I laid down for a while this afternoon and was listening to a book when I fell asleep. I had the most bizarre dreams, more so than usual anyway. I can't tell how much of it was dream and how much of it came from the book. I'll have to get further into the book to determine that. The dreams ran together and jumped around. They involved people I hadn't thought of in years.
I was once again living with an old college roommate that made my life miserable (CB). In the dream we were friends (this will not ever happen in real life). She was dating a friend of mine that I've known since preschool (ND), but haven't talked to since high school (has it really been 17 years?). I was helping track a serial killer (as is the lead in the book) but ended up at this asylum. Things shifted back and forth from first to third person rapidly during the dream. The serial killer was one disturbed man. He would take people and bind their hands and legs, then lock them up in a old broken down deep freeze for days. Then he would return and would use their bodies as twisted canvases, putting pins in them to make "art", singeing the skin with a handheld blow torch.
At the asylum was a girl named Annie. She was 19-23ish, tall, waifishly thin, red hair in a pixie cut, and wearing a dark green gingham dress that hung off her. It looked like the pictures you see in of girls during the depression, the baggy dresses just hanging off of them. She was not insane, but could touch things and see/feel everything that object had been used for. She found a pin used by the killer and tried to tell her partner about it. He had her committed because she would either go into a semi-catatonic state followed by losing consciousness, or just writhe on the ground screaming from the pain she experienced from all the other people that had been burned and then murdered.
At times I was seeing this 3rd party, other times I was Annie. I was begging for someone to please understand I was sane and I knew where the killer was. I knew that he had killed his father and thrown him in a pond on the family's property. I knew how many dozens of people he had tortured, but no one would listen. I knew he was living on his family's property. It used to be a farm or an orchard. There was a barn and the stereotypical white farmhouse with the porch that wraps all the way around. Both were falling into disrepair.
In the day room at the asylum, there was a large fireplace, with round river rocks creating a decent size hearth and surrounding the firebox. The firebox had a gas insert with the logs that don't really burn, but the gas flames blow around them. There was a bulletin board that was covered in a tightly woven green mesh underneath a 2 shelves set high on either side of the fireplace. I kept seeing the pins woven in and out of it, like the killer wove them in and out of his victims. I had to get the pins out and give them to the police. I tried climbing up to them, but every time I'd get close to the fireplace, someone would pull be back. Eventually I just floated up to the pins and pulled them from the bulletin board. The fear and pain from the victims and the blood lust, rage and sense of a child fearing for his life overwhelmed me until I laid on the floor just crying and screaming, holding the pins in my hands.
Then I was outside. I was climbing in this huge sycamore tree. Somehow it was grafted together with a banana tree. I do remember commenting on it to a friend saying how weird it was that bananas were growing in that particular climate. (I'm not sure what the "climate" was. Sometimes it seemed somewhere back east, sometimes it seemed we were in Flagstaff, sometimes it seemed like we were in Texas). The tree was overhanging the pond where the killer's father could be seen floating upright, chains crisscrossing his waist and arms. We had called the police and they were pulling the body out. Someone was finally taking Annie seriously.
I remember flashes of what the killer looked like. He reminded me a lot of Vincent D'Onofrio's character "Edgar" from MIB.
I don't remember much more than that. There was a conversation with my roommate and her boyfriend about how weird it was that we all lived together again and that the sexual situation was odd, but OK. I remember telling them about what I had experienced as "Annie" and ND asked me not to talk about it when CB was around because she was easily upset. I didn't realize that she was in the room when I had been talking. She came over and had these turtles that you put on your door to show you were supporting some cause, like the shamrocks you can buy for a dollar to support Muscular Dystrophy. I had one that everyone in my family had signed and she was telling me it was all wrong and that wasn't how it was supposed to look and I had managed to rip the head off of hers so she was upset.
That was about when I woke up.
It's always interesting to me who shows up in my dreams: my family, generally my parents who I'm either getting advice from or fighting with; people from my past that I have good memories of, but haven't thought of in years; people that I have some sort of traumatic association with and/or that made my life a living hell when I was in high school or college mostly. I also dream of friends I think of often but see rarely, perhaps in an effort to atone for my past mistakes. It's much easier to gain forgiveness from someone in my subconscious than in real life. Maybe it's my subconscious telling me to let it go.
Oddly enough I rarely dream of work or the issues I'm experiencing there.
Then there are the regular dream themes. I have a lot of anxiety dreams, mostly about being in marching band, where I don't know the music or where I'm supposed to go; dreams of my daughter getting lost or kidnapped or hurt; dreams of fighting with my husband; dreams/memories of being paralyzed again; nightmares of fighting off a faceless attacker; being bound and gagged and blindfolded (and not in a good way) and feeling helpless and lost.
There are also repetitive locations for my dreams. North Morton Dormitory, the Skydome for marching band competitions, the nameless asylum from any good horror movie is a frequent location, and my high school as it would look if it had been abandoned for a good 10-15 years: falling down ceiling tiles, blinking florescent tube lights, dripping water, green tiled bathroom with rust/blood and toilet paper strewn all over the place.
I seriously wish I could record my dreams for playback and show someone else how screwed up my head is sometimes. My husband is always amused by my dreams. They are so vivid and I remember so much detail usually. But they always lose something in the telling. To be able to show them visually to another person would rock. Maybe someday.
