nightmare

My memory of how this began is kind of sketchy now:
I'm working on a class project with 2 other students. One of them, a girl, gets mad at me for some reason - unjustifiably as I recall. Since I can't stand to be on bad terms with someone IWL, naturally in my dream I seek out this girl later on to straighten things out.

The following I remember vividly:
I'm alone in a house at night. I'm possibly in that girl's house trying to find her. I walk past French double doors that are wide open; beyond them is a dimly lit back patio. There's a homeless-looking man sitting on a covered porch swing outside, and he's glaring at me. Part of his clothing is green, and he has a bushy beard. He looks threatening, he's not supposed to be there, and the doors are open - so now I'm scared. He's watching me, so as quickly as possible, I shut the right side of the double doors, and just as I try to shut the left side, he lunges at me. Holy crap!! I try to shout for help, but I find my throat severely congested and I can barely make a sound. He comes at me reaching with one arm, menacingly. Desperately, I reach out to grab his hand in an effort to stop him from grabbing me... and I wake up in bed, actually grabbing at thin air!

I've added this to my mental list of nightmares to revisit in future lucid dreams. Nothing against homeless people - heck, I give them money IWL - but I'll beat the living piss out of this particular DC the first chance I get. No one lunges at me from dark patios and gets away with it!
***** UPDATE *****
About a week after I dreamed this, a REAL homeless man who VERY CLOSELY RESEMBLED the nightmare DC came into my work IWL and acted very strangely. He had the same bushy gray beard, the same creepy look, and was even wearing green!! He asked about getting a job, hit on me, and started undoing his fly as if he planned to expose himself to an older woman who was getting fitted by our seamstress (I work at a drycleaners). I was about to tell him to get the fuck out, but he decided not to whip out his junk, and finally left.

This one's been in my mind the last few weeks, so I thought it might be therapeutic to post it. Everyone has a worst fear, and mine is being raped.
Thank God it's never happened to me, but this dream left me temporarily convinced that it had... so it was kind of upsetting, to say the least.

Can't remember how this dream began - maybe it's better that way. The dream had its own back story: In it, I knew it was Wednesday (it really was IWL), and that meant it had been exactly one week since I was raped (again, in the dream!). I always seem to have a desire to go all vigilante on frightening DCs, so not surprisingly I decided to go seek revenge on my attacker. Obviously not alone, so I brought my friend Michelle with me. Somehow I had figured out that a particular area of the tile floor in a vacant building (almost like a very shallow pool, only 1-2 ft deep) covered a passageway to an underground area, and that was where we'd find him. We opened up the tile panel and descended. The next thing I remember is us frantically trying to get back out, pursued by my attacker. I was pulling Michelle out of the passage, and I saw a knife pierce her sneaker, but we got away.

I figured she was only cut if anything, but suddenly it's a couple days later, at night, and after I walk up to Michelle's front door and am let in by her family, I realize she died (from the cut, somehow). I instantly offer condolences to her family, and I'm in shock.

So then I go back down the secret passage to pursue this twisted man, alone. Despite being underground, there are windows up high, with daylight coming in. The underground portion consists of halls connecting large rooms, with nothing really in them. Everything is made of plain gray concrete. I somehow figure out this used to be a school. I think I even see a desk somewhere. I find at least one old piece of paper with writing, and I realize that this is proof of something else I had been trying to prove about the school, some sort of mystery surrounding it (didn't have a damn thing to do with revenge on my rapist, but some sort of secondary mission, maybe left over from a prior dream that night). I don't find the villain, but instead focus on this mystery solving. Then my mom comes around a corner, just as I'm pissing myself (not from fear, I just decided to pee in my clothes LOL), so I try to shoo her away and babble something about what I'm trying to do.

This is the weirdest part: As I began to slowly drift into wakefulness, I was having "dream flashbacks" to the rape itself. It was so strange, like my dreaming mind was creating a memory of something that didn't actually happen. Thankfully they weren't terribly vivid, but it was highly disturbing. Consequently, as I became more awake, I was trying to figure out if it was real. It got to the point where I was sitting up in bed thinking, "Was I really raped last week? Is this a repressed memory?" I was genuinely uncertain for a couple minutes. Once I was fully awake, I was never so happy to realize I had just been dreaming!