Visions in the Dark

I am in a dark house with old dusty furniture. I am in the living room I think and I fall into a hole in the floor to the basement. It is dark beyond where the light from the level above comes through the hole but I can see rows of pillars or something. At the back there is something moving. I can hear it and barely see, but it is definately not human. It suddenly produces a small light source like a tiny pen light or something. I can see the light searching the walls and floors like it is looking for something. I get very scared and climb a thin water pipe back up into the living room. I am terrified of being found by anyone, especially by that thing in the basement.

I am in a three storey house made in the Victorian architexture style. The outer facade is large grey stones and the interior is all wood. I do not recognize the house from anything I have seen in waking life but I know that I am in modern times because the furniture and appliances are modern and there are two cars parked outside in front of the house.

It is dark outside and I go outside to look at the cars. One is my family's old 1986 Volkwagen Westfalia and the other is my dad's previous car, a dark blue minivan. I don't know where I am but it seems to be a rural town or something. I have a horrible feeling when I go outside and feel like there are many "dark things" watching me. I run back into the house where it is warn and lighted and where I feel safe.

Back in the house I find a young man sitting in the living room in front of the fire. I recognize him as one of my dream characters who shows up rarely but I know him by his black hair and green eyes. We exchange a few words but I cannot remember what we talked about now. I went upstairs to the second floor for some reason, feeling compelled by some invisible force.

I cannot remember any more of this dream.

I had two dreams on October 7th, 2008. This is the first one, but it is fragmented.


I am in my own apartment and it is a Victorian style building. I am smoking pot and trying to avoid detection from a police officer who is across the street. I start Spongebob Squarepants and forget about the police.

Grandma is living with me, but she is senile and it is easy to trick her into giving me twenty dollar bills all the time. There is an entity living in an alarm clock but it has satalite capabilities and lots of wires and connectors coming out of it. I frequently have deep intellectual conversations with this alarm clock. There are other people/entities moving around the house but they are vague and hard to define, like ghosts.

The dream changes and I am in a school that is half destroyed and students rioting. I meet an intriguing young man who is interested in UFC and later he starts a UFC fight club in the basement of the school which has somehow merged with the basement of grandma's place.

That's all I remember from this dream.

(There is a "trigger warning" on the content of this dream.)

It is the mid or late eighteen hundreds. I live on the edge of a crowded city in grey brick house at the end of an small street or alleyway where there is a laundry pool, beyond which is a forest. In the dream I am an only child and live with my mother and a few of her friends. We are not wealthy but have enough to live comfortably.

There are several men courting me. The first man is someone I have never met, which was set up by my mother and her friends. I am not comfortable with the arrangement, even though he is an established doctor, because I will not be able to meet him until the wedding. I know nothing of what he is like, let alone what he looks like. I have not said no to the proposal, but I have not said yes either, and I try to stall my answer as long as possible. The second man is homeless and in rags with scraggly hair and beard and unkept hair, but I talk with him by the laundry pool and he is very kind. Everyone opposes interaction with him and "polite society" all but shuns him.

The third man appears on day when I am in the forest on the otherside of the laundry pool, sitting on a tree stump, reading my tarot cards. He comes and sits on a tree stump behind me and strikes up a conversation. He is handsome though I thought he had a kind of shifty look to him. The man's manner of speaking is very well, he is suave and magnetic and I find myself beoming drawn to him. While we are sitting and talking I pull either the Six of Cups or Six of Swords from my tarot deck (I cannot remember which) and say that is the card which represents him. The man scoffs dismissively, not believing in such trivalities as tarot cards, but also not disturbed that I do.

The man asks me to marry him and I say yes. I take him home to meet my mother, who is not enthralled at first but is quickly charmed by my new fiance. There is something about him that makes me uneasy, but I figure that I can't do much better with anyone else so I ignore my nagging doubts. He is eager to move in with mother and I. He has little in the way of worly possessions and it is clear to me from the onset that he is the one to benefit from this union financially much more than I. I am overcome with the dreadful thought that he is interested in me only for my money.

A week passes and the day of the wedding comes and takes place in a clearing in the forest beyond the laundry pool. The other residents of our household vacate for the night so that my new husband and I will have the place to ourselves. Almost immediately he takes me into his room and strips off my wedding dress. I am afraid and trembling because I have no idea what is about to happen. He roughly pushes me onto the bed and climbs on top of me, not bothering to remove any of this clothes, not even his shoes. He begins having sex with me but I am uncomfortable and in pain but he ignores my protests and continues until he is completely spent. As soon as he is done he climbs off of me, pulls up his pants and demands that I return to my own room. His tone is cold and flat and he does not even look at me as I leave his room, very unlike the warm, magnetic man who initially drew me in.

I am in my room on the second floor of the house, laying on the bed and looking up at a dream catcher in the window that is made with pink beads and white feathers onto which I have apparently stuck a tarot card. I cannot identify the card but I stare at it for a while. I don't know how much time passes but my feelings of being used and violated prevent me from falling asleep. I am just drifting off to sleep when I hear a door slam downstairs. Putting on a robe and going downstairs I find all of my valuables gone. I rush to the window and see my husband climbing into a horse-drawn wagon which has all of my possessions in the back. He sees my shocked and horrified face in the window and arrogantly laughs and waves as he drives away. His mocking is the last I can bear it and I collapse to the floor admist tears and despair.

My mother and her friends return and learned what happened and we are all infuriated but can do nothing, since we do not know where my husband has gone and cannot do anything anyway, since all of my worldly possessions become the property of the man upon marriage (an actual 19th century law). To avoid utter poverty I am now forced to accept the first man my mother arranged for me, the established doctor who I have not yet met. It turns out that he is more than twice my age and has children from a previous marriage, some of whom are actually older than I. We do not tell him that I was just married and robbed of all my possessions.

The marriage date is set and while everyone else scurries around making preperations or caught up in the excitement of the coming union, I feel shamed, betrayed and depressed. I resolve to drown myself in the laundry pool so one morning I sneak out of the house just after dawn. I am surprised to discover some of my stolen possessions sitting on a wooden deck next to the laundry pool. The objects where peices of pottery and soapstone carvings, some of which I have actually made in in real life, though in the dream I merely recognized them as possessions and not peices of art that I made. One particular peice that stood out was a small White Tara carved in soapstone and placed on a tree stump in the middle of the laundry pool. There were also some roughly carved faces and my pack of tarot cards wrapped in green silk.

My mother comes up behind me as I am looking at these things and is just as perplexed as I as to why some of my things have been returned. I tell her that I believe that my con-man first husband is mocking me from afar and only returned the things that he could not sell and would thus be worthless to him. I also believe though that it is an ironic twist of fate that the things he considered worthless are the things most treasured by me because of their sentimental value. The dream ends there.

This dream starts off with me as a passenger of a very old fashion car that looks like a vintage Model T without the canopy. The vehicle is severely lop-sided as the front left tire is normal, but the front right axel sports two tiny tires that look like they belong on a wooden pull wagon, not a car. I am in the backseat and the driver of the vehicle is a young woman dressed like a mennonite (in a pale beige dress), minus the bonnet to cover her light brown hair that has been pulled into a tight bun. I have on a grey mennonite dress as well but I think nothing of it in the dream even though I would never be caught dead in a dress in waking life. I know I am looking for something, but I an unable to say what, even when the young mennonite woman offers to help me search. It is for the search of that unknown thing that I have accepted a ride in her oddly designed car.

It is daytime and clear and we are somewhere deep in Southwestern Ontario's Mennonite country, as I remember it from childhood. It must of just stopped raining because the road is extremely bumpy and filled with deep muddy pits as well as various debris that looks as though it has been deposited in the middle of the road by a mud flow. I cannot remember asking the driver how we will get around all the debris and mud, though I do recall her saying that the old car was "tough and like a tank" and it could drive over, and through, anything. She proves this point when we come across what looks like a crushed silver sedan sticking out a shallow mud pit. The vintage vehicle seems to struggle a few times, especially with it's two tiny front wheels on the right side, but on the fourth or fifth attempt it is sucessfully able to drive over the crushed sedan.

There is a large white farmhouse a head of us in the distance that it sits in a depression in the landscape and is completely surrounded by water. The ground level of the building is no doubt flooded with water. As we drive closer the old vehicle slowly starts to become submerged and I am worried that it will stall, but it is strangely unaffected by the rising water level. The front door of the farmhouse opens as the driver parks the car and gets out. The woman who walks out of the farmhouse looks identical to the driver of the vintage car, only she is a bit taller and more corpulant, and is wearing a pale pink dress. It is obvious to me that they are sisters. The two of them seem completely oblivious to the muddy water that has flooded the entire farm even though it is knee deep.

They invite me into their home and allow me to look around at my leisure, but ask that I do not venture into the upper floors. While every room on the ground has been flooded, the water is relatively clean and clear, besides the occasional household object floating in it, unlike the murky and muddy water outside. In great contrast to the simplistic ideals of the mennonite lifestyle each room is decorated, even crammed, with old fashioned household items, knick-knacks, trinkets, oddities, toys and even the random out-of-place modern item, (like a brand new Spider Man plushie I found in a linen closet). Many of the rooms look more like a museum than a living space.

One stange thing I notice is that located in several rooms through the house there are three antique bisque dolls that have been tied together. The first group of three are all identical, dressed in earth tone Victorian fashion, blond curly hair and are tied toegther with what looks like twine. The doll on the far left is missing an eye. They are located in one of the first rooms, which I think is a lounge. The second group of three is located in what looks like a guest bedroom. The dolls are all identical looking with pale blue Victorian dresses, light brown hair and are tied together with a thin peice of red silk. The doll on the far left has a large crack down the middle of her face.

I find a narrow wooden staircase and sense what I am looking for up there. Before I go up I look through a nearby window and see a vast farmers field that is devoid of water and with large mounds spaced at regular intervals. Whatever is growing in the field is under the large mounds. I hear a faint "meow" and I suddenly realize/remember that I am looking for my cat Zrinyi. I quickly run up to the second floor and find her at the top of the stairs in a yellow cat carrier. There is a room beyond where I find my cat and the heavy wooden door is slightly ajar. I sneak a quick peek and see the last group of three dolls that are tied together. They are in what appears to be an old Victorian style office, sitting on the top shelf of a dark brown book case. The windows of the room have been boarded up and broken lines of light give little illumination to the heavily dusty room. The dolls have black dresses and are tied together with a thick peice of rope. None of the dolls have heads and the one on the far left looks as if it bled when the head was removed, as the white collar of it's dress has been stained red.

I hear one of the two sisters downstairs and quickly return to the ground level. I leave Zrinyi where she is and plan to return to get her. Now that I have found what I have been looking for, I am filled with a sense of urgency and desperately want to leave the farmhouse, but I suddenly feel like I am trapped and that I am not going to be allowed to leave. The sisters implore me to come and meet their father and brother. Up until this point I was unaware that there was anyone else in the house other than the two sisters since I had been through all the ground floor rooms and seen no one.

In a room that has suddenly appeared near the rear, right side of the house sits two men dressed in modern clothing on a modern sofa, staring at a large screen t.v with blank, glazed expressions on their faces. The sisters are frantically running back and forth trying to attending to every need and want of these men, and are completey ignored for their efforts. The room is heavy with anxiety and fear towards the two men, who have a dominating and meancing presence. I stand in one corner of the room and watch helplessly as the older of the two men (the father, I assume) starts to yell at the younger of the sisters for something, though I cannot remember what. He starts physically assaulting her and I yell at him to stop but he ignores me. Until I call him a "lazy misogynist," that is, then he turns is rage towards me and I flee from the room, but I am not scared and instead laugh, knowing that I struck a nerve and made the violent man react out of his own insecurity.

I run towards the narrow wooded stairs where Zrinyi is hidden, but instead I find the older of the two sisters at the bottom of the stairs holding the empty cat carrier. I realize at this point that the farmhouse is no longer flooded with water, but the floors have severe water damage and everything the water touched is now moldy and rotting. The older sister nods her head towards a nearby window and through it I can see the vast field that had the large mounds. It is newly plowed and through it runs hundred of black cats of all shapes and sizes. I think to myself "It's a black cat farm!" and know somehow that the cats had been grown from the field and where what was under the large mounds of dirt. I also realize that it is from my own black cat, Zrinyi, from which the "seeds" for these grown cats had been harvested, though I am not exactly sure how they did it.

I demand to know where my cat is but the woman in the pink dress just shrugs. She has a tired and worn look on her face. The dream becomes fuzzy at this point and I do not recall exactly how I found my cat, but I do so at some point, and try to flee from the farmhouse. The two sisters try to stop me but they tell me that they do not really want to, but will face further violence from their father if they do not try. I feel bad for the sisters, but I am tired of the entire place and just want to leave. I push them out of my way and storm out the front door which I first came through, with Zrinyi held tightly in my arms.

I cannot remember the beginning of this dream but there was quite a bit about wandering around outside in a semi-arid setting. I was travelling with three women I do not know in what looked like a camp ground. Despite the dry arid atmosphere, there were many thick, dark green coniferous trees about - enough almost to classify the area as a forest in my opinion. I do not recall much detail about the appearance of the three women except the two were slightly younger than I (and one was wearing a pink, wool sweater) and the oldest woman was about middle aged and had short dark brown hair. The four of us walked for a while, seemingly lost in the desert forest the three women conversed with each other, but I lagged behind and was content to just enjoy the setting, though as we walked a growing apprehension developed in my mind and I found myself wanting to be in the company of my parents because I suddenly felt very vunerable and child-like.

I had not noticed that she had gone, but the oldest woman of the group suddenly turned a corner, driving a red four door car that looked like a Glendale from the Grand Theft Auto videogame series. I never got her actual name in the dream, but from this point on I refer to the oldest woman of the group as Glenda. I never learn the names of the other two women. Glenda tells us to get in and I make myself confortable in the rear rightside passenger seat. The young woman in the pink, hand-knit sweater sits in the left side and I notice at this point that she has shoulder length blond hair. I think that she looks like Cagalli Yula Athha from the Gundam Seed anime series.

The three women continue to talk amongst themselves but I roll down my window and am content to just stare outside, wondering where my parents are. Glenda drives along a lone dirt road out of the desert forest, heading east, and we travel for a long time with nothing in sight. Soon however there is a wooden ramp a head of us and though it appears that we could drive around it, Glenda is determined to jump the ramp. She floors the accelerator and we speed towards the jump, and I feel that this is a very bad idea. I cling to the Cagalli look-alike and she does the same to me. Everyone in the car is afraid of the worst happening and I cannot talk Glenda out of stopping the car or just driving around the ramp. The red four-door car is heavy and though it hits the wooden ramp at a fair speed and level angle, the vehicle inexplicably flips in mid air, crashes on the roof and slides upside down for a short distance.

The four of us are able to crawl out of the wreck, and though we are dazed, no one is seriously injured. Glenda is quick to rally the other two girls into following her again by saying something like "the Arizona border isn't far now," or something, but I am not interested in joining them. While they continue along the dirt road heading east, I notice something in the southernly direction that looks like a group of small buildings or tents. It is hazy because of the heat and I cannot tell if what I am looking at is real or an optical illusion, but I start walking in that direction anyway. It is very hot and I take off my overshirt and wrap it around my head as I walk.

As I get closer to my destination I can see that it is some sort of outdoor event taking place infront of a large gothic styled building which I think at first much be a medieval church or something. There are stone pillars through the square, as well as consession stands and booths selling various consumer goods. There are many people casually browsing the things for sale or sitting on the many marble benchs scattered about. I am aching from the car crash and walk to the center of the bustle so see if I can find anyone I know. I look over my right shoulder and through the throng of people and booths I can see a Texaco gas station and feel drawn towards it. As I try to make my way there, my dad walks by infront of me and heads over to a coffee stand nearby. He did not notice me as he walked by and does not respond when I call out to him. I am sore and feeling needy and want sympathy because I was in an accident, but my dad completely ignores me as if I am not even there. He orders to hot drinks and walks toward a picnic table in the far end of the square, where my mom is sitting. I unwrap the overshirt from my head and follow my dad over to the table and try to get my parents attention, but again they do not respond. My anxiety increases and I desperately try yelling at them again they do not respond. What adds to my frustration is that I do not know if they cannot actually hear me, or if they are willfully ignoring my pleas for attention.

I briefly become lucid as I acknowledge that this is how it feels my parents treat me in real life, but I do not gain control of the dream because I feel rejected and psychologically exhausted.

Though I know they will still ignore me if I return to their company, I still desperately crave attention and affection from my parents - but it hurts too much to feel non-existant, so I head over to the large gothic style building and see if I can find a pillar or wall to hide behind. As I get closer to the building I notice that one of the huge wooden doors is slightly ajar. I make sure no one is looking and slip through the opening. While it looks like a midieval church on the outside, the interior looks much more like an elaborate palace. Lush carpets line the expansive halls; gold and jewels are woven into every decoration and peice of art; massive crystal chandeliers hang from the ceilings. I stand in awe for a moment, drinking in the magnificent excess of extravagance, until I hear footfalls coming from an adjacent room or hall near the entrance. Because the sound seems to be coming from behind me, I run away from the front doors and deeper into the mansion.

There seems to be some sort of party going on as in each room I pass I can hear people laughing and having fun, though the doors are closed and I cannot see anyone. I turn down one hall and almost trip over a stack of gifts wrapped in colourful papers and ribbons. Down another hall I find a long legless table with row upon row of crystaline bowls filled with either chocolate or vanilla ice cream. Because the hall is not air-conditioned, most of the ice cream is melting, and because the table has no legs and is effectively sitting on the floor, much of the melting ice cream is soaking into the lush red carpet. I walk through a set of doors beyond the legless table and find myself in watch appears to be a dinning hall. The place is set up as if to recieve and dine many guests, but I do not see anyone around. I can hear commotion from an adjacent room and hear a woman say something about "having the place ready for the afternoon guests." I quickly run through the room to a narrow hall on the other side. As I make my deeper into the mansion, a feeling of apprehension develops inside of me and I feel as if I am not suppost to be there.

I enter into a hall with a stairs to the left, a large open kitchen infront of me and a set of double doors to my right. There are cooks in white aprons, waiters in red jackets, and maids in black dresses all rushing around trying to get their jobs done. People do look in my direction, but no one stops what they are doing to say anything about the interloper. I stand in the middle of the hall and notice someone coming down the stairs in the corner of my left eye. A waiter with short black hair is slowing making his way down the stairs and he is holding something I cannot see in his left hand. He makes a funny face and then smiles at me, clearly trying to make me laugh. I do laugh, but try to stifle it with my hand and it is then that I notice that I am wearing a red waiter jacket like the man on the stairs. I am still afraid that I am going to get in trouble because I am not suppost to be there, but being near the man on the stairs seems to make me feel a bit calmer for some reason. Another waiter appears from behind me, carrying a silver tray full of silver dishes, walks past us and mutters to the waiter on the stairs to "leave the new girl alone," or something. The man on the stairs just gives him annoyed look. An aging woman with a scowl for a facial expression, wearing a long black Victorian-era dress and her gray hair up in a bun, appears in the kitchen entrance way and I only get to make brief eye-contact with her when the dream ends.


I think I can sum this dream up quite easy: anxiety about relations with my parents and anger about the emotional neglect I experienced in childhood.

There is an old farmhouse and barn in front of me. I can see an older couple working in field out back. I am not sure which, but the couple is either just really old fashioned pioneers or menonites. There is a doorless shed by the east side of the house and I wandered into it. Along with an assortment of old fashioned farming implements, homemade brooms line the far wall. I ask the old mennonite man if I can buy one when he comes over to see what I am doing tresspassing in his shed. Instead I am hired (or forced?) to become a live-in-maid to keep the farmhouse clean.

The mennonite couple disappear and a new couple appear as owners of the farmhouse. They are still older, but they look like they come from the Victorian era. I cannot think of anyone whom the lady of the house (the Mistress) looks like, but the man of the house (the Master) looked very much like Christopher Walken. The outside of the farmhouse looked the same, as did the barn, but the doorless shed disappeared and a long covered porch now wrapped itself around the east side of the house.

The inside of the house was still mainly Victorian/Edwardian era but seemed to have some seemingly out-of-place modernizations scattered randomly about. Though the house wasn't all that large, there was another maid who lived there as well. We usually worked together and while I was relatively pragmatic, the other maid was extremely superstitious and constantly tried to convince me that every creak, or misplaced object, was caused by ghosts. I did not believe in the ghosts theory and tired to argue that the house was old and prone to creaking and that objects get misplaced all the time, but the other maid would have none of it.

The other maid and I were asked to clean out the sothern rooms of the farmhouse because the Master wanted to convert them into a variety store. It was at this time that I started to see unusal things happen, like curtains move when there was no breeze, electrical cords pull themselves from the wall, and doors open and close by themselves. In the main hall, drops of blood fell from the ceiling and pooled on the floor. No matter how many times the other maid and I cleaned up the blood, it always reappeared the next day. Most frustrating was the fact that the Master and Mistress of the house never experienced anything strange, nor saw the blood, and would dismiss our complaints as nonsense.

I was now convinced that the house was haunted afterall, but was still not all that creeped out until the drops of blood from the ceiling became bloody bootprints that appeared decending the stairs and entering the southern rooms. At one point I was cleaning something in the main hall and heard footfalls on the stairs. I turned and saw not the Master as I was expecting, but the bloody bootprints. I quickly tried to duck into one of the adjacent rooms, but the double glass doors either locked of their own accord or jammed. I quickly spun around so that my back was pressed up against the glass doors and the lights in the hall began flickering. The temperature in the room dropped dramatically and I could see my breath. I was frozen in terror as I watched the bloody bootprints slowly and ominously stomp towards me. I cowered and shut my eyes, but just before they reached me, the sound of the footfalls disappeared, the room temperature returned to normal, and the lights stopped flickering. The glass doors behind me swung open and I made a hasty exit from the main hall and ran into the other maid, who saw everything from the other side of the glass doors.

Not only did the other maid quit after that but the bloody bootprints following me around the house became a common occurance. While it did take me a while to get used to, I eventually figured out that if I made no attempt to run from the ghostly follower, or try to clean up the bloody mess, the ghost would soon leave and the bloody mess would eventually disappear on its own.

I was standing in the southern room at one point, brainstorming ideas for the variety store, when I was summoned by the Master. I went to his private study in the north end of the house and when I got there, he lectured me on how no women in his household should leave the premises without a male escort. I realized at this time that I had never so much as stepped out onto the porch in all my time of working there as a maid, let alone leave the property. I got angry and shouted "There is my escort!" I pointed to the bloody bootprints that followed me into the room and the Master finally sees them for the first time, but says nothing.

Almost immediately after the lecture, I began to see ghosts in and around the farmhouse. The first is a little boy in a blue coat and white shorts, playing with an orange ball, near the pond at the front of the house. One Sunday I am sitting with the Master and Mistress and their guests when I get up and go into the kitchen for something. When I return, there is an old man sitting in my seat. He looks exactly like the character Oscar Leroy from the show Corner Gas (baseball cap and all). I recognize him as a friend of the family in the dream and he starts telling me about how it is his birthday. I realize that the old man is a ghost and I exclaim outloud to the Master and Mistress that their friend is dead, but everyone in the room just looks at me like I am crazy. Some get angry because they think I am being disrespectful since they know that man I am talking about and that it is his birthday.

I beg the Master to call the family of their friend but they wil not. The ghost of the old man gets up and asks me to follow him outside into the front yard. I do so, and the family and their guests follow me to see what I am up to, though I suspect it is just to observe me because they think I have lost my mind. The ghost of the old man tells me about how he died peacefully in his sleep, and as a hearse drives by in the distance, he points to the completed variety store at the southern end of the house and to says "Never stop writing down your ideas." The ghost then fades away. I walk over to the pond (though it looks more like a muddy pit at this moment) and stare quietly into the murky water. The Master comes over to me and finally says that he will get someone to call the family of his friend, to confirm his condition, because no one else yet believes that the old man is dead.

The Mistress runs out of the house and proclaims that their friend is dead and that it was self-inflicted. While everyone reacts to the news of their friend's suicide, I walk away saying "He lied to me!" (about how the old man said he died). Later, the Master, Mistress and guests are sitting around talking about how strange it was that someone would want to kill themselves on their birthday, but no one seems particularily upset at the loss of thier friend. I am disturbed and upset at their apparent apathy.


The dream ends there.

The birthday-suicide thing is something that I had been ruminating about for a few days because I struggle with suicidal ideation as a result of clinical depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

I dreamed that I was back in grade six. The classroom was empty except for me and the teacher Ms. M. For some reason I was naked and all embarassed about it, but there was nothing around I could cover up with. Ms. M told me to stop being so worried because she had seen other naked women before. I was all wierded out by her comments and even more so when I noticed that she was wearing only a white Victorian style nightgown. There was something happening in the hall outside of the classroom but I cannot remember any more of this dream.

In the dream I appeared as I looked at about age 11 or 12. I was with my mom and dad and we were in our old 1986 Volkswagen Westfalia. We were driving down an urban street that was lined with old Victorian and Edwardian style buildings, as well as many trees. In the dream, this was supposed to be our hometown of London, Ontario, but the areas we travelled through looked nothing like any area of London that I recognize. I don't remember many of the buildings, but one stuck in my memory for some reason. It was a three story bulding made of dark grey bricks and a black tile roof. The front door was a dark red and there were vines growing up the entire front side. This building sat opposite of a three-way intersection and I recall noticing it the first time my parents and I drove past it because my dad had to make a left turn. Though it had a unique and vaguely farmiliar look in my dream, I cannot recognize it as anything I know in waking life.

My parents and I drove out into the country, though it did not look like the country surrounding my hometown (as I know it in waking life, anyway). We drove for a long time and came to a thicket of trees which seemed to have a picnic area in the middle. My dad drove the van towards the picnic tables but the westfalia got stuck in some mud that we had not noticed before. My parents got out of the van and walked towards the picnic tables and it was then that I noticed an old man in a blue uniform. He looked like a thin Captain Highliner. I walked amongst the trees while my parents talked to the captain. I found a little stream and noticed something moving in the water, but my mom called me back to the van before I could get a look at what it was. As we drove out of the grove (and almost got stuck in the mud again) I watched the old man walk towards the little stream with a blank expression on his face. He waded into the stream before the van turned onto the road and I could no longer see him.

We drove for miles again, past farmland and forests. I noticed that we travelled fairly far without seeing a single building. Soon though, my parents spotted group of white houses and they wanted to go check them out. Parking the westfalia behind one of the houses my mom and dad got out of the van and started snooping around. I was afraid of being caught doing something illegal so I stayed in the van. When my parents had not returned for a long time, I got out of the van and went to look for them. From the window of one of the white houses I could see someone looking at me and I was afraid that they were going to call the police on me for tresspassing. I started back to the van but I suddenly heard a group of people laughing and carrying on. Following the noise I came across my mom and dad and some strangers on the front balcony of one of the houses, opening champagne bottles and having some sort of celebration. The old man in the blue uniform was there as well. Apparently it was his house and he had just won it in a sweepstakes or something (and that is why everyone was celebrating?).

My parents had one glass of champagne before returning to the van and heading home. The trip home didn't seem nearly as long as the trip out there, and I don't recall seeing the picnic grove on the way back. When we returned to London, it again was the strange London with all of the Victorian and Edwardian building. When we came to the three-way interesection and my dad turned, I watched the vaguely farmiliar dark grey, three story bulding grow smaller and smaller in the rear view window. When we were some distance away I saw the dark red door swing open, but I woke up before I could see what was behind it.

I am in a old Victorian style looking house looking down a long hallway with many old wooden doors. There was something about a dark-haired man in a red checkered shirt in one of the rooms off to the left, but I cannot remember the significance. There was also something about a rocking chair and a fireplace but the significance of that is also lost to me. Despite the old Victorian appearance of the house, it had a very modern looking bathroom, though I only remember seeing it while I went down the hall towards the room with the man in the red checkered shirt.