DailyNightmareIs there anything quite as magical as fire? That smell, the flare of color, the flash of heat?
Fire, fire, everywhere at Theatre Bizarre, that wonderful annual masquerade at the Masonic Theatre, Detroit Michigan. The Doktor captured just a few of the fire performances that seemed to pop up wherever we turned.
(Male, 30’s) This wasn’t really a nightmare that is it wasn’t a scary dream, that is, I wasn’t scared so much when I was actually IN the dream but once I woke up and started to think about it, it started to creep me out more and more.
I was on a farm, a very familiar place, a farm my aunt and uncle own. And I was gathering firewood. Twigs and large branches, just everything I could find. There didn’t seem to be anyone else around or at least if there were, no one else seemed interested in the bonfire I was going to start and that was fine. I had acquired a pretty impressive stack of fuel, almost as tall as I am and easily 10 or 15 feet in diameter. It was going to be a righteous blaze.
I was getting ready to light the fire when I saw someone I grew up with. She was a friend of the family someone I’ve only partially kept in touch with over the years. She mentioned in passing that she’d had a seance recently and called up the spirits of her mother and my long dead father. I was struck by a wave of what I can only call jealousy. I’ve been going through some rather hard times recently and even at my worst I didn’t think about troubling my dead father for advice or companionship. It seemed offensive that she’d just summon up my dead relatives, basically for fun.
And then it got weird. Or maybe I should say, weirder. Around that time, I realized that I wasn’t speaking with this friend of the family anymore. Maybe I never had been. I was speaking with my mother who also is dead. It wasn’t clear if she had been summoned in the seance, that is, that I had gotten it mixed up who the friend of the family had called up, or whether Mom had just come along on her own or whether I had been speaking to my mother all along. She seemed so distant and mournfull I got really cold and wished I’d started the fire but it seemed so far away. I still had matches in my hands but I forgot how to use them to make fire.
I woke up thinking about what it would be like for someone who was dead to have a seance to summon someone else who was dead. I got creeped out by the thought that maybe in death we’re all separate, alone and that for some folks that would be incredibly difficult.
(Male, 30) I was in a living room with my brother-in-law. There was a large stone fireplace, similar to the fireplace in my own house but this wasn’t my house. There was a roaring fire in the fireplace that my brother-in-law had started. He was busy doing something with the fire. I moved close to see what he was doing. He had just finished burning a large collection of my belongings and he was now moving on to burn the belongings of my daughter. Just that moment in fact, he was stuffing a huge gnome hat into the fire. (?) I was furious with him but I couldn’t stop him. My stuff was already all gone!
…I was furious with him but I couldn’t stop him…
I think I know what is going on a little bit with the dream. The most recent time I’d seen my brother-in-law was around his birthday. He’s not very into things but he had received a large number of gifts. He was trying to find people to take away some of this stuff. The idea might have come up as a dream because my wife and I are considering selling the house where we live, which means we’ll have to pack and move all the stuff we have, including all the new stuff we’ve gotten since we’ve had our toddler. Moving: now THAT’S a REAL-LIFE nightmare!
(Male, 40’s) There were zombies everywhere but they seemed to be relatively fragile and explosive. One good hit with my flame thrower and they popped like a balloon filled with hydrogen. Imagine human sized Zeppelins. They didn’t seem to have a very good sense of direction either, that is, they didn’t know where I was, so I waited for one floor of the warehouse to fill up with zombies, then I pulled myself up through a hatch to the second floor and ignited the zombies I could see. The flames spread through the whole first floor. But the flames also attracted more zombies. I lured them up floor by floor and then I ran down the fire escape and burned the whole building. This was very strange, especially because my flame-thrower looked like a vacuum cleaner. The handle was a hollow tube and the bag was filled with some kind of combustible gas or liquid. I would compress the bag, like a bag-pipe, I guess and flames would shoot out of the tube.
So now I was down on the ground floor of this grimy, bombed out city, one infested with zombies. And this parade of other survivors starts making its way down the street. We all have weapons that are about as insane as my vacuum-cleaner-flame-thrower. We carefully walk down a few blocks and we gain a few folks with every building we pass. But then it occurs to me that some of the folks who are joining our parade don’t look much like survivors. They look more like zombies. In fact, once I start tallying up the number of zombies to survivors, even in our parade, they’ve got us outnumbered. And they’ve got us surrounded. The other survivors were starting to realize this as well and just as the zombies got ready to attack us, I woke up.
(Female, mid 40’s) It was dark evening in this dream and I was riding my bike back to my car, which is not something I do in real life. My car was parked in a huge parking lot, like at a football stadium or the airport, and I couldn’t quite remember where I’d left it. I was biking up and down the aisles of the parking lot, watching as car upon car drove off. Soon the parking lot was nearly empty and that made it easier to find my little blue Honda, the car I really drive.
I put my bike into the trunk of the car, where it really wouldn’t fit in real life. Then I got in the car and started driving. I thought I knew which way I was going, but the streets didn’t look familiar at all. Still I kept driving, turning down different streets and trying to find my way. I turned down one street, but it turned out to be an alley running behind the backs of a row of buildings, rather than a street. I thought I would go around and come back out on the street, but the alley turned at odd angles. I turned down another alley, a narrower alley, that I thought would bring me back to the main road, but it didn’t. My only way to go was a narrower alley still, either right or left. There wasn’t room to turn around. Now the fences and doors and garages were even narrower. But I kept driving, slowly inching along. The sides of the alley were nearly touching my car on both sides, so I decided I’d better go back. I put the car in reverse and started backing up. It was so narrow that I had a hard time moving without scraping the sides of the car. Then I saw a door that looked really familiar– like it actually was the place I was going. I backed up the car far enough that I could open the door and I got out.
…”Finally!” she yelled, “finally you come but it’s too late! You are too late!”…
I opened the door to find this sort of hippie-gypsy looking room. There was draped cloth decorating the room, and incense, and lava lamps (!) I knew this place: it belonged to my step-mother! (I don’t have a step-mother in real life!) She was there, very angry, dressed like a hippie gypsy herself. “Finally!” she said, “finally you come but it’s too late! You are too late!” She was holding a baby, who was supposed to be my step-sister too. “You are too late to save her!” Then the step-mother knocked over a lava lamp, smashing it and making a little spark of fire catch on one of the shimmery draped cloths. In real-life, I know that the fire would have spread much faster than it did in this dream. She put down the baby to start more fires; she began to light matches from the incense and started dropping them around the room, laughing hysterically, like she was out-of-control crazy. I picked up the baby and carried her to the car and strapped her into her carseat in the back. Then I went back in for baby supplies. The crazy step-mother was still laughing and lighting fires. I knew I couldn’t do anything to stop her, so I left, closing the door behind me. Then I got back in the car and began to back out of the alley very slowly.
(Male) I was inside a mall, a nice mall with lots of internal features and I headed toward an elevator, a round glass elevator. When I got out of the elevator, I was in a very dark field with very tall grass swaying in the wind. Somehow I knew that this grass was supposed to have been cut a long time ago but that the reaping machines had run amok and were terrorizing the area. It was dangerous to be out in this area alone after dark because the reaping machines could cut humans down too. I walked along a dirt road and saw an old abandoned harrow rusting away in the grass. I didn’t look very dangerous. Then all of a sudden a huge reaping machine thundered up on me. It was the size of a barn, made of wood too and it had these long, arcing blades that it worked like fingers. I have no idea how it was able to move since it was so large. The timbers were probably 12 inches by 12 inches. It came to me that there would be only one way I could defeat this thing and that would be with fire. I knew this plan had great danger too because I could set the whole field on fire as well. At that moment, I realized that I had a flaming torch that I was carrying with me for light. When the reaping machine made it’s next pass, I tried to ignite it with the torch but I fell to the ground instead. When I landed, I woke up.
(Female, mid-teens) Dad was cleaning up in the kitchen but he wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing. It was like he was thinking hard about something else. He cleared the counter top basically by putting everything from the counter into the dishwasher.
….flames started shooting out…
One of the things he put in the dishwasher was the little blowtorch we have for making creme brulee. When he turned on the dishwasher, somehow the blowtorch turned itself on. It burned a hole in the door of the dishwasher and flames started shooting out. Dad didn’t seem to notice this until I started yelling. He reached in and took out the blowtorch and started to carry it outside. But he wasn’t very careful about how he held the torch and he basically lit the whole kitchen on fire as he walked out the back door. Then he closed the door and left me alone in a burning house.