Spooky Dreams

I dreamed about a young gay guy who… the earlier parts of the dream are vague now—I think he was out and about in a city.

Toward the end of the dream, he meets a drag queen and has a crush.

Next they’re at his house—it’s the first time we see inside his house, and it’s surprising.  There’s a huge room in which the walls are painted black and standing here and there throughout the room are glass display cases containing things. At least two items are manikin heads wearing the face masks of famous drag queens.  The first one is printed in a lively blue and yellow pattern.

Next—maybe the same dream or a different one—a drag queen meets my fictional character Roland, and he wants to learn how to tuck so he can be Doctor Frankenfurter for Halloween. So they go onto a dressing room, where the drag queen hits on him.

Next a couple of friends are watching behind a tree in horror in a dark forest—it looks like nighttime—and Roland and one other person are staggering down a path through the woods. The friends seeing this know they’re under the spell of so-and-so (presumably the drag queen). This person has a magical or hypnotic ability.

Napping:

I dreamed about a corrupt lab. It was kind of office-like, with multiple rooms. All white—floors, walls—solid white.

An employee in the lab displeased the people in charge, so they did what they normally did in such circumstances: everyone else gets out of the lab and leaves that one person behind. They flip a switch. Along one wall, a screen gradually goes up, and from behind the screen is this glowing orange light… orange or light blue. That light kills the person.  Radiation?

So it worked on one person. I’m not sure whether they intentionally left this one other person in there, someone who looked like they might be a somewhat humanoid mouse. The mouse person ran away from the light and hid in another room.

Next, a guy who worked in the lab returned for something. The mouse person—who I think was now a man—was hiding in a back room.

The lab worker saw the noise guy, but the noise guy stepped forward and began to strangle him. The lab guy was shocked and didn’t try too hard to protect himself. The mouse guy continued strangling him… still strangling him… got on top of him… may have grabbed a large piece of plastic sheeting and tried to smother him with it.

Bad Dreams

I dreamed that I went into the restroom at I think a rest stop, and there were three women in their 60s in there chatting and putting on makeup at this row of little booths.

One of them insisted that I should put on makeup–I think she was making fun of me for not being into such things and for being “square.” Hmmm, how Asshole Audrey of her. And I think they were laughing at me.

Weirdly, instead of just ignoring them and leaving, or rolling my eyes at them and leaving–as I would have in real life–I wanted to prove them wrong about me. As if it mattered what they thought of me! So weird.

I went up to one of the little… cubbies… and put powder on the left side of my face–the side they couldn’t see–and at this point they were ignoring me. There were little brown plastic cups into which makeup brushes were sticking up, and I grabbed one and dipped it into powder. I didn’t know how to put that crap on and was alarmed at the results of the makeup—it was a mess of powder on my face. I hastily started smearing it around and even though I figured you’re not supposed to use your hands, there was so much of it that I ended up using my hands to spread it out all over my face. I was uncomfortable with the entire process, embarrassed, and aware that this wasn’t me.

 

I vaguely recall a dream that combined the Doctor Who novel I’m reading with the coronavirus pandemic. Ace was trapped in a strange place and aware of the need for social distancing.

Nightmares during a Pandemic

I dreamed that I lived in a large Victorian Queen Anne house in a fairly rural area. The house had a wrap-around porch and a stone foundation with a basement. Because the house was built on a slope, the basement had an exterior side door.

At some point I had a visitor who was a friend.

Toward the end of the dream, I heard people on the front porch. I was in the basement and didn’t want to talk to them. I wanted to hide. I slipped out of the basement side door without locking it and ended up… where? Under the front porch? On the porch? It seems like I ended up on the wrap-around porch, which doesn’t make sense if I was trying to avoid people whom I thought were at the front door.

Wherever I was, I witnessed a group of about six people slip in through the basement door I left open! They were breaking into my house.

Enraged, I went after them.

I went into the basement and grabbed a long piece of wood leaning against a wall and, yelling, “Get out of my house!” or something like that, charged at one man. A struggle ensued, with me pushing his throat and him against the wall while the others watched (or ran away?).

A male friend or acquaintance of mine came up behind me and tried to be the voice of reason, I guess. He said, “Don’t kill him! You’d end up in prison!” I just felt angrier.

 

I dreamed that my brother and I were in a car in a parking lot. We were having a conversation… and we may have been talking about the past, when we lived in Indiana.

He said something about Britney Spears. Confused, I knit my brow and said, “But… I don’t think Britney Spears was around in the 80s.”

Completely out of the blue, he yelled at me—how typical—I don’t remember what. His rage made no sense and creeped me out (what else is new?). He got out of the car.

I recovered from my shock enough—only after the asshole got out of the car—to become enraged and, giving him the finger with both hands and yelling repeatedly… well, something very vituperative that I won’t repeat hear. He ignored me

 

(Last night I was revising one of those autobiographical novels inspired by toxic people. That could well have triggered that dream, even though it was a different perpetual playground  bully. I am so sick of empathy-challenged perpetual playground bullies who harbor a bizarre delusion that they’re entitled to use me as their doormat/verbal and psychological punching bag and that it’s somehow magically my duty to be their doormat/punching bag. I was sick of them before the 1980s ended.

Nightmarish Dreams

I dreamed I was at a large, very plain and white library… or museum… with s female friend. For a library, it certainly didn’t have many visible books.

In a large white room, I was standing in front of something like a white podium, and it was my intention to be doing research. But I didn’t like how this library worked and complained aloud, in a moment of exasperation and impatience.

Suddenly a male voice over an intercom—the staffer whom I’d met in the front lobby—was verbally attacking me over an intercom or PA system. He was somehow able to hear me. I replied in kind, and he replied and proceeded to shower me with nonstop insults, accusations, and threats over the PA system for all to hear.

I needed to leave immediately. The friend and I were going to slip out a side door. She reminded me that he had my keys—you hand them over when you show up at this place—and according to her, I needed to go get them myself… although I wanted her to get them for me, so I wouldn’t have to see this verbally abusive asshole again.

And that’s how the dream ended.

 

I dreamed that I was supposed to meet up with a queer Latinx male friend, a petite guy, at a restaurant. So I was in a back room of this restaurant waiting for him… and he didn’t arrive. I felt abandoned.

Eventually, I went to the front of the restaurant… and to the front door… and he was out there waiting to meet me. I was so appalled that it didn’t occur to me to wait out front instead of in back. We talked for a bit, but the hour had passed, and he couldn’t stick around.

 

In another unpleasant dream, I was across the street from a low, glass, L-shaped 1960s building. I recognized it and associated it with the Buddhist book discussion group from which I recently dropped out, thanks to a bully. This gave me aversion. As I watched, I spotted both the organizers of the Buddhist book group approach the building’s door. I froze. They spotted me and kept looking at me. I felt dread and aversion, maybe even panic, although emotions are generally muffled in dreams compared to real life.

Poltergeist

I dreamed I was staying at an old house with another woman, and we sat in a big room with white or off-white walls and a long, dark brown table. In this dream’s reality, I had attempted to comfort ghosts in my parents’ house the last time I was there (or in this house), by walking into rooms and calmly, quietly, and gently talking to them… but this had riled up the ghosts. Maybe they became like poltergeists. While the other woman and I sat talking, this came up in conversation, and I felt disappointed and guilty for having had that effect on the ghosts.

She was going to do a chore that involved filling a metal basin with water, but I offered to do it for her, and she agreed. So I took this metal basin…actually, it was sort of oval and had a white interior bottom and a handle, more like an old pot than a basin. I took it into a sparsely-furnished living room with a large fireplace. (This house seemed like it dated to the eighteenth century, like my dollhouse, and was probably in one of the original thirteen states).

I approached the fireplace, or at least, some sort of wide alcove like a fireplace. I hung the basin from a hook/string in front of the fireplace, as the other woman was going to do. There was a string or something like string. It was supposed to run parallel to the floor for a few feet, from the metal bucket. So I did all that, set it up as she would.

But as I backed away to return to the other room, the bucket followed me. It levitated. I backed away, and it floated through the air anywhere I went. I may have squawked, and I ran toward the room where we had been talking. I didn’t know what to do, and I figured that since she lived here and was presumably accustomed to this ghost, she would help.

The dream ended with me running around, chased by a ghost making that pot float around.

Islamaphobia sneaked into my dreams

I had a dream in which the government was so anti-Muslim that they were doing raids on homes.

I was an adult daughter in a family that lived in an apartment…or apartments that were next to each other, and we were Muslims.

My mother was hastily taking certain items, things that looked Islamic, and hiding them. I went into another room and started doing the same with figurines and stuff of mine. My sister noticed what I was doing and suggested I hide them in a certain place. She was lounging with a book in a little room–it looked like her bedroom–right outside the kitchen, the room where I was hiding stuff.

I didn’t trust her. At this stage, my items were on a wheeled tray just around the corner from her room, and she’d seen me put things there. While I knew she wasn’t looking, I began hiding my items inside a secret cupboard in the back of a kitchen cupboard. My sister didn’t know about that hiding place. I hadn’t finished doing this, when I heard banging on the front door and knew raiders were there to search our house.

Before that, I had a dream inspired by V. S. Schwab’s novel The Near Witch. There was a moor and a lot of strong wind.

Bad Dreams

I dreamed about a communal home, similar to that in my Nanowrimo novel, but the home was a large cave. Even though it was a cave, it had many rooms.

There was some drama. A tall young man found out that he didn’t belong at that communal home and had to move out. (That wouldn’t likely happen in the world of my novel, since it isn’t exclusively extended family.)

*

I had the front door closed and was expecting someone evil to arrive and try to get in.

He arrived and was yelling at me through the door. I knew that in order to make him completely vanish from this world, I had to throw salt at him. So even though the person who’d left a bit ago warned not to open the door, I grabbed a bag of salt and hesitantly opened the door very slightly.

Of course, he took that as an excuse to grab the door and my wrist and to try preventing me from throwing salt at him. He was young, short, skinny, and blond. He was manipulative and accusatory in a way reminiscent of Asshole Audrey. Because he had my wrist, I was having trouble trying to throw the salt–I was holding the bag with one hand and needed the other to throw it. He was a demon or something.

While he was yelling at me and holding my wrist, I exclaimed, “I just opened the door to throw salt out to protect the house!” As though I thought that if I explained this, he’d leave me alone.

 

I dreamed something involving an evil…entity or villain with a laugh similar to that of the Shadow from the old radio show. Orson Wells. Or maybe that wasn’t the villain although this sinister one was threatening and maybe blackmailing.

The opponent looked like Donald Sutherland in the 1970s and was suave and confident, not letting the other one have the satisfaction of intimidating him.

First, the laughing one came and yelled for his attention…in front of an open garage door, maybe?

But next, the setting was the top of a boat with really loud music, like a party was supposed to be happening, although there appeared to be no more than four people present. The boat seemed to be on land and surrounded by jungle.

Demonic laugh looked around… and Donald Sutherland appeared, wearing a dark blue or black velvet smoking jacket with dark trousers and an ascot. He was looking elegant and calm, with hands in his pockets as he casually strolled toward his opponent.

As if I haven’t had enough Gaslighting

Every woman and girl in every patriarchal country has been gaslighted since the day she was born. The past two weeks have been a nightmare, not unlike being in an abusive relationship.

Today I realized that, emotionally, the past two weeks have felt like being in an abusive relationship.

The abuser in this relationship is the Senate judiciary committee. The abuser is the government of this fucking country, which has told every woman and girl, and every survivor of sexual harassment, sexual assault, or rape, that they don’t matter and that they are invalid. It has told yet another sexual predator that he’s so fucking valid that he’s fucking entitled to be on the Supreme Court, taking away women’s reproductive rights.

This calls for a REVOLUTION.

Facebook had an event on September 27: a rally in Portland, in support of Christine Blasey Ford, across from the courthouse. It began at noon, and I didn’t get organized in time to leave by 10 am…so I posted a comment on the event page.

“It’s too late for me to drive the 2 hours, so instead of attending, I’ll be revising a story about sexual harassment. But I’ll be with you in spirit.”

Just this morning–days later–an entitled male troll fucking reacted with a “laughing face” and commented, “What do you mean revise? Make stuff up?”

I became so furious that my hands were shaking as I typed. At first, I was going to reply before blocking the fucking piece of shit, but I remembered my usual policy of not replying to trolls. I didn’t want this smug and arrogant misogynist and possible sexual predator to have the satisfaction of thinking he’d succeeded. So I deleted what I’d started to write with very shaky hands, blocked the parasite….yelled KILL ALL MISOGYNISTS a few times, and then found the event again and posted this comment:

“The only good troll is the one under the Fremont Bridge. “Revising” doesn’t fucking mean “making stuff up.” It means revising, asshole. As in adding more details. Your attempts to gaslight and invalidate me only prove that you’re devoid of any redeeming quality.”

 I then posted a variation onto my Facebook page:

“The only good troll is the one under the Fremont Bridge.

“Revising” an autobiographical story about sexual harassment doesn’t fucking mean “making stuff up.” It means revising, asshole. As in ADDING MORE DETAILS. Your attempts to gaslight and invalidate me only prove that you’re devoid of any redeeming quality.

And I really, really enjoyed blocking your evil, soulless, entitled ass.”

As a fiction writer, I do indeed make things up. I look forward to writing a story in which a group of vigilante feminists chop rapists, sexual predators, the politicians who gaslight us and reward sexual predators, and gaslighters. At the very least, I could post it on a fan fiction site as Dietland (by Sarai Walker) fan fiction.

Campus Dream/ House Dream

I was a grad student and was in a classroom full of students. The instructor was a middle-aged Tibetan man (I’m currently reading a travel memoir). Someone announced a protest march on campus, and people started leaving the room. I was confused, because nobody said where or when to meet for the march. I was slow and one of the last people in the room–everyone packing their backpacks and rustling and bustling–and finally I asked someone a question such as what’s going on or where do we meet. The person, I think a young male student in black, looked at me like I was an idiot and just repeated the info that there’s a March. He glared at me suspiciously. ‘You are attending, aren’t you?”

“Yes, of course!”

I wandered through the building and saw other students hurrying away.

Next I dreamed that I bought a large, quirky, somewhat old, two-story house out of pocket. Inside the new house, I found a sort of hidden crawl space…where there were a lot of things still inside, bags and boxes and a big fake gargoyle that startled me when I first came across it.

While I was looking through stuff, I suddenly remembered the political march and felt guilty that I was missing it and wondered if I could join it in time. (There was no break between dreams, and this suggests that the campus dream and the house dream were one and the same.)

While looking around the house and going through stuff, I talked on the phone with my mother, who informed me–she didn’t ask permission–that she and some other relatives were moving into my house.

Upstairs, I had an odd bedroom–at least, the long, narrow bathroom attached to it was odd. It was covered in tiny yellow glass mosaics and included a curved corner cabinet that swung open near the door to the room. Right next to that was a closet where I had several bright calico tunics hanging.

I took off my shirt and began putting on two of the tunics together, when I heard a door opening and voices; family members were as already there, at least my dad and brother.

I was anxious to be neatly and fully dressed before anyone found me; I was struggling to button up the multiple tunics (or shirts) I was wearing.

Soon a bunch of relatives were stomping around the house and claiming their bedrooms. It was harrowing. My brother and dad were okay so far as I was concerned, but my mother, Aunt Asshole and Uncle NRA, and Batshit Aunt Bev were all invading and claiming bedrooms without my permission. I was in shock and wanted to enjoy my new home. They somehow already had beds and other furniture in “their” rooms in no time, and one of them was lounging in a queen-size bed and watching a loud tv. The evil relatives paid pretty much no attention to me. Remorseless, empathy-less, and self-entitled as ever. They had absolutely no permission to invade and move into my new home, obviously.

After seeing them and hurrying back to the big empty room with the odd crawl space, I was able to begin thinking. I reminded myself: I bought this house for myself and for my cats. I didn’t invite these monsters. I don’t owe them anything—quite the contrary, they owe me my mental health, self-esteem, etc. (okay, admittedly, this last sentence wasn’t actually in the dream and just occurred to me). They had no right to take over my house.

My brother joined me, and what may have started as an internal monologue became a conversation with him. He agreed with me but was passive and probably wouldn’t do anything to help; I knew I had to do it all myself, but I didn’t know what to do. They’d already moved in! They had their furniture already in my house! I was freaking out. As large as the house was, there’s no way in hell that I was going to live with these nightmarish monsters. This was yet another betrayal.

At some point in the dream, I was showing my brother my quirky bathroom, swinging out the curved corner cabinet and all. Most of the house wasn’t painted—indeed, most of it, from what I remember, was wooden and the color of unpainted wood, even the walls (which, realistically, would be plaster).

A striking element of the dream was that my parents were still both alive, but that often happens in my dreams. Sometimes I dream that even though I’m an adult, I’m living with or moving in with my parents.

Because of the toxic relatives, what should have been a happy dream turned into a nightmare. Of course, something like that wouldn’t really happen, because I’d be at the door locking it before the monsters could get a single foot through the door, and I wouldn’t care if one of them ended up with a broken foot. Realistically, the front and back doors wouldn’t have been unlocked while I was upstairs looking around. Post-2002, I wouldn’t have let such toxic relatives have a key to my house.

Just recently I was thinking about how two evil aunts stole a house from me… but the joke is on them, because I now have a bigger house that’s far away from any evil relatives and that has absolutely no associations with toxic relatives. A home is supposed to be a haven—not to mention a home rather than only a house—and the house an uncle left me was never truly my home and haven, thanks to toxic relatives breaking in whenever they pleased. (I’m sure that if I were the same person then as I am now, I would have changed the locks and thus prevented Evil Aunt Ethel from breaking in…well, except for the fact that she was usually my cat sitter.) Not only do none of them have a key to my house, but they’re not invited (and some of them are deceased now). When I think of putting a “no soliciting” sign in my front window, I also think of adding: “No sociopaths, no narcissists, no fundamentalist xians, no creepers, no trespassers, no meth addicts, no assholes of any sort, especially not manipulative assholes.” In short, such thoughts probably helped to conjure that dream. Something else that influenced the dream: I’m often distracted by my home and cats (that’s my family) and haven’t been to a political rally or march in a while. I need balance.

Family Nightmare

I had a nightmare in which I was watching a film based on one of the Worst Frenemy in the Galaxy’s favorite novels.

The nightmare was about a family in which at least one of the kids was an adopted teenager. The type of film looked like something used in the 1960s, and it all took place at the family’s house. At first it was pretty mundane, but it turned dark quickly. Two adults, I think the mother and the eldest son, were conversing in what I think was the dining room (a large, simply-furnished and minimalist room with a long, natural wood table and benches in the center). Off to the right was a wide and short set of a few steps leading down into this room from another room.

Curled up on those steps was a teen girl. The mother and son eventually noticed, and one of them coldly asked, “What’s wrong with her?”

Next thing: the girl’s clearly dead…and her severed head is lying a few feet ahead of her body.

Next, we see another teen girl who is a member of the family, and she has longish blond hair and a somewhat round face…on which she has removed some layers of skin. She’s sobbing, and she’s sitting on the same kind of steps (as though the body vanished) and before her is a large paper plate full of a white powder, which I immediately knew to be poison. She’s eating it. She puts the plate down, and a fluffy orange cat and perhaps also a toddler comes along and licks the plate and drops dead.

Amid all this, I was a horrified viewer and find myself wishing I never saw this and thinking, Trust that frenemy to be into something so sick and insane. I may have made a mental note to avoid anything she was into. I certainly would have in this reality!

 

I dreamed that I had a new house and it was all my own. I didn’t paint any of the rooms but kept the colors someone else had painted it, and it was odd. I had nice hardwood floors, but at least one room had graffiti walls, and a living room had greyish-yellow walls. There were no curtains. I’d been sitting in a room I thought of as the back living room.

I had an urge to do some redecorating, because I noticed that one room had an awful lot of empty space. I looked around and tried to figure out what were the color schemes of certain rooms. I had several old couches that had been at my parents’ house and that were somewhat worn out. One was a green loveseat in the back living room, which was part kitchenette or kitchen nook… but in which I had the loveseat and a yellow armchair where most people would have put a dining table and chairs. The green loveseat didn’t have a wall behind it; instead, it faced an open space that led to a hallway that stretched the length of the condo. It faced a huge window with a Venetian blind. To the right of the couch was the armchair. To the right, the fridge was in the far-left corner, and I’m not sure there were any other kitchen facilities. In the front corner of this room was an odd space, where the white ceiling was low, sort of forming a box, and a blue taupe was forming a curtain and hanging from the ceiling.

Down the hallway, I passed a section of wall with at least one door (perhaps a bedroom on the other side) and came to what I thought of as the front living room. It was the greyish-yellow room, with more old couches. One was yellow, and the other was predominantly turquoise in a pattern. I had been feeling so proud of my new place, but now I was thinking it kind of weird and in need of redecorating, but I wasn’t sure how.

At some point in the dream, I recalled that my new place included an apartment I could rent out, and I got to thinking that what I thought of as the back living room could become a second apartment with a few changes. As I was thinking about this, I noticed from that room the far wall (to the right, opposite direction from the front living room), and this wall was white and had a big metal double door with a black curtain partially covering it, and one of the 2 doors was open, to my dismay.

The new place was on a college campus, and anyone could just walk into my new condo. I needed to go use the bathroom and paused a moment to decide whether I wanted to get that door closed first, but I noticed a college boy standing with his back to that door, and I didn’t want anyone to notice that it led to my place, didn’t want to attract attention, so I decided to leave it open until I got back from the restroom. Meanwhile, I realized that a big screen tv was turned on to a kind of loud anime show; this was to the left of the open door. I felt embarrassed, because anyone in the hallway must hear it.

Outside the condo, I was in the hallway of the same building, which except for my condo was a university. It resembled a hallway in the high school from hell. Students were coming and going, and I felt ashamed of being an ugly and fat middle-aged woman amid all these skinny young people.

I headed to a vending machine, but as though my legs fell asleep, I stopped being able to walk and was crawling along on the floor and feeling terribly embarrassed. Lots of students were around. One young man asked me if I needed help, but I couldn’t talk and knew that if I could just get to that big freezer along the wall in the same alcove as the vending machine, I’d grasp onto it and pull myself up. I was terribly embarrassed and afraid that people would ridicule me and laugh at me. Meanwhile, the same problem happened to a young male student, and he was crawling along straight toward the freezer and kind of getting in my way. But he crawled quickly, so his legs were soon in front of me–his jeans were sliding down and I could see the top of his underwear and his butt crack–and his sneaker-clad feet were in front of me, as I dragged myself in the direction of the vending machine, and he dragged himself in the direction of the freezer.