Reoccurring Dreams

As we drove across town to visit friends, I convinced Stephen, who was driving, to tell me a few stories for The Anecdote. At first, he was hesitant. He demanded full veto power over the use any story he told. Then he started to worry that he didn't actually have any good stories. Having lived with the man for nearly three year, and having known him for nearly eleven, I know this to not be the case.

I decided to suggest a topic for him: dreams. I asked him to, "Just tell me about an interesting dream you've had." Stephen proceeded to tell me about the two reoccurring dreams he had throughout his childhood.

So ok, when I was little I had... I don't remember a lot of my dreams. I only remember sets of dreams. One was that I had a reoccurring dream where I would try and jump down the stairs at our old house. And you know, the stairs had the ceiling that ran kind of diagonally, parallel to them, so I would... Every night, I would wipe out in a different way.

So, I'd get a little running start, and I'd jump, and I would either hit my head on the diagonal and then collapse and roll the rest of the way down the stairs, and then, you know switch to something else, or wake up, or whatever. But every night, I'd... I'd make it... cause really, you know, it's physically impossible to do. I would land, but then I would slap my head on the wall right across from the bottom of the stairs and collapse in a heap. You know, I would just... some humiliating and terrible and painful way I would fail every night. And then one night, I managed to just kind of launch myself, like E. Honda from Street Fighter, in this perfect little downward spiral, land on my feet perfectly, and they ended. I just had to succeed that one time, and then they stopped.

The other one that I really remember, from when I was little is... I would... It started off very weird. There was this hooded figure that was kind of Death, and you know, it had the black cape, and the scythe, and all that garbage, and there were two stone pedestals, and one of them had this little figurine of this big, psychotic, burly looking guy with a double headed axe. Just this violent... you could see little bits of foam hanging out of his mouth. I remember very vividly that this was a terrifying looking dude. And the other stone pedestal had kind of a skinny, creepy, looking guy with a little... like a foot long kind of curved knife in his hand. And they were just standing there on these two stone pedestals.

And all Death said was, "Choose your fate," in this deep booming voice, which is kind of... kind of... Now that I'm older, and wiser, makes me think of a beginning of a video game... Now that I'm much more mature, I relate that to a video game... cause I'm an adult.

But I distinctly remember, in this dream, making the decision, "I'm going to pick the knife guy, because his weapon is smaller."

And I was transported into this scenario, and it was like some weird old murder mystery setup. It was myself... I wasn't actually there. I switched places between all the different people, and it was what I then had the impression of rich old British people looking and acting like... wandering around a mansion.

It was all locked up, and we couldn’t get out, and we were... We split up... Again, I say "we" because I would switch between all of the ten or so people. And we had to find this guy. And it turns out, the knife guy, even though he had a smaller weapon, could hide inside of items; like stuff. Anything around the house. An armchair: he could just become one with the armchair, and the only way you could tell was that it would glow slightly.

And this entire dream I had, seemed to last forever, was me going to this group of twelve British idiots who split up and wandered to different rooms in this mansion, and it would just cut to a different scene, "Ok, I'm the... the codgerly old professor." And then I'd meander off into the study, and I'd turn on the lamp. But the lamp was glowing before I turned it on! And a knife man pops out! And he stabs me to death. And then I'm the next guy.

And meanwhile, the knife guy is sneaking from room to room in this house, and the last thing I remember is, somehow, we thought we'd caught him, and I was the last survivor, and everyone else had been knifed to death. And I was in a library, and I just looked over and I saw that one of the books, in the middle of this huge wall of books, was glowing slightly. And I just resigned myself, you know? Ok, I'm dead. The guy popped out and stabbed me.

And I wondered... Even, like... I think, in that last moment, even in character I wondered, "Maybe I could just run away from the guy with the axe. Did I make the wrong choice?" And that was that dream. It was really weird, cause I was very young. I was like seven or eight. Probably the most vivid dream I've ever had. The end.

I would have to agree with Stephen: that is a pretty crazily dark dream for a child of seven or eight to have. The detail is amazing. It could almost be a short film (perhaps staring Vincent Price.) The images of Death and Agatha Christie-like characters are so iconic, but where would he have picked those characters up at age seven?