Nightmares

[mousme]

I had my first honest-to-goodness nightmare in a very long time last night. Well, this morning, just before waking, to be precise. Bizarrely, the dream involved vampires. Polish vampires (let it not be said that I can't break stereotypes with the best of them).

Most of it is already fading, but I remember being trapped in a hotel room with someone else's family. jteethy was there, with what I assume was his daughter, although she looked entirely different, but there was no sign of pasley.

As in many of my dreams, I got to be the omniscient narrator, in that I could see what was going on outside, even though my "character" was still in the hotel room. I saw as one of the older boys (there were a lot of children, ranging in age from about four to eighteen —so many that I couldn't keep track of all of them) found his grandmother outside in the corridor. He ran to her, perhaps to try to get her to safety, but she refused to go with him. She was very tall, as I recall, and stood erect in spite of her old age. She was terribly thin, her skin hanging in wrinkled folds on her bare arms, and forming pronounced jowls on her face. Her whitish-blond hair (the colour that all elderly women seem to dye their hair with these days) was in wild disarray, but she was perfectly calm, even gloating.

It was then that the boy realized that she had been waiting for the head vampire all this while. He, too, was extraordinarily old-looking, with a wrinkled, puffy face and hands that were gnarled and twisted with age. While the boy looked on, horrified, he grasped the old woman and transformed her into a vampire on the spot (none of this silly waiting period like in accepted cannon, no sir).

The scene shifted back to the room in which I was staying with some of the kids I mentioned earlier. I knew there were still people out there in danger, and so I took the risk of opening the door to let in anyone who came by (the door in this case was made almost entirely of glass, so I could see out before opening it). Things got weird even by dream standards then, because I could see the children running by the door, but it was always the same children at different stages in their lives. It was as though I was getting a glimpse into the future, that I was seeing the shape of things to come, and I knew that the vampires would be around for a long time.

I made my escape to a different room, where I found jteethy and a little girl of about three or four with dark hair and very big dark eyes. We decided that our best bet was to hide the little girl (I still don't know if it was his daughter or not —that was never made clear) in the closet under a pile of clothes. Before I knew it, though, the vampires had congregated outside, and so we too crawled in alongside her. I put my arm around her to keep her quiet, while jteethy huddled on the other side of the closet.

The vampires prowled the corridors, talking loudly at the top of their voices. They were trying to frighten us into giving ourselves away. There was no question of whether or not they'd been invited, but we'd locked the door to the room and bolted the closet door as well, and we were hoping that would be enough to keep them away. When I awoke the vampires had managed to bluff us into making a sound (I think they said something that made the little girl gasp audibly), and I was just wondering what we were going to do next.



In conclusion, it was a pretty standard hide-in-the-dark dream, but when I awoke my heart was hammering so hard I thought it might come out of my chest on the spot. Weird. I haven't had a proper nightmare (I've had anxiety dreams, but they're always very literal and usually involve my being half-awake) in a very long time.

Comments

[pasley.livejournal.com]

Yes, I can see how dreaming about Jeff's family would be the stuff of nightmares. ;)

Seriously, sorry to hear you sleep was troubled. Then again, I like to see nightmares and strange/interesting dreams in general as possible inspiration for stories/writing.

[luvenditti.livejournal.com]

I hate vampire dreams.

[pasley.livejournal.com]

Try writing your thesis about vampires. I eventually lost track of the number of vampire and vampire-related dreams and nightmares I was having on a nightly basis during that time. I even dreamed that my thesis advisor was a vampire in disguise. YEESH!