I had a strange night last night. Well, stranger than usual lol. Usually when I get scared enough in a dream to start to feel paralyzed it wakes me up. Last night it didn't for some reason.
I was at my old house and there were a whole lot of people there- most of them I didn't know. My parents must have been having a party or something. It was kind of annoying to me because the guests kept getting in the way of everything, like constantly taking up the bathroom or preventing me from cooking in the kitchen. It was weird because there were tons of people but they weren't all congregated in the same area; it was like they belonged to smaller groups or were individually wandering around.
There was one guest in particular who really creeped me out. He was very tall and maybe in his 50s, wearing this long white lab coat. He had really frizzy bushy hair and piercing eyes. He creeped me out because he was always looking me over in a way that I didn't appreciate, and then would get this distortedly huge grin on his face. I spent most of the dream trying and failing to avoid him, and every time he managed to find me in a room alone he would grin really huge and it scared the crap out of me. I would start to feel paralyzed like I was waking up, but as the feeling would start spreading from my neck to my back I would shake myself off in the dream and run out of the room. It happened at least three or four times, and it never woke me up- I woke up normally, which for me is always pretty sudden, but I wasn't paralyzed anymore. I still have a clear picture in my mind of the creepy dude staring right at me from the screen porch while I stood in the pitch dark of the backyard where I had gone in my latest escape attempt.
Having the occasional really intense character in my dreams is something I've always done. While I'm asleep they seem like real people. Several of my favorite characters that I've developed into stories of their own came out of a dream to start with. I think it's pretty cool when it happens, even when the character is a really creepy one. So maybe I'll draw him, creepy distorted grin and all.
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When I was 4 years old I began to have very very bad dreams - and there was one particular dream I had over and over - involving a crazy-haired woman in a grey ragged dress with an evil smile, snaggled teeth and pure black eyes. She would follow me, chase me, and I was sure she was going to eat me.
ReplyDeleteI'm almost 39 now and she is still after me. She's the reason why I learned to lucid dream, which I later discovered is common for Narcoleptics because some of us, including me, hit REM fast and stay there (at my last sleep study I REM'd almost 75% of the 8 hours I slept - and I woke up exhausted). So now when she shows up I can grow wings and fly away or trap her behind doors with no handles...
I think our dreams are more 'real' than people think, and for those of us who dream very much and very powerfully, its perfectly reasonable to expect some of these characters to stay with us. The crazy woman in my dream is my fear of loss - of losing my parents, my siblings, my lovers and friends...
And I guess that fear will never go away, so neither will she.
I've come to accept that. I 'hope' it doesn't make me crazy ;-)
Good to know it's not just me with the character thing. I have a lot of them that have stuck, including a character who represents the nightmares and hallucinations themselves.
ReplyDeleteI, too, learned how to lucid dream to get out of the more terrifying of situations, and it's pretty fun. Usually my strategy is to jump into the air, waving my arms really fast up and down, and then I start flying up to safety, lol. Or I'll jump through a glass window, swoop down and start flying that way.
Thanks for commenting. At least if we are actually crazy, there's a lot of company, lol.
I am unnerved by two things. One, Quasimodo2's character sounds exactly like the witch who vividly appeared in my dream (chasing me with her ghost friend) when I was four. It is one of the few dreams that I clearly remember in my life (and part of the reason I am actually glad that I rarely remember my dreams). Two, Wolfie, your creepy guy's description made me think of Dr. Mignot, the head of Stanford's Center for Narcolepsy. If you do draw your character, search for images of Dr. Mignot to see if they match. Weird!
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