41
« on: March 20, 2018, 03:28:54 pm »
11/12/05 (Dream journal)
Three nights ago I dream:
The house is medium-small, with a largish, rustic backyard. It could be the Crawford’s place from my childhood; it’s that style of house, I think, in the middle of nowhere. Separated. Apart. Alone. Haunted. I live there (I am not myself; I am another body with another mind). I am young, but old enough to be afraid. It is my home; I cannot afford to lose my senses to terror, but I am unsettled, constantly.
The tire swing sways back and forth in the front yard (which is scattered with old pieces of junk), despite the lack of wind. The yard feels the safest. I sit on the porch steps and watch the swing warily. It stops swinging, and its stillness strikes me with more dread than its unexplained movement.
I sit with my back to the house, not because I am comfortable with it behind me, but because I am too afraid to turn and face it. But it is my home. Where else can I go?
Inside: cold, dead, gray infants lie in baskets. Faceless prepubescents drag themselves naked across the hardwood floors by their fingernails. I cannot ignore their tortured, silent sprawl.
Through the living room window, I see the lawn chair in the front yard hovering in midair. It is raised and lowered by an unseen hand, refusing to touch its legs to the ground as a normal chair should.
I close my eyes and try to keep the insanity from prying its way through. As usual, unseen terrors prove more potent than seen ones.
When I open my eyes again, I am a fully grown man. It is my first time returning to the house in years. The exterior is rotting; the once-white paint is now speckled with black and gray, like an ancient photograph. It is a corpse that has refused to stop twitching for years and years. The trees in the yard are all dead, too, but the tire swing still sweeps back and forth casually, like a whisper.
I am surprised to find my mother still living there (she is not my actual mother, of course, but my dream character’s mother. A redheaded, thinly drawn, weary woman with sleep-hungry, hope-devoid eyes). I ask her why. Why she never left when the rest of us, my brothers and sister and I, left long ago. Her answer is a defeated glance at the house. “It’s my home,” she says, much in the same way an alcoholic might grudgingly admit: “It’s my addiction.”
She opens the front door for me. “Things are worse,” she says. “The rooms change sizes.” The air feels different inside. It’s like stepping into a greenhouse; there’s a distinct and tangible change. I feel as though I’ve stepped into another dimension. I take a deep breath and suck in what tastes like my childhood. I inhale dread.
It’s like being crushed, stepping into the old kitchen. The linoleum floor is slippery. Grime lines the sinkboard. The world outside the window is blurry.
I enter the living room, whose walls are stretching and reforming. The room grows to nearly twice its size when I enter it. All the chairs in the room are facing each other in a tight circle in what would be the center of the room if it would only stay one size. I smell blood.
The connecting hallway is dark. I don’t remember it being carpeted. For some reason, narrow hallways never feel safe to me. I can feel the walls touching me, even though they’re not.
There is a large figure standing in the shadows of the next room. From the slivers of light hitting it I can tell that it’s a scabby creature, a putrid demon covered in puke and lacerations. It’s grinning at me, welcoming me into the darkness, with the fat expression of satisfied buffet-diner patron. I stand in the doorway hesitantly, with the darkness before me. The hallway behind me. The living room expanding and restricting like my beating heart. The slithering kitchen. The swinging tire. Nowhere to go. It is my home.