t really remember why I was waiting, what was keeping my girlfriend. I couldn’t remember much about her in fact (sorry, dear!) She might have been a professor so I thought maybe she had a night class and then I thought maybe she was a high school principal so she had a long meeting … but I wasn’t 100% certain of anything, only that I was waiting in a pretty large room – one large enough to be a dance hall – so late at night that all the electricity had turned off.

Yeah, that was the first real scary thing. It was like the electricity was timed to turn off at 10:00 or something. I couldn’t turn the lights on even if I wanted to. There was a surprising amount of ambient light, however – through the windows, through the open doors – not enough to see into the corners but enough to make out the general contours of the room. And there was enough light for me to realize that the floor was extremely dirty. There were actual clods of dried mud, like a large group of people had come in from hiking cross country and stood around in this room until the mud fell off their shoes. I didn’t have anything better to do so I grabbed a broom and started to sweep up. I figured that might make the ghosts happy.

Because by this time, I was pretty sure there were ghosts everywhere inside this church. I was hearing strange sounds that I kept telling myself was just the furnace… though now I think about it, a building that shut off the electricity at night probably shut off the heat too. It was white noise that was sculpted almost to sound like music but it also sounded like human voices singing. I also thought I saw lights – shimmering crescents of light – out of the corner of my eye, over where a big storage closet was. But I started sweeping, if for no other reason than to keep my mind off the creepy things in the room. And that’s when the really weird stuff started.

I would no sooner get a pile of dirt swept up and it would dissolve into the floor. I thought at first a breeze had blow it away – which would have been scary enough but it actually was dissolving IN to the floor. I didn’t really care too much. No need to find a dust pan, I guess. But right about this time I realized that there were two large trees growing out of the floor over by where this storage closet was. They were cedars, with long rope-y bark. The diameter of the trunk was over a foot so these were quite strong trees. They came right up through the tiled floor, like the church had been built around them. There was definitely paranormal activity being active over there so I approached to check it out. I was extremely scared but I kept moving closer. A bright bluish glow had started coming out of the closet. Then a dimmer orangeish glow started from one of the trees.

I started hearing a voice-over in my head, like a book-on-tape or a long interview on NPR. The author had written a book called “The Apple and the Cedar” and it was about these very trees. I didn’t have too much faith in his patient, long-winded analysis because for one thing, he entirely mis-indentified one of the trees. The author seemed to think the trees were harmless and they were part of some grand circle of death and re-birth. I was pretty sure that he wasn’t telling the whole story, that there was actually something slightly more dangerous about these trees but I knew what I had to do. I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew it. The long ropes of bark were strangling the trees. If they were going to live, the bark needed to be pulled away. I didn’t know if removing the bark would antagonize the ghosts / spirits but I felt I simply had to do this. I started unknotting the bark from around the trees. It was hard work. Every now and then I’d see a flash of light out of the corner of my eye and hear an angry buzz in my ear so I knew the ghosts were paying attention. I just couldn’t tell what they were thinking. But as I unwrapped the cedar, the light it gave off grew more intense. I could see the buds of new life growing on the undersides of the stems.

That’s the last thing I remember about the dream, looking up at the branches of this cedar, branches that reached all the way to the ceiling and beyond, an seeing all the beautiful new growth on them. As it sounds here, this was a positive ending but I woke up quite disturbed. I didn’t ever figure out whether the ghosts were angry about what I’d done with the cedars. I sat up in my bed. It felt like my whole house was haunted.