I just had the first legitimate nightmare that I can remember having since I was five and dreamed that an innocent, happy Ken doll turned into a giant black snake and swallowed the Barbie doll to whom he'd been speaking. I'm not used to having nightmares. My dreams are normally action-packed, violent and exciting. There are explosions, leaps from tall buildings, swordfights, gunfights, knifefights, fistfights, but there is never an accompanying sense of fear. Tonight is different for some reason. FYI: After finishing writing the story of my dream there still seem to be small bits and pieces missing. I apologize for that, but it is still a cohesive(ish) story, so I'm publishing it here on m'blog anyways.
Dream:
I came home, entering through the door in the entry way that leads out to the garage. It was early afternoon and sun was gently streaming through our small octagonal window. Small motes of dust spun lazily in the bar of sunshine, the only movement in all the house. No one else was supposed to be home.
I walked down the stairs and noticed that the tub (that we don't actually have against the wall by the computer in the family room) was full of water. Inside was also what I would later discover through dream ESP was my grandmother. Her face was missing. I drained the tub, getting the impression that, although she didn't have a face anymore, she was still alive. I went to my room to get something to help her. Returning moments later, empty handed but prepared to help, I found that the tub was full of dark, gray colored water again. This time I knew she was dead. With a very slight pang of fear (the kind of "fear" I feel in most dreams like these: that insignificant excitement that is nothing more than a slight adrenaline rush) I realized that the killer was still in the house and that I might have the opportunity to catch it.
In my room again, I heard a noise and saw a flash of color, like a red cloth being shaken out, in the hallway outside my door. Curious, I quietly walked out into the hall. There she was, mere feet away from me, a tall blond stranger with a large hooked nose and smallish chin. Her face was narrow and worn slightly with age; she was probably in her early 40s. She was folding a green towel. Showing no fear of embarrassment at being caught in a house where a murder had just been committed, she looked at me evenly. I stared back and asked why she had done what she had done. (Magic dream transition)
We were upstairs, where Mum, Matt and Evie were handcuffed, sitting on or standing near the couch. The killer told me she thought it had been for love. She said that sometimes a person loves someone more than they would have ever thought possible, but they are denied that love and it eats away at them. The only way they can confront that denied emotion is to let it out in some way. I nodded and cited Ted Bundy and other random serial killer names to agree with her. Other than feeling slightly uncomfortable that my entire family was handcuffed while I roamed free with our serial killer, I enjoyed talking to her and didn't want her to leave. Everything she said was intriguing and much of what she said resonated with me in some way, even if I would never consider killing people to let an unrequited love breathe.
I worried that my family would look at me badly after this encounter because of my desperate questions and the relative cool with which I addressed what we now knew was a serial killer. Matt cleared his throat and held out his hands. The woman nodded and uncuffed him, my sister and my Mother and then started for the door. We all crowded around the top of the stairs, as we tend to do when a person is leaving our home, and waved goodbye to her. Now it was my family's turn to reek of normalcy and I took on the burden of fear.
I broke down. I collapsed to the floor, dry sobbing as soon as the woman left. I almost wondered if I was faking the emotion at first, in an attempt to convince my family that the coldness they'd seen before wasn't indicative of what I felt on the inside. The door re-opened and there she was again, mask removed and the red muscle of her face accented by the new, deranged clown makeup she had started to apply to her face. There were two white diamonds painted around her eyes and her lips were painted a bronze that was eerily close in color to the red of the underside of her face. Smiling hugely, she picked up a small item she had left in the entry way and exited again. She was disgusting. I had tried to re-gather myself in her presence so she wouldn't think I was fazed, but without success. Already my eyes were pink and my hair askew from my pulling fretfully at it. She knew she had gotten to me, which made her trip to our house all the more succesful.
I made my way downstairs and curled up on my bed, but I couldn't sleep. Terrible images kept flashing through my mind, but not of the gore. The gore wasn't so scary as the fact that I had conversed with her like a normal human being. Her evil wasn' so bad as my receptiveness to it. I stood, mind alternatively sputtering and reeling, and began to walk up the stairs. Halfway up the first flight I stopped myself, grasping the handrail for support, and turned down again. I couldn't face my family.
Down in my room again, curled in a ball in the corner, I recalled a dream I'd had quite some time ago (but I recalled it as a reality because I was in my dream world) and I realized that she had been to our home before, and had committed atrocities then as well. I staggered out my door again, leaning on furniture for support, I made my way back upstairs and tried to convince my family that we had to change our locks, that we had to prevent her coming into our home again. They also remembered my dream-memory, but wrote off the need for locks and better security with the decidedly illogical logic that:
"She probably has a key anyway."
There was no point in trying to get around it. We would just have to be very aware all the time. I felt like Job. I tore at my hair and my clothes and invisible tears flew down my face as my stomach twisted itself into terrible knots and my mind ran in useless circles. I was afraid in a way that I have never been in a dream and will hopefully never be in real life. I was convinced that she was coming back and would kill me in the same terrible way she'd done my grandmother and, moreso, I was still petrified of my initial friendliness with this lady. I was afraid of the implications that spawned and I was afraid that I wouldn't just die if she came and tore my face off. I would become like her, her unwilling (or perhaps enthusiastic) apprentice. God knows there's enough unrequited love in my life to start my killing spree if that's all it takes.
The doorbell rang. I looked out the window and there were pandas flouncing in the snow. Suddenly more terrified than ever I ran back upstairs, this time managing to find my feet and run with relative coordination. The door was open and I could see two of them standing there behind the glass door. Making it into my Mum's office upstairs I looked out the window, where I could see the pandas more clearly. Two or three were playing in the snow, wrestling and laughing airy, panda laughs. Two were standing at the door and they had a huge golden box at their side. Convinced that they were also murderers of some kind, probably bombers, based on the box they carried with them, I refused to admit them.
I started screaming shrilly at everyone in the house not to get the door by way of "No fucking pandas, no fucking pandas" and I ran up and down the stairs, quite properly wigging out. One of the pandas, this one actually a human person in a costume saw me and reached out to open the door. I slammed it back on them, now convinced they were indeed dangerous criminals because one had taken the initiative to open the door, probably thinking it should assist what seemed to be a DERANGED PSYCHOPATH (me).
Still only screaming "no fucking pandas" I continued to run about my house, pulling at my hair and looking the very image of a crazy person as the rest of my family sat passively by. The only reaction I got from any of them was a general sense of disproval from my mother at my use of the f-bomb.
