Dream Log- March 14, 2019 – Terrors on the Loose

dreamlog

Oooh, it’s been quite a while since I did a dream log! But I was reminded by a friend of how interesting dreams can be, and then last night I had a whopper of a stressful one that I thought was worth sharing.

I’m not sure exactly where the dream began, but the entire thing took place in an enormous mall. It was multiple levels, and had so many twists and turns in it that it was practically some kind of bizarre fun-house. It had plenty of stores and restaurants, but also unusual things like a full high school and a giant indoor zoo, which was designed in such a way that you could see it from almost any angle in the center of the building.

The first thing I remember is being in an upper level, looking down through a large window at the zoo, where some kind of show was going on. Zookeepers were in a huge enclosure with dozens of lions, tigers, and bears (oh my!), and were putting on some kind of strange play. Hundreds of people in the mall were gathered around the different viewpoints areas, watching the show. A lot of my family were there (cousins and aunts and uncles and the like), plus friends from school and random people I know.

Jason and I were watching, when we both noticed something unusual at the same time. A couple of the lions, who were supposed to have been trained to be part of this show, were slowly slinking away while their trainers were preoccupied with another part of the show. We examined the way they were going and realized that someone had left a gate slightly ajar, and that gate lead right out into the main area of the mall. We took off running, trying to alert someone, but we were pretty much as far away from that gate as we could have been and still been able to see it, so by the time we got down there animals were already escaping. It was a completely ridiculous number of animals too. Hoards of wildcats, bears, and other random vicious creatures were pouring out into the mall and attacking people. At first we tried to help people – I remember pushing a kid out of the way of a lion – and get the gate closed, but soon it was pandemonium and we just ended up running.

We ran through twists and turns, through the labyrinthine mall, with other people running and screaming around us, until we eventually found ourselves in a quiet corner that no one else seemed to have come to. It was a furniture shop, and we went right to the back where there was a large bed with a strange design; it was a bit like a bunk bed, but it only had the one actual bed, raised up a few feet, so that there was a nook underneath with blankets spread out on the floor. We climbed into this nook and had a lay down on the blankets. I remember that, despite what had just happened, we weren’t particularly scared. It was like we knew there was a disaster happening, but we were 100% confident that we two were going to be absolutely fine. The only little blip of worry I had was when I remembered that Adrianna had been in the mall with her great-aunt Nancy, and I started texting, asking if they were okay, but I was very confident that they were fine as well.

Eventually a worker and a customer appeared in the store, seemingly completely unaware of the animal attacks. Jason and I watched from under the bed as they roamed around, looking at different things, until they finally came to the bed we were under and we wiggled out and took off, giggling like schoolkids who’d been caught making out.

There were definite signs of the animal attacks as we roamed back through the mall – dead bodies and blood, for a start – but the emergency itself seemed to be over and everyone was just going about their mall business as though nothing had happened. Jason and I ended up finding the rest of our family hanging out on the top level of the mall, outside a large ice cream shop. We were asked to join them, and a waiter came out to take our orders.

I remember being very confused by this shop because, as near as I could see, almost none of the items on the menu were actually ice cream. There were weird pastries and mugs of things that looked like oatmeal, and strange “desserts” that basically just looked like bowls of some kind of cream. The only actual ice cream I could find was a banana split kind of thing that had chunks of waffle-cone instead of the banana. Jason and my father both ordered one of those, but I ordered some weird pastry thing. When everyone started getting their orders, they were even weirder than the menu implied. My mom’s was a bowl of powder that she had to add hot water to herself. Mine was basically a golf-ball-sized donut-hole-looking thing with cream inside. Only Jason’s and dad’s splits looked good, and they were digging into them so I assume they were good.

I’m not sure exactly what kicked off the second disaster, but I remember running in a crowd of people. None of my family was with me, but I kept noticing people I knew in the crowd as we ran. Old friends from school, new coworkers, etc. As we ran through the maze that was this weird mall, things started getting psychedelic and very, very creepy. The power went out, but there were still strange lights coming from here and there, flashing and making the atmosphere of the place feel like a haunted house. There was screaming and wailing and lots of weird shapes and colors that made me feel like I was on some kind of acid trip or something. I remember seeing my friend Krystle and her boyfriend, running but calling back to me with their hands out like it was imperative that I get to them. Then it got darker and more shadowy, with the occasional flash like lightning, but for the most part I felt like I was running in complete darkness. And as I ran, people around me began to disappear into the darkness, until there were only a few of us left.

The couple of strangers and I eventually found ourselves in something that looked like a daycare center, but in the middle of the room, facing each other in a circle, were four rectangular-shaped splits in reality that looked like portraits of other galaxies. Somehow or other we came to the conclusion that going through one of these portals was our only way to escape the present disaster, so we chose one, and one of the strangers went through. I followed without hesitation, and we found ourselves…

…in, like…a cartoon world. It was bright and colorful and bubbly, and the characters were super-happy to meet us. It was really, really odd, but within the dream I remember thinking that we couldn’t have picked a better portal, because surely nothing bad would happen here.

Any thoughts? Ideas? Concerns? Feel free to share in the comment section below, and also feel free to tell me what you think of dreams in general, what you think their purpose might be, and fell free to share some of your own! Cheers!

Nightmares, Nightmares, & More Nightmares

dreamlog

The past two nights in a row I have been positively plagued by nightmares. Some of them have been of a more emotional kind of terror, some of them have been based in extreme stress, and some have been straight-up monster madness. It’s clear to me that my bedtime horrors are based in a more real-life stress situation, but I thought hell…why not scribble them down? You never know. There could end up being a book in here somewhere.

Nightmare #1:

The terrible dream that got me going two nights ago has mostly faded in my memory now, but I remember the most important bits. My husband was cheating on me. I have no idea how I knew this, as there was no actual action happening in the dream, but I knew it.

The entire dream revolved around my trying to work out how I was going to confront him about it, because I knew he’d deny it, and since I had no proof I’d end up being the one who looked horrible. But I knew it was happening, so it was a dream that basically involved my getting more and more depressed whilst being completely unable to figure out what to do about it.

Nightmare #2:

The second dream of the first night involved a flea market. It was a rather large one, with tons of prospective buyers, and my entire inlaw family was there as well. Jason and I had several tables filled to capacity with old toys and collectibles, kids’ clothes, dishware, and a ton of other stuff.

It doesn’t sound like it should be a particularly stressful situation, but by midway through the dream I’m sure I was sweating in real life. For one thing, it seemed as though I couldn’t keep a grasp on what was going on. There were too many people, there was too much noise, it seemed like the building was moving around on me so that I could never figure out where I was.

I’d step away from our tables for a moment to speak to someone, and they wouldn’t be there when I got back. The layout of the tables changed every time I looked away, so I could never find the items I was looking for. Kids kept showing up, playing with things, and moving them so that they seemed to disappear, and adults kept demanding items that I knew I had, but couldn’t find for the life of me.

On top of all that, it seemed as though everyone was selling except us. Jason didn’t seem particularly bothered as he chatted with friends and helped out at his family’s tables, but I was about to lose it. We’d dragged along enough stuff to fit every square inch of our car, and we hadn’t sold a single item.

Soon enough the flea market was over, and we had to go about packing everything up again. When I began to haul stuff back out to the car, however, I found the back of it positively stuffed with wrapped Christmas presents. Theoretically that should have been a cheerful thing, but it stressed me out even more because now I had no idea how I was going to fit our flea market stuff in there.

I started moving stuff around, trying to make room, and it only seemed to get worse. For some reason I had a bowl of cereal with milk in it back there, and I was absolutely insistent that I had to keep it, so I kept trying to find places to put it where it wouldn’t spill or get knocked over. Meanwhile I had everything moved when my mother-in-law showed up asking for something that she’d left in my car, and now I had to find it among the enormous pile I’d made.

At some point it transpired that the car was actually broken down. The last thing I can remember about this dream was piling a bunch of stuff in a small trailer, which I attached to the back of a 10-speed bike, and I began hauling it through town on just the power of my legs.

Nightmare #3:

The final dream of the first night incorporated a clear fear of rejection. I can’t recall exactly how it had transpired, but I was back in high school and the year had just ended. Prior to grading day there had been a call put out for short stories written by students. They were going to be compiled into a paperback book that would be handed out for free to students and sold in bookstores to everyone else.

I’d submitted a story – one that I was very proud of – and was a ball of energy when I received my copy of the book. Upon flipping through, however, I found that my story was nowhere to be seen. To make matters worse, as I started reading through the stories that were in the book, I found piles and piles of complete nonsense. There were stories that were literally a single sentence, stories that were actually just drawings with no words, stories that were actually just transcriptions of conversations, and much much worse.

I was enraged, and ended up going to the school, where the faculty were finishing up for their last day until summer vacation. I went to the principal’s office – I believe my father was with me but I don’t ever remember him speaking – and I just lost my mind. I was literally screaming at him with tears in my eyes, hurling insults, pointing out the complete and utter tripe that had made it into the book while my story hadn’t. And the entire time all the principal had to say was things like, “That’s unfortunate.”

By the time I left the office I was a trembling mass of rage and misery, but that wasn’t the final insult. I got an email that had apparently been meant only for the principal, but had accidentally been CC’ed to me as well. It was the lady who’d been in charge of the book telling the principal that there was no way I was going to get my way, and she kept referring to me as things like “special snowflake” and “entitled brat”.

Nightmare #4:

On the second night my mind delved into more monstrous terrors, starting with an undead psycho-killer.

It started out simple enough, with a big family get-together at my uncle’s house. It got stressful very quickly, however. My mother and I were driving there together, and it was my turn to drive when night fell. At first there was no issue, but it came to pass quite suddenly that I couldn’t see a damn thing. I was driving about 100 km/hr and all I could see was blackness in every direction. For whatever reason my mother was calm as could be, and at no point did it occur to me to just slow down and stop. I just kept driving, panicking more and more, having no idea where the edge of the road was or whether there were other cars around me.

Eventually, thankfully, small bits of light began to appear here and there and I managed to not kill us.

We arrived at the house, and lots of my other family members were already there. My father had to meet with someone for work related reasons, and the meeting point was just at a park down the road, so I went for the walk with him. The park was on one side of a busy intersection which had an island in the middle of it, and for some reason this seemed like a pleasant place for me to hang out while I waited for him.

I’m a bit fuzzy on exactly what happened next, but I know that a British man with short brown hair and wearing a pinstriped suit murdered a woman. I was evidently the only one who had seen it happen, and I was trying desperately to get information to the police about it, but I didn’t have a phone and couldn’t find anyone. I remember scribbling details on the back of a receipt I happened to have in my pocket as I quickly walked back to my uncle’s house, but at some point I noticed the British man was following me.

There are a few holes in the story here, but evidently he ended up back at the house with me and was acting normal, but at some point he tried to kill me and it transpired that he ended up decapitated. That should have been that, but the head continued to live, and for some ungodly bloody reason my family didn’t see fit to get rid of it or call the police or anything logical at all.

The rest of the dream was basically several members of my family continuing to talk to the head while it used telekinetic means to continue trying to murder me. My family could see this happening and even gave advice from time to time, but did nothing to actually stop it or help me. I can remember him psychically throwing knives, making live electrical wires chase me, and spitting some kind of poison at me. I kept managing to get away, somehow, but I was rightly ready to lose my mind by the end of it.

Nightmare #5:

The second nightmare of the second night actually came right off the heels of the first one. My family and I were still all at my uncle’s house. It was night and all the smaller kids like my daughter and her cousins were huddled up in a blanket fort, watching shows on a tablet. The adults were all either hanging out in the kitchen or sitting in the living room watching TV.

I don’t recall exactly what happened, but some kind of radioactive material (where did it come from? not a clue) spilled on some food and brought the food to life as little murderous zombie-like creatures. It was straight out of a Troma film, and would have been hysterical if not for the fact that it was a very vivid dream that felt very real.

This one gets muddled. I can’t really remember any details, except that every time someone managed to kill one of the little food creatures, more would show up. at some point there were killer tacos, and at another point a giant bag of gummy bears came to life and started swarming the house. It was completely mental, but strangely terrifying. I remember stomping gummies while shoving tacos down a garbage disposal, all the while my family members were running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

Nightmare #6:

And the final nightmare (at least until I find out what tonight has in store for me) was all about your good old fashioned zombies. There was an apocalypse happening, and I was another person entirely. I remember long black hair, and I was pregnant. I also had a toddler, and one of the first things I remember is dragging her out to the car and taking off like a madwoman.

Overwhelmingly most of the dream was actually pretty boring. I was mainly just driving around; every now and then I’d stop for gas or go to a fast food place, and the world seemed to be continuing to turn even though zombies were a constant threat.

The main thing that I recall being so terrifying about this particular dream is that for some reason there was a threat that the baby I was carrying would be born undead, perhaps even rip it’s way out of me itself. I don’t know where this concept came from, but it was a constant horror in the back of my mind throughout the entire dream. I refused to do anything to threaten the baby, but I was waiting for it to murder me from the inside out at any moment.

And so that was the culmination of two nights worth of nightmares. Every one of them, even when they didn’t seem particularly horrible, had me waking up with my heart racing and my stress levels through the roof. In fact, I slept a few extra hours each of these nights because these dreams absolutely exhausted me to the point that I didn’t think I could drag myself out of bed.

Clearly my mind is a wee bit on the stressed-out side, so hopefully I don’t wind up with another batch of these midnight frustrations tonight. If, however, it is what’s in the cards for me, I’ll be sure to share them here tomorrow. You never know what could turn into a story sometime down the line…

Dream Log – July 5th 2018 – Schools & Ghouls

dreamlog

I often wonder what it is about my psyche that causes me to return time and again to school in my dreams. I’ve mentioned before that, rather often, I find myself in a math class, miles behind with no idea of what is happening and virtually no way to catch up. I’d venture that one speaks for itself; clearly it’s a sign of stress and/or feelings of failure/hopelessness. But the threat of flunking my math course isn’t always what brings me back to school, and sometimes what does seems completely random and totally meaningless.

Usually when I dream about school the dream starts with me already in the school, or I’m desperately trying (and failing) to find a way to get to school. Last night’s dream, however, began with me arriving to school – college, to be more precise – in my old Hyundai, the first car I owned. I was trying to find a parking space, and it was entirely more complicated than it should have been. For one thing, I somehow accidentally drove off the road completely and a good thirty feet into a patch of lawn before I even noticed what I’d done. While people pointed and snickered I turned myself around and headed for an area that had free parking, but couldn’t find any spaces, so I was forced to the paid parking area. While there I was extremely confused to see that nearly every car had bandanas folded out and draped across the windshields. For the life of me I couldn’t come up with any explanation as to why people would be doing such a thing.

The rest of my time in the school is disjointed, but I can remember a few particular moments:

walking through the school, looking at all the little shops, coffee places, etc, and thinking that the building was really more of a mall than an educational establishment,
going to the buffet-style cafeteria and sneaking away with a bunch of food – mostly spaghetti and chocolate bars – without paying for it,
having positively no clue what day it was, what my schedule was, or what class I was supposed to be going to,
going to what was supposed to be a Drama course, but when I arrived everyone there was knitting,
chasing a young boy through the halls – I have no idea why – and losing him around every corner,
leaving the school and finding that my car had been blocked in by several of the cars with bandanas on their windshields.

The next thing I remember is being at my husband’s family’s house, but not their real-life one. It was a very old, large house, almost a mansion, that was in various states of disrepair. Some rooms looked immaculate, but then you’d turn a corner and there would be entire walls missing. I was in my husband’s bedroom, which was decorated more or less the way you’d imagine a teenage boy’s room to be, and he had a cage which I noticed was empty. Evidently he had a pet hamster, and it had gone missing. Here my viewpoint changed to that of the hamster, and I watched as it ran through walls and floorboards. Eventually it came to the wall outside it’s cage, and it chewed an enormous hole in it – a hundred times the size it needed to actually fit through – before popping into the cage to have some food. When I was in my own head again I examined the enormous hole and realized I could see straight through to my sister-in-law’s bedroom. She was playing on a computer, and when I yelled to her and pointed out the hole she waved it off as though it was the most unimportant thing in the world. My husband didn’t seem particularly upset either, although he was amused when he realized he’d be able to throw things at his sister through the wall, and we began looking around his room for the best projectiles.

At some point I decided that I was going to take a walk through the house, but I decided to do so by climbing into the wall between the two bedrooms. I wandered through the walls and up a steep incline, which brought me out into a large, dark loft area. In this area there was a very strange display. It was a bit like a separate room with one wall cut out so that you could see inside, and it was propped up like a stage. Inside was decorated to look a bit like you might imagine the hold of a pirate’s ship, and there were animatronic characters all around, frozen in their last positions. I approached, and one of the characters – a woman wearing a pirate’s hat – said something. If you paid me a million dollars I couldn’t tell you what it was she said, but I remember being very freaked out. I stepped away, and she said the same thing again, and when I stepped away further she turned and looked at me and said it again. After the third time I screamed and ran for my life. I found my way back to my husband and sputtered out my story, positively terrified.

The next thing I knew, I was back up in front of the animatronics with my husband, sister-in-law, and several other people, including my ex-boyfriend’s parents, for whatever reason. Someone hit a button and the robots began to move about and speak their lines, and I insisted that the pirate lady had said something different when it was just me there alone, but no one believed me. Someone set out chairs, and the whole crew of people sat down to watch what was evidently some kind of show. The robots were reenacting something that had happened in the past, and there was some kind of trick to the show itself… My memory is fuzzy, but there was a puzzle of some kind that they wanted you to solve by watching the show. My husband figured it out – it had something to do with watching the location of a particular treasure chest – and when he did the pirate lady began to speak again – something about how ghosts don’t need money. Everyone else seemed to think it was all just part of the show, but I was completely freaked out, because I was certain we’d just discovered that the entire set-up was haunted.

Dream Log – March 25 2018 – Zombies and Fast Food Fury

dreamlog

I had an extremely stressful dream last night.

I don’t remember a ton of details, but it starts with a dream I’ve had previously, in which I was part of some kind of military group who sailed down a jungle river and saved a bunch of villagers from an evil dictator. It was rather epic.

In this dream I was getting back together with that group and we were going back out for another mission. For some ungodly reason one of the men on the crew was bringing his daughter – who was about 12 – with us, and her mother was tasking me with protecting her. We met up with them in a mall parking lot at night, and I retrieved the girl from her mother before the two of us walked across the lot to a limo that was going to take us to the seaport. The limo was like a TARDIS – bigger on the inside, with more seats across than a double-wide bus.

I don’t remember actually traveling anywhere, but the next thing we were on some kind of island, and we were running from monsters like zombies. This is where my comprehension of the situation gets a little suspect, because they were like zombies but somehow not quite. They were definitely originally humans, who now wanted to bite and rip us apart, but for whatever reason they just didn’t seem like zombies in my mind. That’s not to say that I wasn’t terrified of them, because I definitely was.

I remember my team and I sprinting for a cruise ship that was boarding, thinking that we’d get on board and escape to sea, but somehow we were blocked from being able to run up the ramp and we had to take off toward the jungle instead. Meanwhile there were tons of people everywhere, but they didn’t seem to notice the zombies, and similarly the zombies didn’t go after them either. Where my crew went, so did the danger.

My memory gets a little fuzzy, but I remember picking my way through the jungle alone, and avoiding the zombies with a number of little tricks. They didn’t seem to be able to see you if you were covered in mud and leaves (Predator, much?), and also didn’t seem to notice you if you stood absolutely still (Jurassic Park tyrannosaurus?). At one point I was hiding between some trees, covered in leaves and mud, when all of a sudden Doctor Grant from Jurassic Park was with me, hissing at me to stay perfectly still. I’d tried to scramble up a hill and was on my hands and knees, but I stopped exactly as I was and stayed there, as still as I could, not even breathing, as a zombie approached me. This is one of my strongest memories from the dream because I remember being absolutely scared stupid, as a zombie crawled toward me, and actually began to crawl over me, all while I was trying not to move even a millimeter. I remember trying so hard not to breathe, but I couldn’t quite manage it, and was in tears thinking that the zombie was going to feel my breaths and chomp down on the back of my head.

I must have survived the encounter, because the next thing I can remember is that myself and a few other people were in this mansion-like house, trying to find places to hide, and failing utterly. The entire complex was like this strange maze, with hallways that went off in every direction, bedrooms leading into other bedrooms, leading into storage rooms, leading into nothing, and all kinds of weird nonsense. I was running around like a lunatic, hiding behind beds, locking myself in bathrooms, and so forth, but somehow the zombies would always find me and I’d have to go sprinting off in another direction. It was sometime around this point that it became evident that the zombies had a leader, of sorts. I know there was something special about her – she was a member of our crew previously, or something like that – but what’s important is that she was also one of these zombie creatures, but was entirely lucid, totally in control of her own mind, and seemed to have the power to control the others. More than anything else that happened before this, I was absolutely terrified of her, and I can remember imagining what she was going to do to me if I let her catch me.

Somehow or other I eventually managed to find some kind of a garage, which actually opened back up to the outside, and I took off into the jungle again.

The rest of the dream is very jumbled. I remember more to do with the zombies, and I recall a bunch of my crew and I jammed in a trailer, hiding together, but a fight broke out. I think I remember something about someone being able to be cured of a deadly bite, and at one point a bunch of us were running for our lives on a beach.

But there was one other thing that happened that I can remember that made no sense in the context of the rest of the dream.

I was in a fast food place. It had a really weird set-up, with the kitchen up against one wall, but the ordering station at an enclosed island in the center of the restaurant. There was a guy in the island taking orders, but there was also a woman going around with a tablet that let you input your order while you waited in line so that you could just pay when you got to the front and be done. At first it all seemed fairly organized, but the woman directly in front of me seemed bewildered by the tablet and ended up holding me up for a while as people poured in behind me As I waited the restaurant got busier and busier, with the line growing and growing behind me, and all the time I was watching my husband and his family in a fair corner, eating away, enjoying their meal, and getting closer and closer to finishing. By the time I got to the front of the line the guy who was manning the cash register wandered off for what felt like forever, and even after he came back he didn’t actually come back to the register. He stood off to the side for a while, chatting with coworkers, then he was playing on his phone for a while, and just in general he wasn’t working at all. As I waited I got angrier and angrier and angrier until I just exploded and started screaming like a lunatic. The cashier was totally calm and unconcerned and didn’t seem to give two shakes of a rat’s ass about what I was saying. I was ranting and raving about how I’d been waiting forever, and how this cashier was a complete ass without the slightest concern for customers, and how I’d now lost the opportunity to have my meal with my in-laws because they’d since finished their food, and I was just screaming and screaming. A manager came out to talk to me, and the cashier, still totally unconcerned, showed up with some food in a bag for me, but I was still just screaming and screaming, totally and utterly enraged with how I’d been treated.

(I suspect that part of the dream may have been just a little bit of wish fulfillment :P)

So those were my two dreams from last night, give or take a few dozen minor details. Any thoughts? Ideas? Concerns? Feel free to share in the comment section below, and also feel free to tell me what you think of dreams in general, what you think their purpose might be, and fell free to share some of your own! Cheers!

Dream Log – March 23 2018 – Muddy Messes & Childhood Home Randomness

dreamlog

The first thing I remember is being at a cabin in the woods with a bunch of my family, and some strangers as well, who were making me uncomfortable. I was a teenager, and the cabin was very similar to my aunt Linda’s house with a large back porch and wooden benches, but the house seemed very old and dirty, with lots of stuff being made of wood or rusty metals. I was not having a good time. I had a real angsty teenager thing going on.

I can’t quite remember exactly what was happening, but I believe there was something along the lines of a couple of kids missing, possibly my cousins. The adults didn’t seem terribly concerned, but I decided that I was going to take it upon myself to go look for them. It was a bit rainy and very muddy out, so I geared myself up in tall rubber boots, and for whatever reason I put plastic bags over top of them. My uncle Rob started teasing me about the bags, and I felt extremely embarrassed, but I did my best to act cool and defend myself, insisting that it was a wonderful plan because this way if I got too dirty I could take a layer off and start over from scratch.

I took off toward the woods with a flashlight, and all the adults were watching me go so I felt extremely anxious. There was a slope that I had to climb up to get to the treeline, and it wasn’t very high or steep, but it was extremely muddy and I kept slipping and falling back down. I was getting more and more frustrated as I kept slipping and falling, and eventually I was pretty much on my hands and knees in the mud, about ready to scream, when a kid came out of the woods, yelling about something that I can’t quite remember now. I just know that he was extremely panicked, and the adults took notice. They were all crowded around the kid, trying to figure things out, while I was still stuck in the mud, struggling. I also vaguely remember something about my uncle tossing cats off a patio. I’m really not sure what was up with that.

At some point the child and one of the adults wandered off into the woods, and I managed to drag myself up out of the mud to follow them. I lost them almost immediately, but soon enough the woods disappeared and I was on some kind of school campus. There was a path that I was following, like I knew exactly where the kid and adult had gone, but I don’t recall what exactly the path was, just that I somehow knew exactly where I was going. I found myself in a classroom where a lecture was happening, and somehow I knew that there was a secret passage in the wall behind a boy who was sitting in the back of the room. Everyone ignored me as I wandered to the back, except for that one boy, who watched curiously as I poked at the wall and eventually pulled out a panel to reveal the passage. It was a kind of vertical tunnel that dropped down, and as I pulled myself into it the boy followed me. I don’t remember having any kind of conversation with him about what was happening, but all of a sudden we were companions, I suppose. We started wandering through these tunnels, which looked a bit like old mine shafts, with thick wooden beams holding everything up.

Eventually we ended up in a room that looked something like Xander’s basement in the first few seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There were stairs leading up, and a hallway leading out into a room that looked much nicer, furnished, with hardwood floors. But for some reason we got stuck in that room. I feel like there was some kind of ghost or monster or something that was attacking us, but I can’t recall any details about what actually occurred.

The next thing I knew it was a bright sunny day and I was traveling to school with some classmates. We didn’t seem to actually know where the school was, but eventually whoever was driving found it, and I recall one of my classmates saying, “Tracey, isn’t this right behind your house?” and I disagreed, but then all of a sudden I was back at my house (my parents’ house), and sure enough, the school was practically right in my backyard, just down a steep hill on the next road over.

Then I was in the house, and I know there were a few other people with me, but I can’t recall who they were. I remember a girl, I think perhaps one of my cousins, and a guy who might have been my husband. My mother was there as well, fluttering around like a lunatic, cleaning everything in sight. We were preparing for some kind of party or something that my mother was throwing, which was apparently going to be several days long. My bedroom had been entirely cleaned out and everything moved to the basement (which was, actually, where I eventually moved in real life), and the other rooms had been meticulously organized as well. The smaller room (which was demolished in real life to make my parents’ room bigger) was some kind of computer room with a futon, and the closet was filled with board games, packed into every inch of the space. I remember thinking that it seemed like a nice little place to hang out in, but I was busy showing my companions around the house.

I took them to the basement, and here my memory of the timeline of events gets very fuzzy. I remember at one point someone teasingly chasing me with something, and me running into the bedroom to hide behind the bed. I remember discussing a sign that my father had posted on the basement bathroom door, which said something along the lines of to not use it because of plumbing issues, but I lamented that, “Mark my words, the kids will come down here and use it. The kids always want to use the bathroom in the basement for some reason.” I also remember trying to do laundry, but there was so much of it that it was falling all over the floor as I tried to jam it in the baskets. And I recall finding a Living Dead Doll that was meant to talk, but it’s batteries had died. We were trying to fix this when we realized that the wires were not designed properly, and that plugging it in to an outer source made the entire thing go extremely hot, like it was going to melt.

The only other thing that I remember is that at one point we were standing at my parents’ back door, and there was a little deer creature – not exactly a deer, but about the same size and shape with bigger ears and weird orange stripes – on the back porch. I turned the lights on so we could see him, expecting that he’d run away, but he kept coming right up to the glass door and poking his nose at me like he wanted me to let him in.