dream #31

There’s been an abnormal influx of dreams in my brain lately!  Within the past few days I’ve had quite a few.  One of the ones I had today (I had two, I’ll save the next one for tomorrow) was rather distressing.  My father has never beat me before, so I have no idea as to what tick in my subconscious (if you subscribe to the belief that dreams are communiqués from the subconscious; I personally don’t know if I believe that or not) caused this.

It’s a well known fact in my family, each member of which mercilessly teases one another, that my father can dish it out but can’t take it.  I’m standing in the kitchen, while the rest of my family is in the living room sitting on the couch.  They’re ganging up on my dad, poking fun at him about some little thing, and he begins to get frustrated and tries to come back with a rebuttal (just as he does in real life).  After seing him so vexed, I jokingly say, “Aww, poor widdle daddy!”

For some reason, this infuriates him.  He gets off of the couch and comes into the kitchen and throws me to the ground.  He then repeatedly begins to smash my head into the tile floor.  I try to tell him to stop, and that I was only kidding, but within seconds, I black out.  I wake up (in my dream) in my bed.  It takes a minute to remember what happened, but when I do, I get very angry.  I go to get out of my bed to confront him, but when I try to stand up I immediately fall down.  Not being able to walk, I crawl out of my room and into the hallway.  “Dad!” I scream.  “Dad!  Why would you do this to me!?” I start to cry.

I look up and see him standing in the doorway of his room.  He starts to say something, but I can barely hear him.  My mom then walks out into the middle of the hallway and tells me I shouldn’t have said anything to him.

“Why did you let him do this to me?” I ask her.

“You really shouldn’t have,” she starts.  I think she’s about to tell me that I shouldn’t have been disrespectful, but she finished with, “hit her like that.  That’s wrong.”  She was looking over her shoulder talking to my dad, who was still standing in the doorway of his room.

“She shouldn’t have said anything to me,” he says in his own defense.

“Mike, it wasn’t that big of a deal.  You shouldn’t have hit her like that.”

“Okay,” my dad says.  “Maybe I did overreact.”

“Why don’t you go give your dad a hug?” my mom says.  (Every time my dad has seriously hurt me in real life and felt sorry for it, he would always hug me and I would forget all about it.)

“No!” I shout.  My dad begins to walk down the hallway with his arms spread out.

“Come here,” he says tenderly.

“No!  No, no, no!” I turn around and try to crawl away.  Then I wake up.

dream #30

A recurring theme in dreams I have is that when I need them to, no one will listen to me; everyone is always apathetic to what I have to say, even in the most distressing of situations.  And while the dream I had last night is rather ridiculous, it’s a perfect example of this.

I’m in the kitchen with my sister.  She’s sitting down, eating something at the table, while I’m standing at the sink rinsing some dishes.  I casually glance at the fridge to my left and I notice a small snail crawling up the side.

“Ew! Michelle, there’s a snail in here!  Gross!  How did a snail even get in here?  Will you pick it up and take it outside?”

“No way!” my sister said.  “I’m not touching a snail!”

I fuss a little more and, without saying a word, my sister gets up to pull the snail off of the fridge.  I start to slowly back up, automatically thinking that she is going to try to put it on me.  “Don’t even think about it!” I say, walking into the living room.

My dad then comes from his room into the kitchen, where my sister shows him the snail.  “Let’s microwave him,” she says.  She gives the snail to my dad and he puts it into the microwave.  Then she leaves the kitchen and goes into her room.

“I can’t believe you’re going to microwave a snail,” I say to my dad.  He just shrugs and turns the microwave on.  After a few seconds, I look over my shoulder and look at the microwave.  The tiny snail had ballooned and exploded, and the inside of the microwave became a sticky mess.  The mass inside, formerly a snail, had morphed into a giant wad of what looked like stretched out bubble gum.  My dad and I watched in amazement.  Thick black smoke begins to come out of the microwave, setting off the smoke detector in the house.  A few seconds later, the microwave is ablaze.

“Dad!  Dad! The microwave is on fire!  Dad, put it out!”  My dad begins to hit the burning microwave with an old dish towel which only makes the fire grow.  We bolt out of the house.  I have to call the fire department, I think.  But the phone is inside!  Well, I guess I can go back in and make the call from my room.  The fire hasn’t reached that side of the house yet.  I go inside through the front door, but before I can even leave the foyer I think about the fire spreading to my room and being trapped inside and decide to take a different course of action.  I run to the neighbor’s house, but the people there act as though I’m speaking a different language.  “What?  What?” is all that they say.  I pick up one of their cell phones off of the counter and dial 911.  There is no answer – I realize that I have not hit the “send” button, but I go off into a train of thought of how if you dial 911 on a cell phone, it should connect you straight through, so you don’t have to waste time pressing send.  This frustrates me, so I leave their house to try and find my mom.

I end up on the second story food court of a shopping mall with floor to ceiling windows and a sunroof.  I spot my mom sitting at a two-person table by herself, eating Chinese food.  I rush over to her to tell her that our house is on fire.  “I know,” she says.  “Your dad told me.”

“Well aren’t we going to do anything about it?!” I ask her incredulously.

“There’s nothing we can do,” she says, picking up her tray and throwing it out.  “We’ll just have to rebuild.”  We walk over to the escalator and I begin to complain about how I’ve probably lost all my things.

When we get home, the damage isn’t as bad as I had expected.  Our couch is still functionable and the walls, while charred, are still standing.  I walk into my room.  My computer, an old desktop, looks in good shape.  I walk over to it to inspect it further.  I touch the computer’s plastic casing and it falls away.

“Well,” I say to no one in particular, “at least this means NEW COMPUTER!”

dream #29

I have been neglecting this blog, it’s true.  But today I took a nap and had a few dreams that I don’t want to forget.  I had to get up really early for class this morning and didn’t sleep well last night, so I decided to take a nap when I got home.  The following ensued.

For some reason, my family is having Larry the Cable Guy over for dinner.  Halfway through dinner, he starts to feel sick, so we tell him

not funny.

forgetting that he is there, I start to say, “What are you guys talking about? He’s not even funny!  David Cross is way funnier than him.  You know he doesn’t like David Cross, right?  He’s just poop jokes – NOT FUNNY!  And –”  I stop mid sentence as I remember that Larry is sitting on the couch in the living room.  My eyes widen as my family gives me a silent, incredulous death glare.  Baffled at what I’ve just done, I try to backtrack.  “JEEZ, YOU GUYS!  CAN’T YOU TAKE A JOKE?  I was just kidding, god!  I hate David Cross, you guys know that.  What’s wrong with you guys?”  They drop their glare (only slightly), and we clean up the kitchen.  We go out into the living room to see how Larry is doing, and he tries to teach my mom a weird hoedown-type dance.  I go into my room.

I wake up, roll over, then immediately fall asleep and have another strange dream that it’s late night.  I wake up and go into the kitchen to get something to drink.  As I’m about to open the refridgerator, I hear what sounds like a baby crying.  I stop for a moment to try to hear better.  It sounds like it’s coming from my parent’s room.  I walk down the hall to where I’m outside their door, and I begin to hear words.  “Help me!  Help me, Uncle Mike! (my dad’s name is Mike)”  I open their door, thinking for some reason that it might be my mom.  As I walk in, the crying gets louder but I can’t figure out where it’s coming from.  “Help me, Uncle Mike!  Where’s my life?  Where’s my life going?  Help me!”  I try frantically to wake my parents, but I cannot rouse them from their sleep.  I shake them and hit them to no avail, and all the while I can hear the crying person begging for help.

It was a nightmare that woke me up.  After that, I decided that I’d had enough nap time for today.

dream #28

I’ve had some variation of this dream about 3 or 4 times over the years.  The small details are always different, but the setting is always exactly the same.

Some dream friends and I are stuck in terrible traffic on top of a bridge.  The bridge, which is a vital means of transportation for thousands of people, is in the process of having a middle section repaired.  The whole section needs to

as unclear a diagram as they come

be replaced, so there is a large gap between one side of the bridge and the other.  Rather than closing the bridge and using one lane on the other bridge for the traffic, the highway officials opted for a much more complicated and dangerous way of managing the commute; moving each car individually across the empty space via a sheet of metal suspended by a floating crane.  The commuters are largely left to their own wits to get across the bridge – except for the operation of the crane by a worker below, every driver must drive their own car onto the sheet of metal and ensure that the car is perfectly set on the sheet so that there is no danger of the car sliding off into the water.

Eventually it becomes our turn to cross the gap.  None of us have ever crossed the bridge using the lift before, so we have no idea what to do.  As the crane swings the lift back over to our side of the bridge, I notice that there no obvious way to secure the car to the lift.  Not a single strap, just a sheet of metal and the cables supporting it.  I slowly drive the car onto the lift and we all get out and stand on the lift, holding onto the cables so we don’t slip.

The cran begins to move us, and almost immediately the lift begins to wobble.  About 10 feet from our side of the bridge, the lift shifts backwards, tossing the car, my friends and myself into the water below.

After the sheer terror of falling, we all surface and catch our breath.  We swim over to the beam supporting the bridge and pull ourselves up on it.

this might be a little better than the other one

Looking up through the hole in the bridge above us I see that there is no one left on the bridge.  The crane operator is gone as well.  There isn’t a boat in sight.  And the water goes on for what seems like forever – not a spot of visible land.

I start to think of ways to get back up the bridge, but there is no way short of climbing the concrete pillar, which is impossible.  I give up on planning and retract into isolation, just hoping that someone will come by and rescue us.  It’s a feeling of total hopelessness that I’ve only ever felt in a dream.  I suppose I could look upon that as a good thing.

dream #27

A new year, a new dream!  I wish it were a happy or funny sort of dream, but it’s actually the opposite.

I’m in my back yard with my sister and some dream friends, eating carrot

sticks.  We’ve been talking for a while when I hear a big ruslting in the grass on the other side of the fence.  I look up and I see a giraffe, looking down at me.  He sees my carrot and his neck swoops down to take it from me.  I never even had the guts to feed the giraffes at the zoo, much less in my back yard where one shouldn’t have been anyway.  My sister and dream friends start laughing, telling me not to be a chicken and just feed him my carrot.  I hold the carrot by the tips of my fingers as if it were some disgusting rag, pushing my hand out and cringing in hopes that he won’t take my fingers with it.  He happily eats it and looks at us as if begging for more.  My corageous dream friends reach into the carrot bag and pull some out and the giraffe eats those as well.

Suddenly, we hear another rustling on the other side of the fence, only much louder and more threatening, followed by the sound of chopper blades.  We look up, and there is a helicopter hovering not 50 feet above my house.

“Attention ladies!” the chopper’s loudspeaker booms.  “You need to get indoors to a secure area immediately.  There is a rhinocerous on the other side of that fence.  He is very dangerous – whatever you do, DO NOT FEED HIM.  Anyone who does not follow these orders may recieve a full-body charge by the rhino, which will kill you.”

My dream friends and sister scatter – we all run in different directions, to terrified to have the common sense to stay together.  I run inside, through the sliding-glass door near the back of the house.  I head straight for my room, slamming the door and barricading it with a chair.  I wait in silence.  I hear water running and the glass door slide open – someone else is home!

I throw the chair out of the way and move into the dark hallway.

“Mom? Dad?” I get no answer, so I shout louder.

I move down to my parent’s room and see my dad sitting in his chair at the computer desk, apparently unaware of the peril outside.

“Dad!  Where’s Michelle?  Where’s Holly? (my dog)”

“Michelle took Holly outside to play,” my dad answered.

“What!? No!” I pulled up the blinds, practically ripping the pull-cord in half.  I gasped with terror.

It was a grisly scene.  My dog was lying on the ground, in the same way that she sleeps.  My sister was face first in the dirt behind her.  There was a green liquid on the ground next to her.  I assumed that it was bile and that the animal had peirced her in the stomach.

Then, my dog weakly lifted her head and started to whimper.  She was alive.  I called her over, but she couldn’t move her back legs – she had apparently been paralyzed by the blow from the rhino.  I coaxed her to crawl to me, and she eventually made it to the window.  I pushed the screen out and pulled her in as fast as I could while keeping an eye out for the rhino.

As I got her back legs in, I slammed the window shut and my dad helped me get her on his bed.  She was still crying.  I hugged her around her neck and shushed her.

dream #26

(Remember that episode of Futurama where Fry dreams about Lightspeed Briefs only to learn that in the year 3000 advertisements are broadcast into dreams?  I’m pretty certain that’s what happened to me last night when I was dreaming this dream, except instead of futuristic underpants it was an advertisement for Long John Silver’s new “Freshside Grille”.  The commercial for it makes me so hungry – I don’t really even like fish, but the food on that commercial looks so good.)

My dad, sister and I have just gotten back from Long John Silver’s after

derishus!

ordering just about every entree the Freshside Grille had to offer.  This is a glorious occasion, so my sister and I dust off the dining room table – the table usually reserved for family get-togethers – while my dad arranges our copious feast in the middle of the table.

“Open the front door!” my dad booms happily.  “I want the whole block to smell the wondrous aroma of our fantastic supper!”

I spring to the door and fling it open.  I then go to the kitchen for some utensils and plates – the house’s finest china, of course.  My movements are like that of a dancer, fluid and carefully executed, coming together to form a beautiful masterpiece of tablesetting.  I pause for a moment to enjoy the pleasant smell of the fish on the table.  It is so heavenly, I decide to open the door even further.

Then, in the corner of my eye, I see a small black object fly quickly into the room.  I stretch my neck out to get a better view, not wanting to expose my whole body lest the unidentified object be a very large bug.

But what I saw was not a bug.  It is a black box, bolted to the ceiling in the middle of the foyer.  At closer look, I realize it is a security camera.

“Dad…” I start suspiciously.  “Did you install a security camera or something?”

My dad stares at me for a few seconds.  “No,” he says.  Then he starts turning all the lights off in the house.  Within seconds, the whole house is completely dark.  He picks up the phone and calls the police.

“Hello, I have suspicion to believe that my family and I are in danger and that we are being harassed by Martin Crane.”

I have no idea who Martin Crane is or why he would be harassing us.

“Um… yes,” my father continues.  “Yes, I believe he installed a hidden camera in our home…  Well, actually, he didn’t do a very good job of hiding it, because he bolted it to the ceiling in the middle of our foyer… Yes, I’m almost positive it was him… Look, could you just send an officer out to our house so he can check things out?  Thank you.”

Suddenly, I became very scared. If Martin Crane, whoever he was, could get into our house and install a security camera, he was certainly capable of breaking in to our house at night and murdering us.  Tonight I’m going to sleep with a metal pole in my hand, I think to myself.

The phone rings and my dad answers it on the first ring.

“Hello?  Yes, okay, I’ll be down there in a few minutes.  Okay, goodbye.”  He hangs up the phone.  “The police want me to come down to the station, so I’ll be back in a few minutes,” my dad tells us.

“Wait!” my sister says.  “Can I come with you?”

“Sure,” my dad says.

For some reason, I don’t ask to go with.  They leave, and I’m all alone in our dark house.  I hear a thumping sound from my sister’s bedroom window.  Although I am terrified that it might be Martin Crane trying to break in to my house, I still move in for a closer look.

The glass shatters, and an old man, balding with white hair, crawls through the frame.

I accidentally scream.  Martin Crane looks right at me and charges.  He’s right behind me; I arch my back as I’m running, not wanting him to lay even a finger on me.  I get outside and we’re running through a town square.  I see a large, strong but friendly looking man walking towards a shop, and as I approach him I beg him to help me escape from the maniac that is chasing me.  The man pulls me into a shop and leads me out the shop’s back door, and we’re instantly on the other end of the square.  I thank the man for helping me, and he asks me if he can buy me a bottle of water since I look so exhausted.  I oblige, and we sit together in a bookstore, as I sip my water, talking about Martin Crane.  He suggests that I get a restraining order against Martin and shows me a book of examples of legal documents.  I tear out the restraining order examples, just in case I need them.  When I’m finished, I thank him again and we say our goodbyes.

As I leave the bookstore, I see Martin Crane sitting at a small table in the outdoor section of a restaurant.  All of a sudden, I am no longer afraid of him.  I pull the folded up restraining order papers out of my pocket and slide them onto his table.

“Sign ‘em.” I say.

He scowls at me.

I push them even closer to him.  “Sign. Them.”

“You’re a slut, just like your mother.”

I am about to push them even closer to him, but this statement catches me off-guard.

“W-What?  What are you talking about?”

“Just give me those papers,” he says.  He pulls a pen out of his pocket and scribbles his name on the line.  Then the throws them in my face.

“Whatever, pal,” I say, as I walk away.

dream #25

I really, really hate going to the doctor – any doctor for anything, no matter how minuscule.  I rarely catch so much as a cold, and I think the reason for my superhuman immune system is because my fear of the doctor has somehow mutated my genes and turned me into some freak pathogen-fighting machine.  Onto the dream:

It’s about 8 PM and I’m in the car with my mom.  She pulls into a shady parkinglot behind a brown building.  As she parks, she says, “I made you a doctor’s appointment.”

“… What?” I say.

“I made you a doctor’s appointment.”

“No – no way, mom, you can’t trick me like this!  What’s wrong with you!?”

“Come on, time to go to the doctor,” she says cheerfully, patting me on the leg.

I get out of the car and slam the door and walk out to the front of the building.  As I pull the front door open, I realize that I’ve never been to this brown building before, and that it certainly isn’t my doctor’s office.  Does she expect me to walk all the way to the doctor?! I think to myself.

I walk back around the building, back to my mom’s jeep.

“Well why did you bring me here?!  Why didn’t you just take me to the doctor’s office?” I demand.

“This is the doctor’s office.  It’s a new doctor.  Go on, go inside or you’ll miss your appointment!”

I storm back around and shine my flashlight (that was all of a sudden in my hand) around.  The light lands on a sign in front of the building; “LEE & LEESBURG, M.D.s”

I throw my head back in disbelief.  Defeated, I stomp up the steps and go inside.  I take a seat in one of the chairs.  A nurse brings me a clipboard and a pen.  When I look up at her to take it from her, I notice that the waiting room is full of people – old people.  Old women.

“Well… look at you!  All alone in the doctor’s office.  So grown up!” one of the old biddies says to me, waving her hand in the air.

I smile suspiciously. “Eh… heh, yeah.”

I look down at my clipboard, expecting a medical history form or the like.  But underneath the metal clasp there is only a small 3-fold pamphlet.  On the front is a beach-sunset scene.  I pull it ou and unfold it.

On the first inside flap, it read:

Nope, I thought to myself.

Then, underneath that, as if it has read my mind, it read:

Oh, WHAT A RELIEF! I think.

Underneath that, it said:

I gave a great sigh of relief.  Everything would be okay.

dream #24

I’m running away from something down a mountain road covered by trees with someone that I’ve just met (I know that what I was running from and why the person was with me was established in the dream, but unfortunately I’ve forgotten that part.)  Eventually we come to a sheet of rock, part of the side of the mountain, with no trees covering it.

The person I’m with pushes part of the rock to the side, revealing a small cave.  “In here,” he says.  “Go in here and follow the passage all the way in.  Don’t come out – you’ll find out what else to do once you’re all the way inside.”

I do as he says.  In the distance I can see some dull blue strips of lights.  As I near the end of the passageway, I see that the room with the blue lights is enormous.  With the exception of the dull blue lights, the room is completely dark.  I walk to the middle of the room and do a 360°, scanning the rom for a door or some sort of clue as to what to do.  But I see nothing.  All of a sudden the room starts to shake, and the walls begin to rearrange.  The blue lights turn red.  The next thing I know, the room is brightly lit by dome-lights hanging overhead.  The walls, previously black with blue light strips, are now off white.  The room is empty with the exception of a long trestle table on one side.  There are a bunch of teenage girls sitting around the table, talking and doing crafts.  There is one seat open.  I go to take it.

When I sit down, none of the other girls look at me; they just continue with their conversation and their crafts.  I lean forward and look down the rest of the table.  I then see another girl I know in real life names Melissa.  Although we were friends for a short time in elementary school, she quickly developed the confrontational, annoyed-with-everyone, act-and-dress-way-too-sexy-for-my-weight type attitude, and I eventually grew to be unable to stand her (whereas she was unaware of my existence). For some reason an overwhelming feeling of mean-spiritedness comes over me.

I get up and walk over to her.  I knock her off her chair and she hits the floor with a dull thud.  Using her chair as a stepladder, I climp up onto the table and look down at her, laughing and making fun of her, saying things like, “All the boyfriends you say you’ve had are made up,” and, “I don’t get why you always try to be cool, you fat, ugly idiot.”

Mid-taunt, she gets up and walks away.  I keep lauging and making fun until she’s walked so far away that I can’t even see her anymore.  Feeling unusually great, I jump off of the table and go back to my seat.  I plop down and hear the girl next to me say, “…how we got here, and -”

I cut her off:  “I came here through a mountain passageway.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says, “I didn’t know anyone was talking to you.”  She gives me a dirty look and continues her conversation with the girl across from her.

As I begin to continue the craft that I had started before making fun of Melissa, another person comes through the passageway.  It is an older woman, probably in her mid 50s.

“Does anyone want to go to Germany?” she asks.

I gladly volunteer myself, although only four other girls show my same enthusiasm. The lady turns on her heel and swings her arm in a throwing motion, telling us to follow her the way she came.

Cut to a hotel in Germany, where the other four girls and I have been packed into a cabin with no electricity with a couple of boys.  The mid-50s woman comes in to the room.

“Get your things packed up, we’re heading back home!” she says.  “Ten minutes!”

The boys and the four other girls had already packed their things the previous night.  My stuff, however, was strewn all over the cabin.  I began to sprint around the apartment, gathering my clothes and toiletries and stuffing them into my suit case.  As I am checking under a bed for loose socks and underwear, I hear the heavy cabin door slam closed.  I spring up and jump over the row of beds, one bed a a time, and into the living room.  Everyone is gone.  I open the front door, but no one is anywhere to be found.  I run around the entire cabin, but I still do not find them.

I head to the nearest cabin, and I find that it is the man who owns the grounds and rents the cabins out to people.  I tell him that my group has left me there and ask him to use the phone, but he tells me that the phone is for paying customers only, and since the mid-50s woman had payed for the cabin, she was the only person that had access to the phone.  I try to explain to him that she has already checked out – without me! – but he just asks me to leave.

Sulking, I exit his cabin.  I can hear music in the distance, and I then remember seeing a flier for a fair being held in a clearing somewhere on the camp ground.  Eventually I find it, and to my joy it is packed with people.

I dart desperately from person to person.  “Can I use your cell phone?” I ask.

“Oh, um, no…” one woman says hesitantly.

“Sorry, I don’t lend those types of things out,” another says.

“Ich spreche kein Englisch,” a man replies.

Nobody seems to want to help me.  Defeated, I wander into a tent selling barbecue sandwiches.  The lady at the table looks like an American.  “Are you American?” I ask hopefully.

“Yup,” she replies.

“Can you help me get home!?” I ask.

“Whaddya mean?” she asks.  I tell her my story.

“Well sure, I think somethin’ can be arranged.  Go back by that grill over there and talk to my son Alex.  He’ll help you.”

Alex calls a friend who buys me a plane ticket, and when the fair is over, they take me to the airport.  I thank them for their help and board the plane home.

When I arrive at OIA, I stop at a payphone to call my mom.  “Hey mom, it’s me, I’ve been stuck in Germany but I’m at the airport now.  Can you come pick me up?”

“What?  Is this some kind of prank?  Not funny, ma’am!” she says, hanging up.

I decide to walk home.  On the way, I stop by a ToysRUs and wander through the aisles.  In the Lego aisle, I spot a lone See-n-Say that has been taken out of it’s box.

“Oh my god, I love these!” I shout with glee.

Forgetting the traumatizing past few days, I sit on the floor to play with it.

“The cow says ‘MOOOOOOO’ .  The duck says ‘QUACK’“.

dream #23

I typed up this dream a few weeks ago and forgot to post it.

My family and I, as well as many other families, have been forcibly packed into a drab government building with no explicit or obvious purpose.  The room is filled with the muffled whispers of what we have done to be put here and what they are going to do to us.  Every ten or so minutes, a government worker will come out of the door at the front of the room and call off a list of ten people at a time.  It is always the patriarch of the family.  The men line up and file into the windowless room, and the government worker shuts the door behind them.  No man, save the government worker, ever comes back out.

The man comes out of the door again.  Half way through the list of names, he calls my father’s name.  My mother, sister and I all look at each other frightfully.  My dad doesn’t look at us at all, just gets up and follows the rest of the men into the room.

Ten more minutes pass, but the government worker never comes back out.  Then ten more minutes.  Then ten more, ten more, until an hour and a half has passed.  I get fed up with waiting and decide to explore the building to find out what is going on.  My family asks no questions as I get up to leave.

In the part of the building where we are being contained, there is only one very long hallway with exits at

hopefull this helps!

both ends and the door leading to the mysterious room where the men are being held (see diagram).  I walk down the left of the hallway.  There are no doors at all in the hallway.  Eventually I reach the end, and I go out the exit.  There is a small concrete patio, and beyond that an empty field.  On the wall next to the door that I had just come out of, there is another door.  I pull on the handle, and to my surprise, it’s unlocked.  I peek inside, and I don’t see anyone inside.  I go in.

The room looks like an exhibit from some sort of marine museum.  There is a giant model of a blue whale hanging overhead and a recreation of a turtle nesting area, as well as a large tank filled with fish and sting rays.  At the other end of the room there is another door.  Right as I’m crossing the room, I get a mean craving for a cigarette.  I decide to go outside to for a quick smoke of one of the cigaretts that have magically appeared in my jacket pocket before going any further.  But once I get outside, it’s raining.  I then decide that since I’m being held against my will in this building, I may as well smoke inside of it.  I go back in and light my cigarette.  A few seconds later I hear the handle jiggling on the door across the room.  I throw myself on the floor behind the turtle nesting exhibit and put out my cigarette on the carpet.  Someone opens the door.

“Hello?” he says, smelling the smoke.  “No smoking in here!”  He then goes back through the door he came.

I get back up to go through the door.  It leads to an empty T-shaped hallway.  Unlike the hallway by the main containment room, there are many doors down the hallways.  I opt to walk down the hallway straight in front of me.  There are a few rooms with large windows – most of them are empty and dark, but the lights are on inside some of them.  There are some men in white coats, perhaps doctors or laboratory workers or something inside, but other than the white coats the rooms are completely empty – not even some chairs for them to sit on.

Midway down the hallway, I look into one of the windows and see the government worker who had been taking the men into the mystery room.  He is sitting on a folding metal chair inside a larger, carpeted room – I assume that this is the mystery room – but it is completely empty.  Fed up with trying to figure out what is going on, I open the door to confront him.

“Hey, where’s my dad?  Where are all the other dads?  What are we doing here?”

Without saying a word he stands up and quickly walks towards me.

I let out a cry and bolt for the door.  I exit the room, find my family and sit on the place of the bench that I had been sitting before I left, squishing myself against the wall in case he decides to come out of the room after me to find me.

A few minutes later, he comes out, but not to get me.

“You’re all free to go,” he says.  No one asks him about the men.  We all cram into a van and are shipped home.

Once we get home, we don’t speak a word to each other.  I go onto the back porch for some time to myself.

I hear a van door slide open and then closed.

Maybe it’s dad, I think.  Maybe they’ve brought him home!

Not thinking, I decide to climb the pylon in the back yard (how and why a pylon was in my backyard, I have no idea) in an attempt to look over the house to see him standing in the driveway.  A millisecond before I begin to climb the pylon, I hear my dad’s voice.

“Hey!” he says.

But it’s too late.  I’ve already gripped both my hands and places one foot on the bottom rung of the pylon.

As a result, I’m delivered a terrible electric shock.  I’m knocked back and I land on my knees.

“Dad!” I exclaim.  I then realize that my body is completely numb.  “Oh crap, I’m paralyzed… ugh, great.”

“What the hell were you doing?!” my dad asks me.

The feeling in the left half of my body returns.  “Oh, never mind, I’m only half paralyzed.  But I’m so glad you’re home!” I say

My parents rush over to help me.  As they grab my arms to lift me up, the feelings come back to my right side and I’m able to stand and walk on my own.

“Yay, I’m okay!” I say.  We all share a sitcom laugh and go inside, free of the weight of the world.

dream #22

I’m at a gas station.  Across from the gas station is a small park with a couple baseball fields.  My friend, Nicole, lives directly behind the park.  After I’m done filling up my car, I decide to pay her a surprise visit.  I knock on the front door.  After a minute or so of waiting with no answer, as I am beginning to walk back to my car, my friend walks out of the garage.  “Hey, come in through here,” she says.

Once inside, I get a strange feeling that something is very wrong.  I can’t tell what it is, but something about being in her house scares me.  I look at my friend.  Her face is pale and she looks as though she hasn’t slept for a few days.

Her mom comes down the stairs.  When she sees me, her eyes widen and the color drains from her face.

“Nicole,” she says, “why did you let her into this house?”

Nicole says nothing and just looks at her mother.

“You two need to get out of here.  Now.”

Already scared from the house’s unnerving atmosphere, I begin to run to the kitchen, which leads to the front door.

“No!” Nicole and her mother shout in unison, “Don’t go that way!”

Once my foot touches the kitchen’s linoleum floor, I am struck by a wave of fear.  It feels like there is something behind me that wants to get me.  Not to kill me, but to do something much worse that I can’t even begin to fathom.  This new found fear gives me a burst of speed, and I soon reach the door.  I fumble with the doorknob and fling the door open.  As my feet hit the first step outside the front door, I no longer feel the presence of whatever was behind me.  Too afraid to look back to see if I could perhaps see it, I run straight to my car and drive home.

Later that night, apparently forgetting about the terror that I have experienced earlier that day, Nicole invites me to a party at her house and that I can stay the night if I want.  I tell her I’ll be there.

I arrive at the same time as a few other people, and we all go in through the garage.  Nicole meets us at the door.

“When you go inside, make sure that you do not step anywhere where there is a towel or blanket on the floor.  You can stand as close to the them as you want, but do not stand or walk on them.  DO NOT go anywhere near the kitchen.  There are two bedrooms upstairs.  If you’re staying the night, put your stuff in the bedroom on the right.  Most importantly, DO NOT go into the room on the left.  If you’re not staying the night, I’d recommend that you don’t go up there at all.”  She moves out of the way and lets us inside.

The house is full of people, and due to the towels and blankets on the floor, the room is so densely packed that it is almost impossible to move around.  I manage to make my way through the room and up the stairs with a few other people.  We’re standing in the middle of the hallway between the two rooms.  I look to the right.  There are two beds back to back to each other, a couple of lamps, and a floor to ceiling window covered by a thick sheet of muslin.  I look to the room on the left.  The only light in the room is the moonlight shining into the room through a small window.  There are some shadows on the floor, indicating that the room is not empty, but I can’t make out what’s inside.

“What do you think is in there?” a girl I’ve come up stairs with asks.

“I don’t know, and I don’t think I want to know,” I say.

“Are you afraid?” she asks.

“Kind of,” I say.  We go into the room on the right and put our stuff down.

As we are leaving the room, a guy comes up the stairs, laughing, and says to us, “Hey guys, dare me to go in that room?”

“What, do you want to see what’s in there or something? ‘Cause we were kind of wondering ourselves…” one of the girls I’m with says.

“Yeah, come on!  I bet it’s something embarrassing that she doesn’t want us to see.”

The two girls I’m with laugh.  “Okay, let’s go in,” they say.

All of a sudden the feeling of terror I felt earlier that day rushes back to me.   “No,” I say, “don’t go in!  I have a bad feeling about that room.  I think something terrible will happen to you if you go in there.”

The boy rolls his eyes and says, “You’re joking, right?  Look, if you’re seriously scared, go outside and climb up onto the front porch roof.  You’ll be standing right in front of this window when you get up there.  Once we’ve looked around and made sure everything is safe, we’ll open the window and you’ll be able to see what’s inside.”

I agree to this and make my way outside.  I climb up on top of the porch roof.  The little window is right in front of my face, but I am too scared to look in.  All of a sudden I hear some muffled shouting.  “Open the window, open the window, oh my god!”

One of the girls reaches the window.  I try to push it up to help her out, but it won’t budge.  I stare in horror as she screams, hands beating against the window, before she is sucked away an I cannot see her anymore.

The glass then shatters into my face; the boy had broken through it.  In a hurry to get out of the room, he runs straight off of the porch roof and lands on the ground.  The other girl then runs to the window.  Tears are streaming down her face and she is screaming.  I help her out and we climb down off the porch roof.  The boy is just now picking himself up after landing on the ground.

When I ask them to tell me what happened and what was in the room, the both just tell me that they have to go home and begin walking down the street.

Terrified, I go back inside.  But for some reason all of the partygoers have vanished.  Nicole is the only person left in the room.  When I tell her about what had just happened, she tells me that there is nothing that we can do now and that the two that had gotten out of the room are extremely lucky.  I start to cry and tell her that I want to go home, but as I try to open the door to leave, the door will not budge.

“It’s too late,” she says.  “You can’t leave until it lets you.”

“What? Why?” I ask.

“I don’t know why it does it, but there’s no way of leaving until it decides to let people leave again.”

“What is ‘it’?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says.

I go upstairs, deciding that if I couldn’t leave physically, I would leave mentally by sleeping as much as possible.  When I go into the room, I see that there are still a few people left.  They’re sitting on the beds, completely silent, looking at the floor.

“So you can’t leave either, huh?” one of them says.

“Nope.”

We all go to sleep.

In the middle of the night, I wake up.  I go into the doorway of the room and look into the other, forbidden room.  The light is on inside.  It looks like a normal room – there is a bunk bed and a few posters hung up around the room, and a desk with a small green lamp in the corner.  I hear what sounds like someone hammering nails into a piece of wood, but I cannot see the source because of the room’s construction.  I begin to wonder if everything is over, or if it had even happened at all.

“Hello?” I say as I walk to the middle of the hallway.  “Hello?”

“Yes?  I’m just up late putting up some new closet doors,” says a man’s voice.

I say nothing and go wake up Nicole.

“Hey, Nicole, the light is on in that room over there.  It just looks like a normal room.  And there is a guy in there who said he’s putting up closet doors.”  She sits straight up.

“Do. Not. Go. In. There.”

I frown and go to sit on the bed.  Once Nicole has fallen asleep again, I go back into the hallway.  The light is still on.

I go in.