You must be dreaming

I'm a dreamer, but not in the John Lennon, save-the-world sort-of way. I don't claim to dream about the future or alternate realities. I DREAM. I go to sleep and something in my brain lights up like a Christmas tree! I envy the people who say they don't dream.

On very special occasions I have knock your socks off crazy messed up dreams and nightmares that are so vivid that the details become permanently etched in my visual cortex.

When I was about 3 years old I had a terrible nightmare that I was creeping through a large aluminum cistern filled with sleeping bats. When one of the meanest and ugliest of them awoke, he began to chase me, calling after me. "I'm gonna getchya, and when I getchya, I'm gonna eatchya!" I screamed and a hand reached out of a trapdoor in the ceiling and pulled me out just as the bat (now turned hideous bloodsucking monster beyond description) was nipping at my Mary Janes.

When I was eight, I had a dream about a soldier's ghost that desperately needed me to do something about his grave because it was under a road and that didn't rest well with him. Somehow in my dream the road was moved, and that seemed to please him. In the dream, he was haunting an old antiques shop that my mother had once brought me to in order to buy a skeleton key for our old farmhouse. Years later I told the story to a friend who said that house was well known to be haunted by a British Redcoat from the war of 1812. (Cue Twilight Zone music)

I am living proof that when you die in your dream, you don't die in real life. I have dreamt of being shot in the back, having my throat slit, drowning, and even falling out of a 20 story window and hitting the ground before I woke up. If you die in your sleep its not because of what you dream.

I've also had a dream where I was hunting an axe murderer who was terrorizing a slumber party I was having, only to find out at the end that the axe murderer was me. Imagine my surprise when I chopped one of my friends into little tiny pieces!

A couple of years ago I had the most f'd up dream ever.

I was standing in front of my highschool with some friends of mine smoking cigarettes and watching yellow buses blow by us. I had just handed a friend of mine a small piece of jewelery, a pearl on a chain that I had taken for worthless. It was an overcast day. The clouds were hanging low in the sky. My friend pointed suddenly to a black spot that appeared like a scorch mark on one of the clouds. Soon I noticed that it was no spot at all, but a massive black spider gripping the clouds with his long beetle like legs... but no, it WAS a beetle suddenly and it was spreading its black wings getting ready for flight. Then as it began to descend it morphed into a monstrous black bird with a 50 foot wingspan. As it glided towards the grounds of the school, the students around me began to scream and run in all directions. But I stood there. The bird was nearing the ground, and I could feel the wind of its great wings on my face. That's when I saw the rider on its back. I couldn't tell if it was man or woman. But you can bet the rider wore all black, and rode holding on to the reins with only one hand. The other, of course, held a gleaming sword pointed at the sky.I knew what it wanted.

I called to my friend to return the small pearl-pendant but she was gone. I turned back, and just as the bird reached the ground it morphed again into a giant black mastiff (not unlike the sort of dog that Sigourney Weaver turns into at the end of GhostBusters, except WAY bigger), the rider still perched on its back - sword in hand pointed at me, the only person still standing in the vicinity. I was more curious than scared, and as I marveled at this fact, taking pride in my own bravery, I woke up.

I've thought about what this dream may mean, but I think I'd rather not know and simply sell the idea to a heavy metal band interested in a concept for a music video. Any takers?

Sweet Dreams!

G