I have
recurring nightmares. Sometimes, I dream that I'm being chased by someone who wants to
kill me -- sometimes, that person is armed with a
shotgun, sometimes with an
axe, sometimes with a
chainsaw. I flee from them and look in vain for a way to strike back at him. Then after a while, I decide I've had enough of this, and I wake myself up.
Sometimes, when I've had a bit too many reminders of my life back when I was a
radio disc jockey and
newsman, I'll dream that I've just walked into a
radio station, and someone tells me I've got just two minutes before I have to go on the air with my
newscast. They park me in front of the
microphone, hand me a jumbled pile of paper, some
news stories, some
garage sale announcements, many completely
unreadable. "You're on the air in five... four... three... two..." And by that point, I always say to myself, "Screw this shit. I don't have to take this. I'm waking up." And I do.
Those aren't so bad. I have the
dreams, wake up, grumble about my stupid obsessive
subconscious, roll over, and go back to sleep.
The dreams about the
evil ghost girl, however, completely fuck me up.
The little ghost girl isn't so much a
recurring dream as she is a recurring character in my dreams. The dream can be about anything at all. It can be a happy, confusing little dream, like so many of mine. But then she shows up, and everything goes straight to
hell. She is a
little girl, approximately six to eight years old. She has
blonde hair and wears a pretty
orange (sometimes
yellow) dress. She wears
sneakers that are the same color as her dress. She smiles
sweetly and
adorably. She is very definitely a ghost -- sometimes she is
invisible, sometimes
translucent, she can appear out of
nowhere, and she has
unearthly powers. She doesn't look at all frightening -- she looks like any little girl you'd see anywhere -- the type of girl who gets entered in (and wins) those Little Miss beauty pageants. But she radiates so much
evil, such pure,
malign, terrifying evil, even through that precious, beautiful smile.
She wants me
dead, and there's a pretty good chance she could kill me.
In a way, I'm not really sure it counts as a recurring dream. It's not really the same dream over and over -- I can be having any dream at all, then all of a sudden, she shows up, and everything slams straight into abject terror. But I've been dreaming about her more and more often. In the first few months of the year, she appeared in my dreams twice, once in February and once in May. She showed up again in June and July, then twice in August, four times in September. So far this month? Lucky Number Seven. So far.
Last night, I was having a particularly
maddening dream. My ex-
boss wanted me to do some errands for her, but my
parents were insisting on talking and talking and talking to me, keeping me from doing the chores, or even remembering what my work assignments were. And when they finally finished talking to me, I couldn't get my boss on the phone to learn what she'd wanted me to do.
I left the house to take a nighttime walk, and when I walked past the house next door, there was a pair of
orange sneakers on the porch. As I watched, the sneakers began walking across the porch. As they reached a short, decorative
column on the porch, they walked up the side of it. When the sneakers reached the top of the column, a little girl's orange dress had
materialized, too. The sneakers and dress began walking down the column, and when they got back to the porch, the little girl had finally appeared.
She looked at me, smiling her precious, adorable, beautiful
smile, and she said, "You're the stupidest person ever, and you're going to die.
You'll never get away from me."
She took off her sneakers and threw one of them at me. I picked it up, planning on throwing it back at her, if I had to. Then she threw her other
shoe at me. I started to reach down to pick it up, and it slid away from me, back almost to her. She smiled again, and I knew that she wanted me to go to get that shoe, because then I'd be close enough for her to
touch.
If she touches me, that's it. They'll find me dead in my bed, an
eternal mystery for the police. They'll tell my family it was a sudden
heart attack. But they won't ask them to identify my body. They'll strongly recommend
cremation. The
coroner will develop a
drinking problem.
How do I know these things? How do I know what sort of
expression will be on my face when the police find me? How do I know what sort of
bizarre injuries they'll find once they
open me up? How do I know that the dreams are somehow contagious? How do I know? Dream logic. The same thing that told me, in my nightmare, not to even bother running. She'd have no problem catching me,
laughing happily, as I ran on that dream
treadmill.
I woke up not that long after that, and I did what I always do when she shows up in my dreams -- I laid awake for a couple of hours, paralyzed with
terror, unable to get out of bed, unable to fall back asleep, knowing that, at any moment, I could roll over and find her standing right at the edge of the bed, smiling her beautiful,
malevolent smile, reaching one hand out to me, too close and too late for me to escape. I was, however, completely
exhausted, and eventually, I fell asleep again.
This has many of the markings of
night terrors or
sleep paralysis, particularly the unreasoning, terrified
panic. However, I am able to move while this is going on -- I am able to roll over from one side of the bed to the other. There is also no sensation of
breathlessness, as often occurs during sleep paralysis. In addition, most people I know who have had night terrors don't seem to have them as
vividly as I do.
So I guess it's just a
bad dream, or at least a particularly nasty
motif of my personal
dreamscape, right?
That sounds
plausible, right? Sure it does.
But you know what I found when I got up this morning, lying on the floor right next to my bed?
A little girl's orange sneaker.
fearquest