A Collection of Windows Vol. 1

The way I see it is dreams are sort of a foggy window into the subconscious. I have a lot of strange, interesting, and sometimes horrifying dreams that I often remember vividly and with great detail. Maybe they mean something; maybe they don’t. But they are all very real, and often leave me with a strong desire to share them in order to analyze where they come from or what may have provoked them. So I’m here to start officially documenting these brief glimpses through the murky glass of my mind.

February 6th, 2018
I was home and realized someone was at the front door and I didn’t want them to come in so I started running around locking all the doors. But they got in anyway and I saw that it was my husband. I started begging him not to cut me anymore. That’s when my brain caught up with itself and I realized that in this dream setting, blood was a valuable currency. I remembered that my husband would cut me all the time, take some of my blood, and sell it. He said he needed to, and he came towards me holding a really sharp knife. I managed to get out of the house and I was screaming for help but all the other houses on the street were deserted, except one. I climbed up a telephone pole in front of that house, where my husband couldn’t reach me, so he just stood at the bottom waiting for me to come down. I knew I couldn’t hold on for much longer. Then the owner of that house appeared and I somehow knew he had already called the police, but he just started talking normally to my husband (I was guessing so he wouldn’t try to run away). When the police got there, I got a really bad feeling in my gut. I thought they were all in it together and were probably going to kill me. Turns out I was right. I jumped down while they were talking about what to do with me, dodged them, and just took off running. Eventually I lost them.
Then I found myself in the midst of a very dangerous and apocalyptic world where everyone was constantly trying to get each other’s blood. You couldn’t trust anyone. The atmosphere was really dark and sort of a reddish color. I kept having to hide behind dumpsters and under highways. I found a dog at one point who followed me around for a while. Eventually I got caught by a gang. I’m not sure, but I think that’s when I lost the dog. They took me into a room with a low table in the center, hung me upside down, and started draining my blood. I felt myself get weaker and weaker, and I was about to die when one of the people in the room gained a conscience and demanded they let me go. They all started fighting with each other and I escaped… barely. I started running again, and knew I’d probably never be able to stop.

March 29th, 2018
I went to some part of South America, Venezuela maybe. It was a Spanish-speaking country. I was staying in a dorm-style building with a bunch of other people. I needed to get gas and groceries, so I went to a gas station first. While I was there I decided to just get some food stuff there, but the person I was with was saying it was all really expensive. I was just like meh I don’t care, it’s convenient. So I loaded up a giant cart with food, and also some toys and random tools and other household things. The person ringing me out only scanned the food stuff, and I had to be like “no, this is ALL mine.” Then the total ended up being around $1,100, and I said “oh shoot… my card has a $1,000 limit.” So I asked the person I was with if there was a grocery store nearby that this stuff was cheaper, and they were like “yep.” I felt bad for making the gas station person ring out everything just for me to not buy anything, so I still bought some bananas and a couple of drinks and just left the rest of the cart full of stuff. When I got back to the dorm I went to my room and my boyfriend was there, but it wasn’t really him. I kept getting the feeling that it was some kind of demon thing pretending to be him. He kept zoning out with this awful look on his face, and then re-focusing on me. I felt like I had to act normal so that’s what I was doing, but internally I was super freaked out. He started asking me about fetishes, and I was sort of dodging the question and acting like I was too embarrassed to tell him. I left the room and found out some girl named Nadia had died, and everyone was gathered in her room looking through her phone to try to figure out if someone had killed her, or what happened to her. I woke up before I could find out.

June 21st, 2018
Part I:
I was at some kind of function with my mother and my brother Ned at his high school. There was an open bar, and all of the servers were human-like robots. I think it was a test or a demonstration for how believable the robots were because I remember saying one of them seemed too stiff, then it went away and came back and was a lot more natural. The event ended and everyone started leaving. I stuck around to help clean up, but I was feeling kind of down so the robot lady bar tender (who looked like Kathy Bates) offered to have a drink with me. She made two gin-based mixed drinks that I drank, then poured some straight up gin as a shot. At that point I was afraid I was gonna be full-on drunk so I was thinking “okay maybe drinking this is a bad idea…” but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings so I drank it. I’ve never had gin in real life, but I remember in the dream it tasted very bitter and I had the taste in my mouth for the rest of it. Then I WAS drunk and I stumbled out to the lobby where my mother and Ned were waiting. I told them I couldn’t drive, but we had all driven our own cars so they were like “I guess you’ll just have to wait here until you’re sober.” There was a couch in the lobby and another short robot that was supposed to monitor drunk people to make sure they didn’t leave/drive. I tested it by walking towards the door pretending I was going to leave, and it came over to me and guided me back to the couch. Then I noticed it was actually rather creepy looking– it was like a tan bald man with no legs or arms, just a head and torso that rolled around. The head had dark spots in a pattern on it and the face was sort of a vacant smile. I decided it would be better not to mess with this thing and took a brief nap. When I woke up I was feeling a bit better, not quite sober but not staggeringly drunk anymore, so I thought it would be safe to leave. Torso robot let me go this time. When I got to the parking lot it was completely dark and deserted, but I saw that Ned had waited for me and he ran up and gave me my car keys and then left. I got in my car and started driving, and as I turned towards the road my headlights flashed on a man in a red sweatshirt holding up a sign. I couldn’t read it but it freaked me out so I just turned and kept driving down the road. I was having a hard time keeping the car straight and I kept thinking I was still too drunk to drive but that now I had no choice because I was not going back to where that weird man was. I was all nervous about getting pulled over for a DWI and then suddenly I had a terrible feeling that the red sweatshirt man was somehow in the back seat of my car and he was going to pop up at any second.
I woke myself up.

Part II:
When I went back to sleep, I dreamed that I was talking a fried who lost her dad a couple months ago. She was telling me that she wanted to go back and change it and get her dad back. I agreed to go with her. We hopped into the past somehow, to the day that it happened, and went to get her dad and take him to the hospital. We grabbed the most reasonable looking nurse and my friend explained that we just knew he was going to die and they had to help him immediately, before they helped anyone else. She believed us and they took him back. I believe they lost him briefly, at the time he originally died, but then they resuscitated him. He came out of the hospital all smiley and cheery and we were just hanging out with him in the lobby for a while. Then when we were leaving we passed a big set of glass doors, and I noticed that his reflection showed a different person (a Hispanic man, mid-forties). I was like “WAIT A SECOND. WHAT IS GOING ON.”
We found out that it wasn’t my friend’s dad who had come back, it was someone else. The Hispanic man explained that her dad was meant to die that day, and when he died he was in a good place. When we went back to change the timeline he was given the option to come back, but he chose not to because he wanted to go be at peace and be where he was destined to be. So the Hispanic man had agreed to take his place in his body for our sake.
When we realized that we couldn’t get him back, we decided to go to the day before he died instead just so my friend could spend some more time with him. We ended up sitting in a church pew with him because that’s what he had done on that day. We went back to that day several times, and every time we went a new random person showed up and talked to her dad about some great memory they had shared, and then left. We thought it was kind of odd that it was a different person every time, considering we always went back to the same day and time, and we understood that we caused that to happen somehow. We were able to give her dad a great final day(s) that were full of him being loved and appreciated.
Then I woke up … from that which was a dream within a dream. When I “woke up” I felt like this dream had to mean something, especially the part with all of the different people showing up on different versions of the same day at the end. I needed to get home to tell my roommates about it so I put “Home” into Google Maps and it told me to drive into a parking lot and get on a train. I did that, and as I was riding I found out the train basically went around in a big U turn. This was a waste of time and I was feeling a strong sense of urgency, so I jumped (literally) off at the other end to just get back in my car and use the highway. But I had parked on the east side of the tracks and I ended up on the west side, so I couldn’t find my car anywhere. I saw a big field at the top of a hill where there were a ton of people gathering. At that point it was getting dark and I realized everyone was waiting for the fireworks to start. Apparently it was also the 4th of July. So I sat down on the grass, watched, took some pictures and sent them to my boyfriend, and when it was over I was like “oh RIGHT, my CAR!” That was when I finally figured out that I could just cross the tracks to get to the parking lot on the other side. I looked both ways, waited for a train to whiz by and go up and around in a loop that looked more like a roller coaster than anything else, and brazenly dashed across even though I knew it was against the rules. I found my car and then suddenly I was home. I tried to tell my best friend Missy and my brother Bill about the dream I had but every time I got to the important part I would get interrupted by Bill showing off his tricks. So I finally gave up.

July 8th, 2018
This happened in two parts within the same dream. In the first part I was trying to run a big concert/festival type thing in a big, long building, kind of like a mall or something. It was definitely a weird place for a concert. I was working really long days and we kept having problems with not enough people attending the shows for the smaller bands. The headliner finally went on but the lights on stage stopped working so they were just completely in the dark, you couldn’t see them at all from the audience. You could see the rest of the room, but it was like the band was behind a black curtain. I was radioing people to pause the show so we could fix it but everyone was just responding in a “nah it’s fine” kind of manner. I was thinking about how pissed all the fans were gonna be if they didn’t even SEE the band at all the whole time, but apparently I was the only one who cared so I was getting really stressed out. Then the dream switched gears to the second part. It was after the show, and it was like I was watching a movie. In it this guy had kidnapped his daughter, put a bunch of drugs in her system to make her an addict, and locked her in this tower thing that was part of the mall. He left her a small packet of drugs and a note that said the only way out was to go through this booby trapped maze he had designed. She knew that she had the choice to either sit in this room until she ran out of drugs, started going through withdrawal, ended up losing her mind and not being able to go through the maze in a smart way; or to start going through it while she was still functional and stable. She decided that it was best to just go right away and get it over with. That was when I started being IN the scenario, so it became the two of us trying to escape. There was a window and I realized I had my cell phone and a couple bars, so I called the police, who tried to get our location. They said “You’re calling from Florida, which used to be America, correct?” (Apparently the state of Florida took over the whole country..?) and I was trying to say “no, we’re in New York” but then the kidnapper guy showed up so I just quickly closed my flip phone (yes, flip phone). I could still hear the operator talking and I was like FRICK this guy is gonna know what I did and kill us. He just said “I see you’ve placed a long-distance call… I wouldn’t recommend trying anything like that anymore” in an amused but terrifying tone. So me and the girl started going through the halls of this maze. A middle-aged woman joined the guy and they were just kind of following along, lurking and watching us. We were near an office building and saw a guy and his dog walking by outside, so the girl and I yelled “HEY PLEASE WE NEED HELP GO GET HELP!” The guy kind of looked at us with a confused expression. I saw the woman start to walk over  to him and I thought oh no, she’s gonna kill him. So I started screaming “JUST KIDDING, WE WERE JUST PRANKING YOU. THERE’S NOTHING WRONG, JUST KEEP WALKING HAHA” but he kept looking somewhat concerned. Then the woman grabbed him and said to us “this is what you’ve done!” as she put a rope around his neck. She forced me and the girl to pull on it so he hanged. I was just crying and refusing to look cause I knew it was my fault and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it. Then when he was dead, the woman pulled him down and went through his pockets and found a glasses case that said “Ned Monthie” on it. She was suddenly shocked and terrified and she goes “that… that was your brother??” and then I was like “YES THAT’S WHY I DIDN’T WANT TO KILL HIM” (even though prior to that moment I had no idea that’s who it was). She looked shook, like killing him was a BIG mistake. So then I was like what in the world is going on here?? But instead of finding out, I woke up.

July 14th, 2018
I had recently moved into a new apartment with a couple of the roommates I live with now. They were away for a while, so I had the place to myself. The house was laid out so you would walk into the living room, then through to the kitchen, and then beyond that was a hallway with three bedrooms along the back wall. I picked the one in the middle because it was big enough to fit all my stuff, and I arranged it so it looked a lot like my childhood bedroom growing up. I would frequently take walks up the street (which looked like one of those nice city streets lined with trees and beautiful row houses that you see in chick flicks), and sometimes go stay with one of my friends because I didn’t really like staying in the house alone. On one of these occasions, I returned home from an overnight trip, pushed my bedroom door open, and saw a whole bunch of stuff that wasn’t mine. I was like “wait a second… what’s going on?” I ran over to the room on the left and when I opened the door I saw all of my stuff just thrown into it with no care at all. I got incredibly mad, and stormed out of the room to find my roommate, James, standing in the kitchen. He goes “oh hey, I wanted that room cause it’s bigger, so I just moved your stuff into the other one” and shrugged. Then just walked out the front door in an “I don’t feel like dealing with this right now” manner.
I started truly raging at that point, screaming a number of colorful words while I started trying to organize the mess that was in my new room. I was throwing things away and fiddling with the air conditioner because the window in this room was shaped differently and therefore had a different AC unit that I had to figure out how to use, and I remember being worried that it wasn’t going to work as well as mine did. Then my sister Laura came in to try to help me. My brother, Bill, came in at one point and saw how upset I was and tried to console me by saying “It’s okay, stuff like this happens sometimes. You can’t let it get to you, don’t be so upset.” I was trying to explain why I had every right to be so upset that all of my stuff was moved without anyone even telling me, I just came home and found it like this, but I couldn’t get the right words out and was actually angry crying. Laura stepped in and was like “she had her room all set up like her old bedroom and she won’t be able to get that back.” I felt relieved that she put into words what I couldn’t.
I finished up what I could and went out to the kitchen to find my mother there. She was kind of wandering around looking at things and I asked her what she was doing.
She said “I just wanted to take a look around my new house.”
I said “You’re moving in?”
“No, I just wanted to have a place to do my laundry, so I bought this house and now you’re renting from me” and she smirked.
I just stared at her for a second, and thought to myself “I have to find a new place to live. I can put up with this short term, but I definitely can’t stay here.”
I walked over to the window, and saw my dad outside unloading stuff out of the big blue van we had when I was a kid, in the driveway at Lester Street where I grew up. He looked like he did 10 years ago, healthy and full of life. I screamed “DAD!!” and ran out to him. He looked surprised that I was so excited to see him because I guess he didn’t know he was dead in real life. I started to realize this wasn’t real, and he wasn’t really there, but I knew I had to hold onto the moment while I could. I hugged him, I could actually feel it, and I closed my eyes. The moment started to fade, I started to cry, and the window dissipated like warm breath on a cold day.