nightmare

Morning of May 25, 1975. Sunday.



Background information: This dream seemed to relate to simultaneous associations of seeing razor blades as primarily dangerous combined with a concern about becoming ill from mosquito bites as well as leeches. There was also a brief incident at Lake Katherine where a few other teenagers (at least one wearing a razor blade as a pendant), walking by when our class was on a field trip, made threats about using a razor blade to slice up our backsides. The female teacher looked worried but did not react and the others just kept walking. I am not aware of anyone being killed in this dream, though the idea seems very plausible. My concern is possibly minimal due to wearing a repellent (such as “Off”) of some kind, though I believe it is a special type of “cologne” in my dream (and even this potential was possibly influenced from a television commercial about “Off”).

This is not a more pronounced nightmare (I am not fully active in it nor emotionally bothered in any sense, although I am actually fully in-body in my Cubitis front yard for the most part, near the culverts that are about one-third filled with water), but it is a somewhat negative dream about a type of “giant flying one-celled animal” like a protozoa (though they are about the size of large moths and likely not one-celled relative to real-life logic), that attack and supposedly somehow eat people when rising out of culvert water and flying in groups of twenty or more (and it seems they live mostly in the water of the culverts or ponds as well as slightly flooded areas of parts of lawns). They have one maneuver where they tip sideways, mostly on the diagonal and moving about in a horizontal semicircular arc as such.

I am not entirely sure why I decided to call this dream “Diamond Crawlers” back in the mid-1970s in my original dream journal entry, as they never crawled anywhere much; they mostly just rose from shallow water (when people were around) and flew around in a diamond-shape formation and were vaguely reminiscent of a diamond in form and body appearance. They resemble a transparent leech, shaped somewhat like a rounded-off truncated plus sign, but longer along the length than the winglike protruding sides (which is akin to an airplane having very short wings and is not realistically feasible), with the mostly translucent pattern of a glass-like razor blade in mid-body. Calling this dream “Razor Blade Flyers” would have made more sense, I suppose, but sounds ridiculous in afterthought. It is possible I was thinking of diamondback snakes at the time and just threw that absentmindedly into my dream’s title.

The new image I made does not do justice to their transparent nature, but is fairly close otherwise.

Night of July 5, 1964. Sunday.



One of the first vivid and somewhat lucid nightmares I remembered with more clarity as a young child is this one from age three. Woody Woodpecker is driving a car (which is rendered in my dream as a real car, that is, not like a cartoon), which seems like my brother-in-law Verdell’s car. Knothead and Splinter are also in the front seat. He accidentally drives off a very steep embankment (which is likely modeled after the road up to Grandad Bluff). His car rolls downward and out of control over the very steep incline with my dream showing (as if I am hovering in front of the scene) terrified expressions from the three of them, sometimes taking on an almost anthropomorphic appearance. His car does not turn over or completely wreck; it just keeps tipping forward a bit, dropping and moving forward. I seem to be hovering closer in front of his car at one point (almost as if switching between being in front of a movie screen as to actually being there, though incorporeal). It seemed to go on for a very long time. This was a late nighttime dream, but which seemed to “reset” and repeat near early morning. It did not cause me to wake with a start as with other nightmares.

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This dream is likely my first remembered “failed flight” waking transition. The birds, even though cartoons, are trapped in the car and there is no apparent escape. There is a transmutation of “I am falling” (waking consciousness shift though sustained here in real-time foreshadowing) to “they are falling” as well as “I cannot drive” to “he cannot drive”. This dream was very likely the result of the memory of riding in a car on the road up to Grandad Bluff and the sustained wariness I had in real life for a time.

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Night of March 15, 1974. Friday.



Flashback to real life. He was thirteen. I was thirteen. Walking from the southwest exit of the school I was surprised by his attack upon me, knocking my books from my arm but not touching me directly. “You’re evil,” he said, “How do you know so much about what’s going to happen?" He seemed so angry and I had no clue what he was referring to other than the fact that certain classmates seemed suspicious of me for no particular reason (likely due to my ethnicity and little else, though many thought I was Asian). We were about the same size. He was born in Queens, New York but came to this small isolated town a couple years before. I never knew this. Until 2014. He was a Catholic. Another thing I never knew until now.

I was totally confused by his unexpected behavior. He had rarely even spoken to me before that day and I did not recall ever seeing him angry before or even that annoyed by anything. I was the last classmate he ever spoke to. I did not know until later. The calmer and friendlier I remained, the angrier and more out of control he got but we did not actually fight or make physical contact at all. He remained standing about four feet away at the closest, facing the entrance of the school, seeming nervous and hesitant. He did not move as I picked up my textbooks and notebooks. I did not have a clue. "Get'im, M,” said another classmate walking by on his way to the bus stop at the end of this school day.

I caught myself absentmindedly giggling as one would laugh at a lunatic on a television show…and of course, this made him even more angry, his breathing more and more coarse, almost as if he had been running for a long time. Eventually, he walked off westerly on his own and off the school grounds, never looking back. Two girls, to my right, the only others around, leaning against the outer wall of the school perpendicular to where I was, gave me an amused look, one whispering to the other and the other shaking their head and looking back at me.

This…made…no…sense. At all. How could a thirteen-year-old boy act so angry? And why?

My dream. It was lucid and almost overpowering. Susan R kept “pushing” at me mentally. “Are you thinking about me?" She kept saying. "Don’t think about M. Think only about me. Please." The imagery was somewhat kaleidoscopic. Her head, her essence, almost seemed like it was on a Ferris wheel. "Please. Are you thinking about me? You must only think about me." It went on for about two hours. I felt dizzy and strange for a time and felt like I was replaying "The Chrysalids” in my mind later on, and actually slept on the living room floor near my door that night and for some reason felt as if all my energy was gone. I was not angry or upset. I was just very puzzled. My mother did not wake me. I had slept there a few times before during a bad storm.

Night of March 16, 1974. Saturday.

In my dream, Susan walks up to me with her arms crossed over her chest. There was a knee-high mist everywhere. “M’s gone…” she informs me. She lowers her head and cohesion is lost.

Night of March 19, 1974. Tuesday.

In reality, I did not return to school on Monday, but on Tuesday due to a mild illness. That was when I learned that M had died suddenly on Saturday; no explanation. I learned this when I asked Roosevelt where he was when I noticed he was not at his desk, only asking because of the previous week’s events - otherwise I probably would not have regarded his empty seat. “He died,” he said sadly. Nothing was said of him after…ever. I did see his photo in a frame in the bank where his mother worked.

A thirteen-year-old should not have so much hate and anger and then just die without cause. This event, for many years, made me even more passive in my communication with people. I thought about it way too much and of course, it took over a year to put it farther back in my mind. Although it was not that often, when people seemed angry with me for no reason, I felt relaxed and calm. In fact, in the back of my mind, I decided that if I were to become angry or aggressive, I could just die suddenly. I have grown out of this way of thinking over the years, but I still do not hold anger very long. It is as if I had been conditioned. In fact, I have learned that even when I “sound” angry (including in writing), I am not, as if people cannot “read” me correctly.

In my dream of this night, I was at my middle school in the homeroom classroom. It is seemingly after hours. I am the only one around, it seems. The room is of an eerie semidarkness.

My attention is brought to two shadowy figures under a large table (almost as if they are indulging in a game of hide-and-seek). They are seated on their knees and clasping hands in silhouette - which I believe is imagery borrowed from a version of “The Newlywed Game”. It is very strange. I sense the female on the left is the “mystery girl” yet I also contemplate it is Susan. The one on the right is “me”. I am watching myself - like an older future version (or perhaps “revision”) of “me”. This seems to be some sort of eerie occult ritual even though it is just a silhouette of two people at the beginning of marriage, perhaps.

A disembodied voice comes through the doorway. “It is alright that M died because his family killed horses!" The voice declares this ominously. A suffocating horse writhes and dies in the classroom directly in front of me, its eyes bulging. A disturbing sound emanates from that area of the room.

I wake in terror…and a year later, I was more at ease.

Night of March 16, 1975. Sunday.

M appears in my room. There is a pale glow all around him. He seems happy. He says things are okay now.

Morning of August 19, 1972. Saturday.



I am deep within an amazingly vivid lucid dream state and in my Cubitis home’s backyard. It seems to be late morning. Being in this state and knowing I am dreaming, I decide to go and visit Lisa in the house next door, to the immediate south. However, when I near the southeast corner of my house, on my way to cross diagonally to her front yard, a large orange dog, which looks sort of like a Labrador Retriever, emerges from behind the corner and growls menacingly and starts to pounce upon me, waking me up with a bit of stress and frustration, but not quite a full-on nightmare due to the lucidity it was not “real”. For a few years, on and off, many of my lucid dreams as a boy were “interrupted” by black or rust-colored dogs attacking me and it annoyed me more in the long run than bothering me in other ways. I did not experience any trauma with dogs when younger and I was not afraid of them in reality. It was only later when my brother Earl owned a black Lab named “Gypsy”.

Morning of February 19, 1972. Saturday.



Around this time period of my life were some of the last but more unusual dog attack dreams. This was also one of my more vividly “energized” dreams of the time.

I am walking out to the backyard and fairly close to the back of the shed my father had built. Some of the area seems as it was before he built the shed. I notice the somewhat bony remains of a dead dog halfway between the railroad tracks and the edge of the backyard prior to the more weedy area (which we later used for a garden). We also had bonfires in the area in real life during one time period. It is otherwise more featureless in my dream and seemingly slightly more elevated.

My dream takes on an unusual eerie mood, a sort of “antiquity” (or sense of “alternate time” - slightly reminiscent to the eerie feeling I got when watching “Jason and the Argonauts” the first time) that seems to begin to dominate my dream. I notice that a smaller dog seems to be guarding the remains for some reason - from the other side and facing me. The dog soon notices me and begins to growl menacingly. The ghost of the other dog rises up from the bones and seems to pose a threat as well. Soon, both dogs (the “dead one” possibly being a golden retriever and the other at least part Labrador but two-thirds the size of the first) run towards me. I turn and flee into the carport and dive into the front doorway (which apparently was already open) and wake just as I contemplate the idea of the dogs getting to my feet and legs, which are still just outside the doorway. I wake with somewhat of a jolt, but it is an interesting sensation as if I was actually leaping out of my dream’s residual energy. I anticipate the feeling of the dog’s teeth on my feet and legs but this never actually occurs this time, although I have felt severe pain in similar dreams.

As stated before, dogs are most often rust-colored or black in my childhood dreams, and almost always invasive to my in-dream freedom, both lucid and non-lucid (though more common in lucid ones). My wife also had very similar associations with such dogs.

On February 18th, the prior night and into this morning, I had watched “King Kong vs. Godzilla” (1963) on Channel 13’s “Shock Theatre” (though found it very amusing rather than scary in any way) as well as the first fifteen minutes or so of “The Mysterious Doctor” (1943) starting from 11:30 pm (apparently about a headless ghost) before falling asleep. However, it is more than likely this dream was influenced by having seen “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (late 1950s version, I think) at an earlier date.

Morning of September 7, 1970. Monday.



A giant lobster is approaching my school from the west and we all have to leave (I had been in a class on the second floor). When I am outside, east of the building and at a fair distance from it, the giant red lobster approaches from the other side, but the scene does not look right. It is as if the school is now only one large wall with windows (and perhaps now implied as four storeys high), since I can see everything supposedly on the other side rather clearly as the creature bashes his claws on the building. Realistically, I should only have seen the building and not what was behind it through any windows to the other side, as I was down on the ground.

Not only that, the movement in each window seems to be the exact same partial scene and movement somewhat like a fly’s eye view, including what is seemingly duplicated sections of the same pieces of blue sky and arc of lobster claw in the background in each and every window. The simultaneous imagery and movement in each window is almost ominous in itself. Still, I actually enjoyed this dream because of its unusual “rare” nature. Although the “fly’s eye view” has occurred in other dreams (this being only one of two more vivid instances over a lifetime), it seems very rare.



This dream, I think, amusingly enough, was perhaps more influenced by the restaurant commercials shown during “Shock Theatre” than by any monster movies at the time, though “The Black Scorpion” (from 1957) might have had an influence.