A nightmare and a dream

Well.  Occasionally I try to record my dreams here, because if I don't I forget them after a while, except for the ones that I forget immediately, or forget and then remember weeks later.

I'll try to place this one in context.  I've been sick lately, maybe a touch of pneumonia, I don't know.  I've been treating it with generic Robitussin during the day and NyQuil at night.  I've had it since the end of January, and I think I picked it up at a zoning hearing at the Nanticoke municipal building for a proposed solar panel sales and distribution center that someone wants to put on reclaimed mining land about a mile from my house.  I'm actually mostly recovered, to the point that I haven't needed or used either the day or night medicine in several days.

I'm feeling stressed.  It's been nearly two months since I lost my job, and I haven't made any real progress in finding a new one.  I keep hearing horror stories about people who have been looking for jobs for two years or more, and that's not very encouraging.

I spent the night at my house across town.  I'm doing that a lot lately, and have been doing it since last year, after the robbery.  It's a big old house, and some people might find it creepy.

There was an incident at the house next door over the weekend.  I don't know what.  Something involving the tenants.  The first sign was a fire call to the house, though when I got there there were also an ambulance and a police vehicle there.  As I sat in my car and watched, two ambulance people set up a gurney in the front yard of the house.  After a while someone came out of the house, accompanied by four or five people, some of whom appeared to be police.  The person appeared to have a bandaged hand.  I do not why they needed quite that many people to walk them onto the gurney, unless they were being restrained in some way.

There was a home invasion incident in the area yesterday, about ten miles from here.  Three people broke into a house, or maybe just one person while two others waited outside.  There was an exchange of gunfire.  The homeowner was injured, the home invader was killed.  Turned out the home invader was a criminal out on bail awaiting sentencing; he had been arrested in a million-dollar meth lab bust in town last year.  (And, I would learn this morning, the home being invaded was also a meth lab.  So this wasn't an NRA success story of a homeowner defending herself from criminals; this was a criminal-vs.-criminal incident.)

I don't recall what I ate before I went to bed.  Chicken soup and some excellent red seedless grapes, I think.

I know I continued re-reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows before bed. Harry, Ron, and Hermione had successfully snuck into the Ministry of Magic and had retrieved the locket of Salazar Slytherin from around Dolores Umbridge's neck.  They then fought their way out of the Ministry after first releasing a group of Muggle-born wizards awaiting hearings.  But their escape was fouled when the Death Eater Yaxley managed to tag along to their secret hideout at 12 Grimmauld Place, forcing them to go on the run.

And then I went to sleep.

I probably fell asleep around 1:30; old sleep patterns die hard, and I am only gradually changing over from a night shift pattern.

I don't know when the nightmare began.  Nor do I remember all the particulars.  But I remember this:  I was watching CNN in the evening.  Kyra Phillips was co-anchoring with another woman.  As in real life, she was pregnant, though in real life she is a morning anchor.  Someone in the Obama administration was stepping down, someone at a Rahm Emmanuel level.  They kept going over a biography of him, talking about how he was an outstanding athlete before getting into politics.  Then there was interference on the TV; the image broke up, there was static, and the image came back.  Then it happened again, only instead of coming back to the original image there was a shot onscreen as if a camera had been pointed in a random direction.  It showed an on-set monitor and some equipment in the picture - a camera and a light stand or something.  The monitor had a test pattern on it, but the picture was distorted, and the colors were screwed up, so the test pattern was just shades of pink and magenta.  And I heard Kyra Phillips talking off-camera, apologizing to viewers, explaining that they didn't know exactly what was happening, and suddenly she segued into the most godawful scream I have ever heard.  This was the scream of someone being murdered, of someone pleading for her life, and her baby's life, and of someone watching in Lovecraftian horror as all of reality suddenly transforms itself before their eyes, and everything they have ever believed to be real turns out to be a shallow myth, and every fear they have ever heard turns out to be a pale echo of reality.  It was a scream of horror, and terror, and despair, and agony, and I'm pretty sure I woke up after that.

Of course, nothing was happening onscreen for me as this happened.  I don't know if that made it worse.

I don't know if the next bit was attached, or if it was something I retconned in after I managed to get back to sleep, but I remember seeing footage of two people wearing headsets sitting at a control board turning to a camera, the image still distorted and color shifted, and silently shrugging in a "we have no idea what the hell is going on" gesture.  One of them was a skinny man with a beard and moustache, blond, I think, though how I could tell that when everything was shades of pink and magenta I don't know.

Anyway.  When I woke up I seriously thought about just heading across town to check on my mom, or at least calling her.  I checked the clock.  It was 2:45.  I decided to go back to sleep.  After a while, somehow, I managed it.

The other dream - which I only just remembered - was more placid, though more vague.  It was in a dreamscape I think of as "dream Nanticoke," which is like regular Nanticoke but with slightly steeper terrain.  There was a festival of some sort going on downtown, and my father was taking some of us down to it.  I think I was about 14 in the dream.  I don't remember much else, just wandering around through various places.  I know I've dreamed of this place before; there was a dream about using a bathroom in an ornate version of the post office downtown, and another about a limited edition Boba Fett action figure available in a store, and another about magazine shops downtown, and still another about magazine shops on the other end of town.  (I remember when I would walk Haley in those parts of town back in 2004 and 2005, I would sometimes look at houses and try to imagine them as the magazine shops I had dreamed of.)

So, anyway, that's that.  Make of it what you will.  Now maybe I can forget that dream, and that scream.



...Or not.  I saw this a while ago on the Cracked.com article "The 5 Creepiest Unexplained Broadcasts."  After the dream I couldn't get this out of my head, though in tone and content this doesn't compare.  Stil, you may want to heed the warning given by author Evan Kasindorf: "Want to sleep tonight? Then you probably shouldn't watch this:"



You were warned.