I Hope It Was A Dream

Inspired by Halloween season and recently seeing Paranormal Activity 2, I was trying to remember the scariest thing that's ever happened to me. I drew a blank at first, thinking I've lived a pretty unscary life for the most part. I've grown up to be a pretty hard-headed rationalist who tends to scoff at the idea of ghosts, goblins, demons, or other monsters stalking humans. That side of me believes these things have no basis in reality are nothing but remnants of humankind's unenlightened, superstitious past. 

But another part of me is bored by skepticism and becomes rapt with fascination when it comes to things that go bump in the night, thrilled with the idea that the rational side of me is wrong, and that perhaps a supernatural world that follows different rules exists alongside the one we see in our everyday lives.

The closest I've ever come to perhaps having an encounter with that world occurred when I was only four or five years old. My mom, dad, and I lived in a trailer park in Valdosta, Georgia at the time. In my bedroom there, I was cursed with many bad dreams. Perhaps this was because I had only recently been weaned from sleeping with my parents. There were some nights when I would still try to sneak in their room, but these efforts consistently ended in failure when they forced me out again. My efforts were so persistent that they took to locking me out, and I would protest by carrying a pillow and a sheet down the hall, and laying down to sleep in front of their door. But this tactic ultimately proved unsuccessful because the discomfort of the location would soon outweigh my desire to sleep with my parents, and I would slink back to my room to try to make the best of things.

The worst nights were the ones when I was sent to bed while my parents stayed awake. I felt painfully excluded on these nights. I could hear them talking and laughing, and it bothered me that they could seem so happy without my presence. I would lie in bed determined to stay awake until they went to bed themselves so that the following morning I could tell my mother that there was no sense sending me to bed early. I could stay up as long as they could if I wanted. But invariably I would fall asleep before the house went dark, and would wake up hours later after a nightmare to a silent house. These were dreams that did not dissipate in the morning. Their effects would linger into the following day, and being the contemplative sort, even as a child, I spent a great deal of time thinking about them.

The nightmares were recurring, and of three different types. The first, and least terrifying although still oddly scary, was of a pack of miniature black puppies with beady red eyes. They would suddenly pour from my closet like a swarm of locusts and bound onto my bed. I would stand up and try my best to throw them off, but it was a hopeless cause. The ones I removed from the bed would only jump onto it again as soon as I set them down, and others would leap onto it as I did so. This would continue until my bed was completely infested with the things. Eventually I would wake up with my heart pounding, sweating and panting.

While this dream was disturbing, I did not feel threatened by the bounding puppies. It was only that I did not wish to share a bed with hundreds of them. I have sometimes tried to figure out if this dream held some sort of Freudian or symbolic message, but I have drawn a blank on what it might have been.

The second and more frightening recurring dream was of a hoboish looking overweight witch who would appear in the doorway of my room and come to stand at my bedside to peer down on me. She didn't speak, but I understood somehow that she wanted me to go with her back to wherever she came from. I would stare at her, paralyzed with fear as she placed a hand on me. As she did so, I would find myself transported to what I understood to be her world. I stood in a long hallway walking beside the witch who held my hand against my will. Against the walls on either side stood armless puppet-like creatures with sunken in cheeks and beady eyes. On their heads they wore hats of all types. The hallway was dimly lit, as if by candlelight, and I did not know where we were going, or what the puppets wanted from me, but I also did not want to find out. My fear would finally get the best of me, and I would flee from the witch. This would prompt a cacophony of noise from the witch and all the puppets surrounding me. The entire mob would chase me down the corridor as I fled. But running is hard in dreams, and within moments, the witch's gnarled hand would take hold of my arm. Then I would wake up, finding myself safe in bed, immensely relieved I had only been dreaming.

This dream was terrifying to me mostly because of how real it seemed in the moment and its linear nature. I wonder now if I've filled in the blanks after the fact, but I don't think that was the case. It was just an exceptionally scary dream that recurred more times than I care to recall.

But it still wasn't the scariest dream. There was a third one that, thankfully, didn't recur as often as the others. I believe it only happened three times, but the third one was the worst of all. It was the dream that seemed to end them all...if it was a dream at all.

In this dream, I would be laying in bed on the verge of sleep when I would hear something beating on the wall that my bed was pressed against. I would look to see what was there and see one of the witch's puppets banging its head against the wall and staring at me. It did nothing else...only stared and after a moment it would pound its head against my head and stare at me again. In the first two dreams of this type, there were two puppets. One appeared at the foot of my bed, and another at the middle. The one in the middle wore a derby hat while the other wore a straw one. For some reason, the middle one seemed the most sinister. I literally feared for my life when I had this dream, and dreaded its coming.

The third and final time that I had this "dream" is one of the most vivid memories of my childhood, and I sometimes wonder if it was truly a dream at all although I have no other explanation for it. It happened on one of those nights when I was sent to bed early. For some reason, I was even more upset than usual about being forced to bed early. Feeling very angry, I attempted to stay awake until after my parents went to bed as usual. But, also as usual, I failed. I was rudely wakened sometime later by an awful racket of something hitting the wall the bed was pushed against. I already knew what was happening before I turned to see. The puppet thing had come to get me. I saw it glaring at me in the dim light of my nightlight--an armless figure pressed between the wall and the bed staring at me with beady eyes and a malevolent grin. It wore a crumpled derby hat and the remnants of a ragged shirt. For a moment, I could only stare at the thing, unable to move or speak. Then it slammed its upper body against the bed in two sharp motions. I heard the bed springs squeak from the impact, and screamed for my mother. The alarm in my voice must have been evident because she came running. She came to stand beside me and asked me what was wrong. Too terrified to speak, all I could do was point to the other side of the bed at the thing I could still see grinning at us.

She told me there was nothing there. Determined that she must be right, I turned away from the thing and begged her to let me sleep with her and Daddy. But she said my dad would simply not allow it, and I said there was no way I was staying in my room alone tonight with the scarecrow puppet thing. Finally, she agreed that she would sleep in my room and that I could sleep with my father. I worried that the thing would get her, but something told me it was only interested in me, and I left her there alone.

The next morning I was extremely relieved to see she had survived the night. Over breakfast, I told both of my parents about what I had seen, and also about the other two types of recurring nightmares I often had. My mother seemed concerned about my nightmares, but she assured me that the thing I'd seen against the wall had only been part of a dream and nothing more. I accepted this, but wasn't so sure she was right. My father believed that all my dreams were just an imaginative ploy to convince them to let me sleep with them.

In any case, I never had any of the dreams again after that. It wasn't long afterward that we moved out of the trailer park onto a piece of isolated land in the country. Although my room in the trailer remained the same, something about moving away from the trailer park made it less menacing, and I was no longer so afraid to sleep alone. But for many years afterward, I made it a point to never look to the wall side of my bed. I believed that if I did the scarecrow puppet thing might appear, and even now a ghost of that fear exists for me.

I've convinced myself now that it was only a dream, but every now and then there are nights when I'm not so sure.