07-27-04 .. another classic bad dream ..

you might be wondering why I woke up at 5:30 this morning. more specifically, you might be wondering why I woke up at 5:30 this morning and felt compelled to turn on the light and start reading parts of Bookends, a horrible representative of chicklit as penned by jane green. the answer is that I had a bad dream.

another damn bad dream. why do I keep having these? obvious answer: the stress. duh. at least they aren't cropping up with anything even resembling regularity. they're on no schedule, and they're blessedly infrequent. I've started referring to them as the hellraiser dreams, since they tend to feature pinhead, although the character featured in my dreams acts almost nothing like the one you'll find in the hellraiser movies -- his appearance owes more to the horror I feel at the idea of hell (on earth, unjustified) than to the horrible, un-scary movies.

almost always, I'm immediately aware of the fact that I'm dreaming. just as immediately, I know that I can't make myself wake up, even though I know what's in store (these dreams always terrify me). in fact, in one dream I tried to huddle in the corner of a living room or den and watch the VCR clock, waiting for it to hit "morning" so I could wake up.

this time, I started out with mom and dad in some sort of condemned research lab that had been used to study... either pinhead or nasty things in general, not sure about that. somehow selenium was involved. (I know because I had to explain it, in the dream, to dad.) at first, since I was so aware of the dream, I thought maybe I could control the terror level and keep it low. this cropped up in the "scene" where dad and I helped a kid get out of a locked antechamber or lobby in a building connected to the research building via a courtyard. if you imagine the entryway to a mall or fancy hotel, you get the general building plan: glass doors opening into a narrow room whose own glass doors, in turn, open into a large open area. anyway, dad went in to get the scared kid and told me to hold open to doors to the outside to prevent them from locking behind us. (I'm crediting the propped door with representing my attempt at control. flimsy, yes, but so is my ability to handle these sorts of dreams.)

so I knew I was doomed right away. mom vanished at the very beginning of the dream (into the bright white light of a doorway that led outside, so in dreams-about-hell terms, that's pretty good). then adults in general vanished and night time set in pretty quick. (the lobby sequence happened here. it wasn't until I got into the courtyard with the rescued kid that I turned around and noticed dad was gone.) so we're in the courtyard with a bunch of other kids. teenagers, really -- classic horror movie fare -- and I'm kinda riding the line between teenager and adult. final girl material, if you ask me. har, har.

the ominous spine tinglies are hitting hard at this point, and there's some sort of... large, dark form (I initially thought "ocean liner") approaching from above/behind. the rescued kid, who naturally knows the gist of what, physically, approaches, tells everyone to hide. if it sees someone, that someone is a goner. I could go into specific geography here, but let's just say I'm sitting in a corner across from someone else, and some moron kid is standing in plain view between us. naturally, the moron kid is seen, the "ship" morphs into... um, rectangular black boxes, about the height of (quelle coincidence!) a seated teenager. I guess once it saw the one moron kid (and took it), it saw the rest of us. then the rescued kid brings the knowledge again and somehow expresses to us a way to foist off the black boxes. think harry potter and the patronus charm. so each kid does his "think happy thoughts" thing, and a tinkerbell-esque dot of light appears near each box. we get some very 80's-quality special effects here, and the black boxes vanish after being "netted" by the lights. we all enter the research center.

something that was way creepier in the dream than I can express here: my own light appeared before I'd even thought of anything to invoke it. (I even saw a separate light starting to approach once I started the "charm." it drifted away when it saw the light that was already with me.) it occurred to me, in the research center, that they were all false lights; we hadn't done jack to the black boxes, other than let them herd us into the center, with its selenium (huh? it was important in the dream somehow, I swear...) and history with pinhead. and, of course, cenobites now appear.

it was really more the kind of scene you get with an omniscient narrative. (which I sometimes get with these dreams, but can't use the info to the dream-me's advantage. awesome.) another part of the research center -- very industrial, furnace, freddy krueger -- and an awakening/approaching pinhead (who was much more bloody than the variety you get in the movies).

shortly thereafter, I'm awake and -- surprise! -- totally tense. the clock says 5:30, and I'm hopeful that a distracting read can get me back into happy sleepy land, especially since my first dream of the evening pertained to a former crush. (rowrr!) instead, I just kept reading until around 7am and then started getting ready for work. damn dreams.

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