02/01/03
Running Away
I wanted to possibly describe a dream I mentioned yesterday in my regular journal, if I can remember. *sigh*
This is the dream as it was described in my regular journal, January 31, 2003 :
I had some very disturbing dreams the past two nights running but I can't remember them well anymore...I was at home and there was a threatening male figure, like a stepfather, who I was running away from. I grabbed the cat, realized I had left behind my hamster (I don't have one), then decided I'd get it later. Everything felt dirty and violent. Yet I was finally putting my foot down and leaving. But I knew he was following right behind me. Maybe with a knife.
There was more detail to this dream, about the abusive man. (I had this dream during my nap.) I seem to recall that the hamster (might have been a rat) was left upstairs in my brother's room, right in the middle of the floor (its cage, I mean); by "dirty," the whole house felt dirty and messy and worn; by "violent," I meant the man coming after me as I fled. Ma and somebody else--my brother?--had already gone, and I was going to follow them. I don't know why I was the one left behind. And while this guy was supposed to be a father figure, he was not my dad. He was thin, and I don't think he had a beard. He MAY have been shirtless. :/ And possibly with a knife. Which sounds oddly like the teenage guy from my "Tehuti Vs. The Creepy Knife Guy!" dream.
Everything just felt so scuzzy in that dream. It again gave me an ominous feeling. This is really starting to bug me, all these dreams about abuse and weird things lately.
Anyway, in the first part of that dream I was afraid to run, but eventually I faced this guy down in a screaming match; I was terrified to do that, but anything was better than staying. Then before he could get back at me, I hurriedly gathered what I could--including the cat--and RAN. I'm not sure where I ran to, but I know I went outside.
The Corpse Of A Cat
This is a dream as it was described in my regular journal, January 31, 2003 :
OH! I remember it now. [This dream] was from my actual sleep... Let me take notes here and I hope I'll remember to type it up later on: Golden-rimmed clouds, strange sky, camera, detained, clouds, getting darker, tornado, gone fast, grabbing Cosmas (freaking out outside), cat carcass, afraid, run inside, Dad?. That's all I can remember of it right now...but it freaked me out, and put me in a bad mood when I awoke...
This dream was disturbing. It started out rather cool, though big parts of it are now missing. I do know I was at home with others, and I looked out what seemed to be either the utility room windows or the back porch door window, and saw a sunset/sunrise outside in the north. (The sun always rises/sets in the wrong place in my dreams...) At first, the clouds there were dark gray with rounded tops (bottoms?), the edges of which were rimmed with gold. Awesome! I had to take a picture. I went to get the camera, but there were lots of people at our house for some reason and I kept getting distracted. Occasionally I would look outside again, but every time I did, the sky had changed. I do think I finally managed to snap some pictures, but by now the sky was turning plain gray. There were still unusual clouds, though; I stuck my head out the porch door (I THINK it may have been summer, or autumn, but it was cool and wet outside; I think there were leaves on the trees, but I could see the sky clearly), and was just in time to see a FUNNEL CLOUD descend! I gaped at it before it disappeared again, lasting only a second or so; still, I knew there was now the possibility of tornadoes, and dashed back inside to warn somebody. I don't think I was terribly afraid. More excited than anything.
At some point I had to go outside for some reason, and when I did I think it was starting to rain, plus Cosmas was outside, running around in circles near or inside the garage. The weather was making him panic. I dashed outside into the starting rain to grab him up and hurry back inside. It was a little hard to catch him but I succeeded, turned around, and made my way back for the door. As I did, something off to my right, by the side of the house, drew my attention, and I stared at it in horror. It was the corpse of a cat--partly decomposed but sort of mummified or else frozen, lying on its back with its legs straight in the air. The color of the entire thing was a dark bluish-gray and it didn't seem to have fur, or rather, the fur (skin?) had matted into a shiny but bumpy and hole-dotted surface. I think it was a little bloated too, but for some reason I got the impression that while it wasn't exactly ALIVE, it was at least sentient--or partly aware--or something. It's hard to explain. I also believed that it was Pepper, as it was lying in the exact spot where her grave is in real life. This both panicked me and freaked me out, and I ran inside as quickly as I could. I think I went to tell Dad, but I'm not sure.
I had the feeling she was going to exact some kind of vengeance on me, or would at least play tricks with my mind...an awful dream to have about her, considering most of my other dreams about her have been positive ones. :( There may also have been the feeling that I was forgetting something.
Trapped In CSI: Miami
Last night, I napped during Monk, but had trouble sleeping as I had drunk too much previously, so my dreams were rather unsettled. I can't remember the exact order they were in. Firstly I had a sort of waking dream about an episode of CSI: Miami, in which a plane crashed in the Everglades. In this episode, a woman had been pushed from the plane while it was still in the air, and she thus ended up a long ways from the crash site itself. In my dream, it was bright daytime in the swamp, which for some reason made it eerier. I was sort of roleplaying the part of the woman pushed from the plane, and trying to imagine how it felt, falling through the air, knowing I was going to die. David Caruso's character figured in here, but only in passing; he was more of an observer. At one point I imagined how horrible it would have looked to see the plane soaring overhead, ready to crash, but I had missed that part of the "show." I don't know which came first, but at one point I was falling from a vast distance, and this terrified me, the knowledge that I would die, and had so much time to think about it! I decided to turn myself face down, I believe, and shut my eyes, and wait for the end in peace, as it was definitely coming, and there was nothing I could do about it. At some point I may have landed, but the landing wasn't right; I didn't end up hurt, but I had to pretend I was dead.
Then (or maybe this was before), I was floating in the middle of the water--a vast ocean of green, though it was supposed to be the Everglades. The water was warm and I was floating in it up to my waist. I wasn't afraid of it, for a change, but I slowly began to realize--and explained this aloud to somebody who was with me or nearby--that I could not feel my entire body. I don't think I could feel my legs beneath the water, for example. This reminds me of another old dream of mine, "Treading Water." I wondered if the fall could have had something to do with this, as if my body were broken. I seemed to float for a long time, my anxiety growing.
This dream was while I was half awake--I thought for certain I had been yelling over my shoulder at my mom, about the episode of CSI on TV, when I hadn't, and that hadn't even been airing.
The Bookstore On The Mountain (With Monk!)
During my nap, after going back to sleep, my dreams became more detailed. I think it started out with me in some kind of weird store that I can't describe adequately, but it gave me a curious, comfortable feeling. There was this big set of shelves with all sorts of things for sale, mainly necklaces and statuettes. The shelf was multitiered and was on my right. Firstly I became interested in some necklaces with pendants made out of some kind of weird stone. The first ones I looked at were whitish in color, some of them dyed; maybe it was faux stone, but I know the colors were added. They were all very rough (bumpy, like pumice) and cheap looking, like they were meant to be rough hewn--primitive pendants--but they looked just cheap instead. Some were faces in profile, goofy-looking things with long noses and foreheads and tiny eyes, all of an alabaster-like color; then there were the colored ones; then I came across some dragon pendants. Yes! They were deep blue with blue sparkles, down near the bottom, and I started digging through them (they were hanging on pegs) for the best-made one, but I couldn't seem to decide; they all looked rather cheap. :/ Somebody was with me but I don't know who, and I turned my attention away from the necklaces for some reason, toward some statuettes on a higher shelf. There were all sorts of ethnic-looking things here, including some vaguely Egyptian-style statuettes made out of wood. I remember in specific a Horus, and one or two of the goddesses--maybe Hathor or Isis or Sakhmet. One of them had its face hidden from my view; maybe Osiris? They were all chunky and blocky and fat looking, made of painted wood, but I was still intrigued. I think I was interested in the Horus, but I started looking for a Thoth--of course. I couldn't find one no matter how hard I looked. *sigh*
I got sidetracked during that and then ended up in a sort of old BOOKSTORE instead. I wandered into what might have been a slightly lower level and came into a cluttered room all in shades of gray, washed out, worn looking, dim. No lights on but for this overcast light coming in the windows. Lots of books, though! As I walked along I spotted some potentially interesting tomes, but they always made me lose interest. One was a very, VERY big (many pages) book about...something...I sensed it was written for kids and kept moving. Then I came across a similar one and I thought it said "Astrology" on the front, but when I stooped down to look at it harder, it actually said something like "Astraunomy" (Astronomy with an odd spelling). I knew it was of the same sort as the other big book--intended for a young audience, and possibly badly out of date, like from the Fifties (it had a dust jacket with blue on it and just seemed very tacky and old). I moved away from that off to my right, and as I passed around the far end of a low shelf, I spotted an intriguing leather-covered book on the bottom shelf, near the floor (this shelf only seemed to have one or two levels on it like the shelves in the elementary school library). It was a creamy ecru color, grainy pattern like snakeskin, shaped kind of like a photo album only longer. I know that the cover had something to do with Abraham Lincoln, and while that didn't interest me, the age of the thing did. I picked it up...only to discover that it was merely a BOOK COVER and nothing more! No book inside, just its cover! Yech. While I had been picking it up it was as if there was a voice in my head, or maybe it was the other person with me (a guy), saying that there was something wrong with the book (maybe based on its price?), like it had a section missing or something; but it just didn't have any pages at ALL, so I put it back.
I tried to be more amused than annoyed, though so far, I hadn't found anything good in this place!
I passed that shelf, and then another near the other (left) side of the store...looking down and to my left I spotted an old children's book sitting atop a table. It was in the shape of a board game box, though I think it was a book. Yellow cover, old-fashioned illustration of a little boy, and a little dog running toward the viewer. I read that the dog's name was Damien (the name of one of my fictional characters); I think he was a beagle puppy. There were some "headlines" or taglines on the box and they seemed to change as I read it; but the basic gist of the story was that Damien was the boy's puppy and he escaped and ran away, and the little boy was chasing after him; something like, "Get Damien!" or "Go, Damien, Go!"...and as it turned out this puppy's escape would lead to him saving the day (there was a tagline to that effect, all dramatic and such with exclamation marks and all, like the goofy taglines you'd find on old horror movie posters). Cute, I thought, but not for me. I turned away and looked around some more.
Finally I came to a high shelf, like a bureau or something, and going around to the other side of it, so I now faced the front of the store and not the back (I was closer to the back), I noticed that sitting atop this shelf (it was made of wood) was what appeared to be a teeny-tiny miniature bookshelf. It wasn't a typical bookshelf, but again, more like a bureau or dressing table or something; taller than it was wide, with a table top and then a high wooden back, and several compartments and cupboards and shelves and such like for sorting letters. It was maybe a foot tall, or a little less. (This reminds me vaguely of my dream "The Yellow Room.") There was somebody with me again now, maybe a guy, or maybe Mya (an old friend of mine), and I stared at this miniature, enthralled. For stacked upon it were lots of miniature BOOKS!
They were all alike, like a set; each very tiny, with a black leather cover and gold embossed print, built-in bookmarkers (I think), and inside, gold print in teeny-tiny, narrow lettering. The font was a deterrent to trying to read, as it was so narrow, but that was just a minor inconvenience in my eyes. They were so CUTE! I started looking through them as a female attendant or some such arrived on my left (my friend was on my right); I think she tried to explain what I was looking at. It was a tiny bookshelf for tiny books! So amazing. These books--there were a lot of them, all piled haphazardly atop the shelf--were supposed to be classics, but I didn't recognize any of them. They all seemed to be Civil War-era and Revolutionary War-era-type books. Very dry, boring reading (it was fiction), but so interesting just to look at for how tiny they were.
I think I knew I could not buy these, but I loved looking at them, and after all the other misses, this hit made it worth coming in here.
The dream moved on a bit and now it somehow involved the character Monk (Tony Shalhoub) from the TV show. (This was on TV while I was napping.) Perhaps I was his female companion or some such. I think we were still in the bookstore, only now its location had changed; it was bigger and more open, like a large log cabin, and I think we were in the mountains. I know we were up high, in some desolate area, and it made me nervous. There were windows and we could see outside now...I seem to remember pine trees, a misty, overcast sky, dampness, and a long gravel swath across the ground. Very depressing scenery, like from the Northwest or something. I feel there were even lumberjacks around. We sat at a high seat underneath a window (this would have been facing the right side of the bookstore, on facing the back) and atop this shelf here (everything around us was made of this orangish-colored wood, not at all the dark wood of the little shelf I'd liked so much) was an antique newspaper, maybe mounted under glass. We were interested in this, perhaps as it pertained to a case. There was a headline on it--I think it was from the 1800's--and it mentioned Kentucky, I think, but the spelling was wrong--like "Kintuckee" (I'm pretty sure it had an I instead of an E, and the ending was different). There was also some kind of racial angle involved in an article in it, and we surmised that it was a Southern newspaper of around Civil War times. For some reason that also explained the odd spellings--they just spelled Kentucky differently back then. On reading this we felt anxious--we knew the people in the building around us were hostile toward us--I think they included a lumberjack type and a stout Germanesque woman--maybe this place was supposed to be Alpine? But it was also related to the region the paper spoke of, so it had something to do with Kentucky--though it didn't feel at all like the South, with that wet, chilly weather. This is all very hard to explain, but basically, I knew we were in danger at the hands of the people around us; they were tolerating us so far, but we were digging too much into something in the past, and that could have consequences. I wanted to flee this place before it was too late, but as we were possibly on a mountaintop, with no way down, we may have been stuck with no means of escape but a hasty retreat down the mountainside--which could be deadly, if that loose gravel outside was any indication.
There may have been more, but that's all I can recall.
2003 Dreams
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