Visions in the Dark

I am in a house I do not recognize and most of the action takes place in the large kitchen, dining room or hallway to the bedrooms. The house sits at the top of a hill amidst a forest whose leaves are ablaze with all the brilliant, fiery colours of autumn. The inside facade of the house consists of very natural colours and materials: wood floors and earth tone colour schemes.

There is going to be a party if sorts tomorrow, maybe a family reunion or something, and I am in the kitchen making dish after dish of salads and casseroles and other side dishes. I think the party is a pot luck because even though I know that other people are going to be bringing food, I have an almost uncontrollable urge to make as much food as possible. I worry that there will now be enough for everyone even though I am not sure how many people are going to be there (though I know it is going to be a lot).

I have guests who have arrived already and they are going to stay the night. There are two men and two women. I am suddenly in the living room talking with one of the men who has a beige polo shirt and who has a bushy brown beard. He is joyful and always smiling and seems very happy to talk to me. We are related in the dream, but I forget how. From just above the knees down to his ankles his pants become transparent and I can see his leg bones. The transparency effect becomes stronger the further down the leg you go and his feet have completely disappeared. I know this is wrong somehow and I sit back with a white marker to blend the white of his bones with his pants and try to colour in his legs to make them look full. For some reason I think that the man will be embarassed about it if other people notice. Suddenly I realize that the bearded man I am talking too is a ghost and that is why his legs are transparent. I am not afraid or anything but I am confused as to why he has come here and not gone to the afterlife and I think I ask him this and his response is that he is glad that family is getting together. He disappears soon afterwards and I think I realized that there were other ghosts around as well or something but I cannot remember if I talked to them or not.

While I am the same person in the dream in mind, my body has suddenly aged significantly and I am now an old lady. Also quite suddenly I am in a foul mood (though not because of the aging) and start throwing plates and cutlery around roughly and pushing the two women guests (one is a blond middle aged woman in a baby blue sweater and the other is younger with brown hair?) around in the kitchen . They are visibly shaken by my sudden mood change and though they say nothing I can tell by the expressions on their face that they wish I would retire for the night so they could finish their work in peace. I stomp out of the kitchen in a huff and scream "Dont touch my fucking cheese casserole or I'll fucking kill you!" as I enter the hallway to my bedroom. For some reason I think they will eat it when I am gone and it only adds to my sudden and inexplainable rage.

I go up to my bedroom and lay down on the bed and though the house has three other people in it downstairs I cannot hear them at all. They have either gone to bed or are tiptoeing around because they think I am trying to sleep, but honestly, to me it feels like they are not there at all. The house feels empty again like it did for a long time before they arrived. The window is open and I can feel the soft night breeze coming in the window and hear the rustling of the leaves on the trees. A few autumn leaves are blown in with the wind and scatter across my bed and my floor but this doesn't bother me and I find that I am no longer so full of rage but feel very lonely. I become confused and start to think all the planning and cooking was not real and I imagined the whole thing. I get up and head downstairs. I cannot find my three guests but there is indeed many plates of food prepared and scattered through the kitchen and in the fridge.

There is a knock at the front door and I open it to see a young black man in grey clothing standing on the path leading to my house. He is smiling and asks me to walk with him for a while. Even though it is the middle of the night and I don't know this man I go with him anyway and we walk through a path that leads to a forest talking, though I cannot remember any of our conversation now, but I am very content to be with this man because I feel like I know him but I cannot articulate how. The sun starts to rise and we go return to my house and stand at the very top of the hill and I am surprised to see a very long line of people outside of my house consisting of thousands of people, most of whom I do not recognize as family or friends. I have trouble believing that all of these people are here for the party and the young man in grey just responds that these are all the people whose lives I have affected or who love me.

I start to realize that something is amiss and suddenly I am back laying in bed, half conscious and vagely aware that I am waking from a deep sleep. Instead of being in my bedroom though I am in a hospital room surrounded by the three people from before who were my guests. It dawns on me that I had died the night before and the walk through the forest with the young man was actually a walk through a replay of my long life with my guardian angel, though I did not realize it at the time. I was able to talk to the ghost of the man with the transpartent legs before because I had been a ghost too.

I reach out and take the hands of the people surrounding me and tell them I love them. I feel so full of love for them and for the whole world that I feel like I am going to burst with joy. Even though I had just died the night before the doctors let me leave the hospital and go back to my house for the pot luck party. There are not thousands of people there but there is a lot and everyone is happy, filled with good food and enjoying life and the company of others.


This is a very unusual dream for me, because it ended positive and there was lots of positive feelings in it, when usually my dreams are dark and depressing and scary. I'm not complaining, I'm just saying...