First of all, I’d like to apologize for having such a kickass title for a blog post which is ultimately going to be a big let down. I’m simply going to tell you about the nightmare that I had last night. That’s it.
“But, Bones,” you may be thinking. “I thought you hate when people talk about their dreams!”
Indeed I do. I abhor it. I’d rather you tell me about your explosive diarrhea from last night than your dream from last night. I’ll save my anti-dream rant for another time, but suffice it to say, if you compel me to listen while you mentally and verbally excrete your dream at me, you’re turning me into your personal mental and verbal septic tank. Now I’m stuck with your dumb dream that didn’t actually happen, nor is it even a fiction that you consciously invented. It’s nothing. Gibberish. You might as well just make a series of beeping noises for 10 minutes while looking me dead in the eyes. Oh, and that part where you have to take a pause: “Wait… and then… No wait… Oh yeah, and then…” and I have to sit there while you try to remember the part of the dream that DIDN’T HAPPEN but is critical that I know about?!
I digress. And yes, I acknowledge that I’m being a hypocrite by writing about my own dream, but that’s the great thing about having a blog with no audience. It just doesn’t matter what I write about, friends!
Anyway, the point of this post is to kick off a new project of documenting my nightmares post-nightmare, since I tend to experience them a bit more frequently than normal folks, and it might be fun to see what kind of patterns emerge and what conclusions we can draw about your little blogging buddy here.
The Nightmare Journal.
Hell yeah. Join me, won’t you?
Or, totally feel free to stop reading now and pop back over in a couple days to see my next blog post about a cool crow idea that I have. If that’s your choice, I respect it, and see ya next time!
So anyway, the dream..
I’m in the middle of a party. I don’t remember the details very well, but it must be a college party or something. I vaguely recall there being people from my past, so I guess I’m a college student at the beginning of my dream. Then I say something to someone, and, bang!, I’m now standing in a basement.
I don’t think whatever I said (and don’t remember) caused me to teleport into a basement. I think whatever I said at the party, and the party itself, were completely irrelevant to the basement part of the dream. I think it was just bad dream editing.
So, I’m now in the basement for some reason. It’s a big unfinished basement, and it’s my basement. Definitely mine. Despite the fact that I’ve not lived in a house with a basement in the non-dreamworld since I lived with my parents in the early 90s. But apparently I have a big ass unfinished basement in the dreamworld.
The basement is divided into different “rooms”, but not divided by walls, just vertical 2x4s. A shitload of vertical 2x4s forming the skeleton of rooms that are yet to be covered by drywall. Just a bunch of wooden skeleton walls. The whole thing looks and feels a lot like the interior of the warehouse in the book JUDY that I wrote, coincidentally (did you read it yet?).
I wonder why this visual of a large unfinished interior space with skeleton walls keeps popping into my mind’s eye (Note: this is the regular non-dream version of me pontificating right now. I wasn’t actually thinking about all this in the dream).
As I’m typing this, a childhood memory actually just popped up of me playing in a friend’s unfinished basement that contained, I think, a couple unfinished rooms framed by wooden 2×4 walls. And, at some point, a chair on wheels came rolling across the basement towards me. I knew even at the time that there was nothing weird about it, and one of the other kids in the basement had just pushed it towards me, but I don’t recall actually seeing the kid who did it, and I do recall thinking that it was a terrifying moment and it really did scare the shit out of me.
So maybe that one memory is burned into my brain, leading to an image of skeleton walls popping up decades after its origin. And hell, maybe that scary ass rolling chair was the inspiration for the chair in JUDY.
Then again, that childhood memory could also be a false memory entirely. It could very well have just been a dream from decades ago. Or maybe I dreamed that I dreamt it in another dream. Maybe last night’s dream. God damn, we’re getting recursive here. But ain’t it cool? See, I knew this would be a fun exercise!
Ok, back to last night’s dream. I’m standing in the middle of the basement, surrounded by skeleton walls. I’m down here because I’m supposed to be getting something to take back upstairs. I don’t remember what it was. It’d be weird if it was a chair. Apparently my dream didn’t care if I found it or not, because I’m already ready to exit the basement. And I think at this point I might even be feeling a little creeped down here. It is a basement after all, and every basement carries some shade of creepy, right?
I’m now at the foot of the stairs that lead back up to the rest of the house and I flip the switch to turn off the basement light. The basement goes dark, except for a single light in one of the “rooms.” Now I’m even more creeped out, because I’m going to have to navigate my way through the dark basement to get to the light switch in that one wooden skeleton room that has an illuminated light bulb hanging in the middle of it.
Apparently I’m a bit dim (pardon the pun) in the dream world, because I should just flip back on the switch next to me there in the stairway to light up the rest of the basement and reduce the scare factor. But I don’t. Instead I just find my way through the dark over to the “room”, which is kind of like a wooden cage, locate the lightswitch, and flip it off, leaving me now in total darkness.
Quick note from non-dream me again. A large unfinished pitch black space full of skeleton walls? Ok, this is straight out of my book. So, either my dream stole from my book, or my memory of my dream is now getting confused and it’s remembering my book instead of my dream. Weird.
Oh, and sorry to keep blabbing about my book. This is not supposed to be an ad.
Back to the dream. I’m now walking up the staircase with the pitch black basement behind me. I don’t recall if me traveling from the “room” to the staircase in the pitch black was part of the dream, or if it was just another bad dream edit that awkwardly plopped me here on the stairs. But the scariness factor is now at its highest level for some reason. The dark basement has really got me spooked and I can’t shake the feeling that something is actually down there. Something that wasn’t there when the lights were on.
I keep pulling myself up the stairs and I’m almost to the door at the top. But that… something… is definitely down there, and it doesn’t seem to want to stay put. I should just run through the door and slam it behind me and entrap whatever that something is. But of course, I can’t do that in this dream. So I turn around to see what’s below me at the foot of the stairs.
It’s a long dark way down from where I stand. I can’t even see the bottom of the stairs. It’s too goddamn pitch black. But wait, it’s not a true black. Not about half way down the stairwell. It’s more of a, well, a static. Like a black cloud of static just floating within the blackness in the stairwell above where the stairs would be, if I could see them.
My anxiety and fear have peaked. The adrenaline rush of fight or flight is flooding my brain. I’m staring at the cloud of static and I’m trying to determine if it’s the something that I know is down there, or if the something is about to come through it. But it’s too much for me and I start screaming at it. Just standing at the top of the stairwell in the dark, screaming at a cloud of static.
In the dream I’m screaming hysterically. In the non-dream, I’m making more of a low, long moaning sound. Uhhhhhhhhhh… My wife in the non-dream gives me a slight calming pat on the back to snap me out of it. She’s pretty used to this. She rolls back over and goes to sleep (and didn’t even remember it in the morning). I lay there for a while, wide awake, trying to remember that party that started the dream because I think it was kind of a rager and I’m a 50 year old man in the non-dream and ragers are pretty rare these days, so it’d be cool to get back into it and maybe do a keg stand or something.
Then I think that instead I’ll try to remember the scary part and I’ll write it down in my blog the next day, and before getting into the dream details in the blog post, I’ll need to explain that I hate when people talk about dreams and why it’s ok that I’m about it do it, and then I fall back asleep.
And thus concludes The Basement, the first episode in the Nightmare Journal. More to come, I’m sure!
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