Things to Run Away From Really Fast

I'm in a familiar place, messing with the controls on a high-tech piece of equipment (possibly the Stargate). My partner is a girl named Susan.

The building is a small house with fake-wooden paneling on the walls. There's old and worn furniture scattered throughout, mismatched and comfortable. There are a huge number of people in the house, milling about and chatting, but the atmosphere is mournful. Apparently this is a funeral or a wake.

I'm trailing beside Susan as she moves through the room talking to people. Suddenly, she half collapses, sobbing. I turn to our boss and tell him I'll take her away from the crowd.

I tell Susan that we're going into the lounge. I support her weight as we walk into the room and I have a strong feeling of familiarity with the location. I help her over to a couch and she lies down. I go over to sit on a recliner.

When I look up, I see that Susan has come to stand beside my chair. She asks if she can sit with me. I move over, and she sits down with me. I imagine the chair laying back and the footrest coming up. Susan and I lay down together, and I drift off to sleep.

I wake up, curled on my side in the chair. Susan is gone. I get up and pad through the living room that was full of people last night. I pop into my head into the den, and ask my dad (who's watching TV) where Susan is. He says she's probably sleeping in one of the bedrooms.

I stare at all of the people in the room, whose faces I can't really see. I notice that some of the people seem to be disembodied heads under various blankets all over the room. I dismiss the phenomenon as being normal for a dream, and go to find Susan.

Susan is, in fact, sleeping in one of the bedrooms. I close the door quietly, trying not to wake her.

When I step away from the door, I decide it's time to double-check my suspicions. I do a hand RC for the first time in a dream, staring at my left hand until the fingers move separately from my will and thick red blood begins to foam over the knuckles of my ring and middle fingers.

I'm somewhat disturbed, but I decide it doesn't really matter. I look at the digital clock on a VCR, which reads 1:45 PM. I decide that the time isn't unreasonable, since it was around 11:00 AM when I last woke up, and I had time to sleep in today.* I will the time on the clock to change, and it flickers. I repeat the hand RC.

I stretch out a hand in front of me, willing open a portal to a skyscraper. Instead of a portal opening in front of me, the door across the room to my left opens with a bang, letting the bright morning sunlight stream into the room.

I step out of the house and look around. There are mountains surrounding the town. The mountain I can see between buildings is a sloping, tree covered hill, and I'm happy to be on the mountainous west coast. The buildings are probably a couple centuries old. The church I can see has a spire reaching up toward the blue sky.


St. Paul's Church, the oldest building in Halifax, NS.

I repeat the hand RC, hoping to extend the dream. The ring finger on my right hand is missing, but when I look closer, I realize it's still there. The light seems to bend around it so that it's just barely visible, like the non-existent puddles on the highway in the middle of the summer.

There's nothing resembling a skyscraper nearby, so I throw open a few doors, hoping for a portal to a bigger city. I go through one, into brighter light, but I'm still more or less in the same place.

I'm just outside of town, looking at a delapitated building. There are no doors that don't have shelving inside, so I focus on the people who are there. Selina, a girl I graduated with, and an old man who looks kinda like one of my art school professors (Mike) are the only characters who don't fade into the background. They're picking things up, working on repairs to the heritage site.



Mike and Selina greet me, and ask what I'm planning to do. Mike says that if I'm planning to go into the woods, I should avoid making deals with the beings there. They can offer a lot, so it's a hard temptation to resist - the creatures could bring back any of my relatives from the dead.

I wryly assure him that I've had a similar dream before, where someone warned me not to bring back the original Elaine. By this point, I'm well aware that anyone I try to bring to life will come back wrong.

Mike is wistful, saying that if they would come back right, all of us would be willing to live without our souls, and to hell with the consequences.

I remember to do another hand RC, but I'm waking up. Everything fades and when I wake up, I already have my eyes open. I do another digital-clock RC, but I'm really awake this time.

Girlfriends, Dead People. Scare Factor: 2.

*It was around 12:45 PM when I actually woke up.[/QUOTE]