The Most Vivid, Terrifying Nightmare of My Life.

All I can remember from before the mansion was walking around Savannah in the day time. I think I had seen Mom at some point, and then suddenly I’m waking up in a bed in a house I don’t know. It’s dark, and I have a computer or TV on the floor that I attempt to turn on and up, but a nurse of sorts comes into the room and turns it down, moving it away from me so that I don’t disturb what other patients reside down the hall. She gives me some food, and I eat it. Chicken and rice, I believe. Next thing I know, I’m getting out of bed and leaving the house in a hurry. My body is heavy, my mind is sluggish. It’s so hard to coordinate my movements, I feel severely impaired, am I drugged? I stumble around in the dark, lost and panicking due to my inability to move with complete freedom. I am a very physically coordinated person, and not having control over my body like this, along with the hazy confusion of my thought processes WHILE lost and stumbling around in a dark, unknown neighborhood brought me into sheer terror. I’m in a nice neighborhood with big houses, but I can’t figure out where I am.

“Where am I? WHERE AM I!? This is a dream. This has to be a dream!” I remember attempting reality checks at this point - I plug my nose, but it feels stuffy and blocked and so when I can breath through it I feel like there must be some sort of air that is able to pass through it, that I’m not pinching it properly enough over boogers or something. I try to poke my finger through my palm, and my finger sinks into it like poking into a loaf of bread, but it doesn’t go through to the other side and I look down and see a dent where my finger was. The physical sensations were startlingly real, and I was totally fooled. I lost all semblance of lucidity at this point and continued to try to find my way home.

Very soon, what looks like a golf cart rolls up to me on the street, and the two nurse ladies from the mansion take me back, saying something along the lines of “That’s why we drug you, we need you to stay here with us. Remember the food you ate?” I remember them taking me back to a well lit check up room of sorts, and there being a man there. He looked to be about 50, and when none of them would answer my questions he eventually got up, realllll close to my face. We sat there, face to face for what felt like a good 20-30 seconds. He had stubble, glasses, harsh aging lines around his mouth, and a gaunt stare that pierced my insides. He never said a word. I felt under scrutiny and judgement. Hopeless, I asked who, at the very least, checked me into this place. All the nurses did was shake their heads, smiling sadly at me, saying “We can’t tell you that.” All hope seemed to be lost. I felt stuck, trapped, imprisoned.

At some point I found myself placed back in a room, a different one this time, and falling asleep in a daze of confusion.
When I wake up again I find myself on lawn chair on a large balcony, overlooking a vast patio with plants and picnic benches asunder. I look up in the distance and see through the darkness a long and extremely busy two way street with hundreds of cars racing by each other with only two lanes to use. The traffic was perfectly synchronized, everyone getting to where they needed to go at a high speed. Meanwhile I notice a young man, around my age, appear from the darkness of the house and stumble down the patio pathway blearily. At some point he falls forward, and hooks his pant leg on some sort of hanging wire above him. The pants are yanked off, and he runs away into the darkness freely. From what I remember he still had the pants on though, another pair?

So confused. I walk back into the house through a sliding door into a room that looked hotelish. There are two beds, a lit lamp on the table between them, and what felt like a huge vending machine cooler thing in the corner. I never really got a good look at it. And in comes who appears to be my roommate, tall, hulking, with slightly darker skin than me (I'm mixed black and white) and a shaved head. He carries in a plate of food and I immediately begin questioning him as to what is going on, where are we, who are these people, etc. He puts off every air like he can’t tell me but I know that he has some sort of clue. Out of the darkness another young man walks up to us, wrapped in a blanket and looking shy. My first roommate introduces me to him, and he smiles but says nothing. He’s almost a cross between Claudia from work at SCAD, at Josh from Drake and Josh. He had that look that Claudia has in her eyes, a sort of loving, sympathetic, but worried look, and the body of Josh. When I have them both here, I continue my questioning, but the first one hurriedly and worriedly indicates to be silent, motioning toward the housekeeper/custodian lady that appears in the doorway. She's hidden around the corner of the entry way, and we can see her from the mirror on the hallway wall that stretches across the length of the wall to the other corner of the room, before we can see her physically there with us in the room. I see her listening in on our conversation. The first man obviously thought that she would report my blasphemy to the higher ups - as right when she was walking in I was talking about how they can’t do this to us, that we shouldn’t be here, etc. I suppose she was so intent on listening that she didn’t think to look in the mirror at us, and I know she didn’t see us, so I immediately switched my train of thought and the flow of the conversation into alluding that they have such a great house keeper and that the place is spotless, and that I don’t understand how such a nice woman could be working for such twisted people.

After that, she revealed herself, walked over to the refrigerator like device as if checking it, and gave me some sort of smile and compliment. Then she began to walk back out of the room, saying “If only you could speak Spanish, we could talk.” To which I said “Se hablas Espanol?!” (I only some intermediate Spanish, but it was worth a shot) but she was already closing the door. And as the first roommate guy started to ask me what kind of Latino background I come from (something I get a lot), I began to wake up, face down, and relieved like NO OTHER. The dream was so long, so real, and so terrifying that I was amazed to find myself safe in my bed. It seemed like waking reality had ceased to exist, felt like I would be stuck in that mansion forever.

For those of you that know about the chakra system and energy work, I feel like I have a great understanding and interpretation of this dream. I did a Reiki session before falling asleep, but went unconscious before I got to my root chakra - so no wonder I felt betrayed to a dark mansion by my Mom, who conceived me into this world, trapped with nurses and a doctor that had me heavily drugged and delirious. What an intense signifyer to the fear of not belonging in a world where I don't feel justly treated by authority that I can't escape from. My Root chakra clearly needs more attention, as I have fallen asleep multiple times before treating it with Reiki, while my other chakras have gotten full attention. All except my Sacral, which I had fallen asleep before treating several times as well; it makes sense then that I barely had any creativity within the dream and that my emotions were running wild until the very end where I creatively chose to cater to the house keeper's sense of self.

Friends, all I can say to you coming out of this experience is that we must accept where we are at this point in history and wake up to our own ability to see that we cannot truly be imprisoned by the state of affairs that we are currently in, no matter how hopeless it all appears to be. We can't blame our parents for it, nor can we change the minds of authority by resisting it. We can, however, create the reality that we desire; but we must first embrace the conscious awareness that enables us to do so, together.

Comments and questions are most welcome!