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The Blue Room

This is a very, very old nightmare of mine, one which I find disturbing to this day. I call it "The Blue Room," even though it's not visually clear enough in my head for me to tell if that was the actual color or not. If I have referred to it in my dream journal before, I may have called it "The Playroom," "The Children's Room," "The Sickly Sweet Smell," or "The Smell Of Death."

What I remember of the dream had me setting foot in what I think was supposed to be my bedroom. I walked over toward where my closet is in real life, but instead of that, in my dream it was like a walk-in closet. I went into it and instead of the closet it now led down a few steps and into a lower-level children's playroom.

Now remember, this is how I piece the memory together now, not how it actually may have appeared in the original dream. The room was a sunken level and was unlit--no lights were on--though there were windows, so pale light from outside shone in. This would be impossible in real life, as, if my closet were in fact opened up to become a playroom (even IF there were enough room!), it would enter right into the bathtub, and there would be the porch on the left, and the hallway or my parents' bedroom and the kitchen on the right; the basement stairwell would also interrupt it, ahead. In short, there would be no place for these windows; half the house would have to be resituated.

Anyway, in the dream, the room was rectangular, nice and spacious, and longer than it was wide. It stretched out ahead of me. I must have been young in this dream as I had it when I was very little. I stood on the top step of the few leading down into it and stared in amazement. This is what my memory pieces together; but I think the room was all in pale blue, though that might have been just the lighting. My mind thinks of airy, puffy drapes, patterns designed to please children, many toys, nice carpeting, and a big toy chest, possibly to the right (though this itself could be from another nightmare). In short, everything needed to delight a child.

I think I started to walk down into the room, happiness and awe welling up inside me. But then...this horrid smell wafted to my nostrils. It was this awful, horrible, sickly sweet smell. I don't think I've ever smelled this in real life, but in my dream, I just KNEW it was the smell of death. Something here was dead, and it had been dead a long time. It was hidden in the otherwise welcoming children's playroom. Something pretty and inviting covering up something revolting and awful.

I slowly began to back out of the room as this terrible fear overwhelmed me. I knew there was something in that playroom I was not supposed to see--or something that had been put there specifically to frighten me. The dream fades here and I don't know what, if anything, happened next, only that I knew I had to get away from there. For some reason my attention focuses on the toy chest, so perhaps that had something to do with it; but then again, as I said, that could have something to do with another nightmare involving a toy chest. (That will be covered in another entry.)

I can remember distinctly only one other time when I dreamed about this particular scent, though there may have been more times. In that dream, I was again in my bedroom, only I was sitting/crouching over near where one of my dressers used to be (the opposite side of the room from the closet). I think I was just playing or something and then all of a sudden that smell came again, once more filling me with fear and dread. Again I knew there was something hidden that I should not know about if I didn't want to start screaming in terror.

When I once described this dream to others, somebody suggested that perhaps the smell was a throwback memory to smelling lilies at a funeral. Dying lilies, she said, could have the same sickly sweet smell, and my association of them with a funeral could have led to my associating them with the smell of death in my dream. I've considered this, but I don't put much stock in it. The only funeral I can ever remember attending was that of my grandfather, around 1985, and my ONLY memory of the entire funeral is of sitting in the car in the rain and wishing that I could cry, and hearing my brother say he wished he could STOP crying. I don't remember the casket, or lilies, or a scent, or anything. Whereas in my dream I am POSITIVE that the smell, even though I don't think I've ever encountered it in real life, was the scent of a body decomposing--the "smell of death."

This dream still greatly disturbs me as I have no clue what it could mean. I fear it may be trying to tell me something ominous.



Early Dreams
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