In Your Dreams and Nightmares
Dreams, good or bad, have always given me the shivers. This section is devoted to some of the more interesting dreams I've heard. They are written as they were told to me.
I woke up one night to the sound of a train horn blowing. I could also hear my son, Jacob, crying in his bedroom. I went to his room to check on him. When I asked what was wrong, he said that he had dreamed that a train was coming into his room with its horn blowing. I was shocked because I had also heard the train. There were no train tracks near our house.
My sister and I fell asleep on the two couches in the living room. I woke up in the middle of the night and got up to get something to drink. While walking to the kitchen, I heard a cackling sound. A witch grabbed my ankle and started dragging me towards the kitchen. I started screaming for my sister to wake up and help me. She heard me screaming and jumped off the couch. She ran and grabbed my hands and pulled me away from the witch and into my parents' bedroom. We hid beside the bed. We could hear the cackling coming from the living room. We also heard the TV, fax machine and computer come on. Some time later, our parents came home. They were upset and asked us why fax machine paper was all over the living room.
I was walking through a woods with some really tall trees when I spotted a man in a black coat and top hat. The man was sneaking from tree to tree and hiding. I somehow knew that the man was after me. Terrified, I tried to get away from the man by running and hiding behind the trees. I could see that the man was getting closer and closer until he finally caught up with me. At this point I couldn't move. The man took off his hat, and he was totally bald. He placed the top hat on my head and started pushing it down. As he pushed, I began to shrink really small. The man started laughing. At this point I woke up.
I was in bed and heard a car pull up out front. I got up and looked out the window and saw a long black car. It was dark out, but I could see two men dressed totally in black get out of the car and start walking towards the house. Their faces were so pale white that they nearly glowed. At this point I woke from my sleep to the sound of someone knocking on the door. Terrified, I turned on the lights and slowly crept down to the front door downstairs. There was no one there.
About five years ago, I was staying at my grandparents' house alone to keep an eye on their stuff while they were in the process of moving. I went to sleep that night and had a very vivid dream about my uncle who had died about six months before. In my dream, I was standing in the dining room when the phone rang. I pick the phone up and said, "Hello." The voice on the other end said, "Hello, do you know who this is?" As soon as I heard the voice, I recognized it to be my deceased uncle. I replied that I knew who it was but didn't know how he could be calling me. As soon as I said this, the scenery changed, and my uncle and I were standing in a long hallway. At one end of the long hallway, my entire family was standing and talking to each other and didn't notice us. My uncle said that he had come to tell me something. He wanted to tell me that he was fine and not to worry about him and that he wanted to tell me this because he needed me to tell my grandparents and his wife and children too. He said Mom and Dad and Pat and the kids had been worrying about him so much, but I had to tell them to stop worrying about him because he was okay. As soon as he said this, the scenery changed in my dream again. Now everyone in the family, including me and my uncle, was riding in an orange Volkswagon van that had once belonged to both my dad and uncle. This time the family could see and hear him. They were all excited asking him many questions. I asked my uncle, "What's Heaven like?" He immediately stopped talking and looked at me. With a puzzled looked, he said, "Heaven?" And I said, "Yeah, what's heaven like?" He said, "No, I'm not there yet, But don't worry-I'm okay." Being Catholic, We believe no one is pure enough to go straight to heaven, that you must go to a place called purgatory. As soon as he had said this, I woke up from my dream. A few days later, my grandparents came with more stuff to move into the house. Still puzzled and shocked by this dream, I decided to tell my grandmother about it. After telling her about this dream, I noticed tears in her eyes. I asked if I had upset her. She said, "No, there's something I want to tell you." She said that her other son had called to talk to her the night before. And in their conversation he had described to her the exact dream that I had just told her.
As a kid I once had a very strange dream. I was in the hallway at night and was leaning against the wall as though I were on a board or something. I could see my parents asleep in their bedroom, but I couldn't scream or move. Little squirrels came in the room and started wrapping me up with gauze like a mummy. The squirrels kept wrapping me up, and I couldn't do anything. Before they had totally covered my face, I woke up terrified.
I used to have the same dream about every time I'd just start to get to sleep. In the dream, I would be walking down a sidewalk with my head looking down. I would see a dip in the sidewalk and step into it. This would always cause me to jerk and wake up startled.
When I was ten years old, my best friend died due to an accident. I cried myself to sleep that night and had a dream. In the dream my friend came to me and told me to stop crying. He told me that we could still see each other sometimes and that he would return and be my guardian angel. Years later when I was twenty-four, I was very upset one night because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life. When I fell asleep, I had another dream. In the dream, the friend I had lost during my childhood called me on the phone and told me to go out on the front porch. I went out on the front porch, and my friend was hovering outside above the porch. He had a white glow about him. He told me to stop worrying so much about the future, that he was my guardian angel and would watch out for me. The next morning I woke up crying. That same day I received a phone call and was offered a good job.
One night I seemed to wake up not knowing if I was dreaming or not. Everything in my room had changed. There were things in it that did not belong such as a deep freeze, and the floor was vinyl instead of carpet. I got out of bed and walked around the room confused. I decided that if I was dreaming, I wouldn't be able to feel anything, so I went around the room touching things. I could feel the texture of everything I touch. The deep freeze felt cold. Everything seemed very real. I began to think that I had awaken in a slightly different dimension. It all seemed too real to be a dream. The next thing I knew, I woke up in bed, and everything was back to normal. This is the realist dream I've ever had to this day.
