Fuck. Now where the hell did I park?
Well, I’m already late with today’s post, so it’ll be a quick one. My kid told me a couple of days ago about how he had nearly missed getting up at his normal time because, in the throes of a nightmare, he had somehow disabled his alarm clock.
It was the first time he told me he had nightmares at all. At first I was a bit concerned but then I realized that I seem to be the weird one. I’ve had three nightmares in my entire life, by which I mean “dreams so unsettling they woke me up.” And two of them weren’t even dreams of horrific circumstances.
Nightmare #1. I’m playing the part of the pretty girl, here.
So, going in ascending order of how messed up the nightmare made me, the first one was pretty simple and I had it, oh, maybe five years ago. In the dream, I was at a party with some friends and everything was pretty normal. Then I started making out with my friend Tom and my mind rebelled and I woke right the fuck up.
On a scale of “huh” to “therapy for the next decade” the dream was way down on the “huh” end of things but I guess it still qualifies as a nightmare because, hey, I panicked and hit the “eject” button on the dream.
Nightmare #2 in the same order was fairly recent. About two or three months ago, I had a dream that She and I sat down together, having a nice, pleasant day. The setting was dream dorm, which is a gigantic structure around fifty stories tall that is made up of every dorm I have ever been in, located just off of dream highway, which is a snarl of on ramps and off ramps sure to cause your Garmin GPS to spontaneously become possessed by the Irish guy from Braveheart and tell you, “I’m pretty sure you’re fucked.” Both of these are recurring locations in my dreams, along with dream house, which is a five story affair and the top story is a glass roofed loft that, somehow, remains dimly list at all times.
Anyway, She and I were on the front lawn of dream dorm having a picnic or something. Maybe tooling around in tiny cars lent to us by Shriners (not that unusual an image for me to associate with Her because I often associated this They Might Be Giants song with Her early on). We had a long, quiet conversation together in which I laid out every reason She shouldn’t leave me. And She agreed with every point I masterfully made. So, after my summation, I said, “OK, so you’ll move back in, right?”
She patted me on the cheek and said, “No.”
And I woke up in shock.
Again, not too far up on the fucked up scale, honestly. As a matter of fact, after the shock of waking up, I had one of my best days I’d had since the disaster. “Finally!” I thought, “My subconscious is accepting the truth!”
The third one is one of my earliest memories and maybe that’s why I was put off of nightmares for most of my life. It must have been when I was three or four years old and living on The Rock. It’s also, oddly enough, my earliest memory of my mother.
Nightmare #3, Tick-Tock, mother fucker!
In my dream, a clockwork man was wandering around and people were enjoying his antics and generally being in awe of the marvelous automaton. He was about six feet tall, had painted metal skin, and was wearing a pinstriped grey suit and fedora. And he had a big, brass windup key sticking out of his back, constantly turning and turning as he went about his day.
Only I seemed to see what else he did.
Whenever he encountered a person alone, say in an alley or something, he would reach into his pocket and pull out, cartoon style, another big, brass key just like the one turning in his back. Then he would stab that key into the back of the unsuspecting human, crank it one, twice, three times, and then that person would turn into another clockwork human.
But no one else would notice.
The transformed clockwork people would then go out, still wearing human skin but now with the big key in their backs, turning and turning, and find themselves new victims to transform.
This went on for a while until it seemed that there was no one left but me, running away from the original clockwork man as I tried to find someone to help me. I saw my mother off in the distance and ran, crying, into her arms. She scooped me up and held me tight and I looked over her shoulder to see a brass key, turning and turning.
I woke up screaming and crying and that dream has been burned into my mind my whole life.
Four years old and my brain had employed all of the tropes of the body snatcher/ vampire/ zombie style movies, complete with shock/cheesy Twilight Zone style ending. I guess I was destined to be a writer all along.
Or those tropes are so effective because they really touch the primal fears of humanity.
My Name is Max but I go by Bob 
My recurrent locations are usually a dream mall amalgam of every mall I’ve been in, and dream high school.
I have so many dreams on such a great scale between disturbing to entertaining, that I don’t really think of nightmares much anymore, they just all fit on a sliding scale.
In my youth, I used to have a recurring nightmare that would almost always happen just before I got sick, like a cold or some such. In it, my arms grow so heavy that I can’t lift them, and then I lose traction on the earth below me and can’t move forward, just stand there helplessly trying to walk and life my arms.
I recently had a dream that woke me up quite disturbed, but I no longer remember its content, just the aftermath. My wife had a dream that she recounted on Facebook, that I think qualifies as a nightmare.
My wife often tells me, when I remember a dream enough to tell the details, that my dreams are movie scripts, and it fascinates her. Almost all of my dreams follow a story line, sometimes logically, sometimes more in the Family Guy fashion of random changes in direction or content.
I used to keep a dream journal, and that allowed me to start remembering a lot of my dreams with a lot more clarity.
Rambling comment is rambling.