Another nightmare

So this is what I remember (and that's because my dad woke me up early because I have to get to school later on and take a test. May God have mercy on my soul -- on multiple levels). Maybe it's because I was listening to the Stephen King Cast last night (because I thought the meditation app I was using was at least part of why I had that nightmare), but I had a dream about some stories from Joe Hill's 20th Century Ghosts, which...on a sidenote, I admit I'm trying to like. He's definitely very talented, but he has a certain style that I can't really get into. But yeah, they were stories from 20th Century Ghosts, just tweaked a bit. There was one bit with a man with a crooked eye -- it's hard to explain, but it was kind of crooked, I guess. And there was another bit that definitely was not from 20th Century Ghosts, and that was being in some sort of building, behind glass windows, and another girl asking Dr. Loomis from the original Halloween movies why, when he went into such detail about Michael's childhood (I assume she got it mixed up with the remake because in the original, he was mostly going on about Michael Myers just being pure evil, being an evil child, things like that) and he wasn't really examining hers. He kind of brushed her off, basically, sort of like she was nothing and didn't matter. (It was also kind of all happening in one segment that was labeled Mary Sues. Fanfiction term, really) And there was something about it that didn't seem like any sort of hospital as much like...maybe a classroom, but there was something about those glass walls that looked like some sort of office or something (which I was behind, like I was watching the thing, and the girl who I suppose I was supposed to hate but really felt bad for instead. She was kind of mousy-looking, and looked like Ellen Muth from the flashbacks in Dolores Claiborne the film. And she just looked so miserable -- I guess the dream was supposed to show her as petulant or something, but she just looked really, really alone. And meanwhile, dream-Loomis was drawing some stuff on the whiteboard as a demonstration, which was mostly nonsense, but some of it



And then there was a scary part to the dream where I was alone in my house, scared of someone invading it, and the doorbell rang. I was actually afraid to open it because I thought there would be a stranger coming in to attack me, but it was just my Dad coming home from work. There was also a bit based off the book NOS4A2, which I didn't finish, with a woman trying to save her son from a kidnapper, with the added element of this man being into



and things like that. The son was kind of acting out thanks to the man, doing things like



and it was only after his mother rescued him things were okay. There was also Laurie Strode from the Halloween remakes being blamed for stuff that was out of her control and not her fault. I don't know what the circumstances were -- I think she was going to a friend's house and Michael Myers struck. That's the best I can remember.



Wow...I actually remembered a lot more about the dream than I thought. Bizarre dream, either way. Strange thing is I kind of also heard the voice of the guy doing the Stephen King Cast drifting in and out of my dream, which just made it weirder.

In these dreams, it looks like your mind was working through your feelings of the day.

Could be. I did find some more stuff of me when I was younger (more stuff to piece together!) and yet...I actually did have a good day yesterday. Relatively. I went to my gaming group and actually ran a Star Wars game for the first time, which was fun. I did have a bit of tension between me and a friend of mine, but it got resolved. Can't think of anything in the day that would have set off the nightmare.

First - did you fall asleep with the show still playing? If so, the drifting narrator voice was literally an audio stimulus.

I see a return of the Mike Meyers monster, and there's a connection to an evil child. So now you're looking at negative connotations of your childhood... This could be as simple as the reaction to re-evaluating your guilt from that era in your life. It's that whole "a new layer is as potent as the first layer" thing we talked about before...

The kidnapper could be a projection of your fears about bringing the different parts of you together and if it's destructive.


The fear of an intruder would tie in as well, as an anxiety over having to open yourself up and not knowing if the people you talk to are going to use that against you.

Either way, these dream images sound a lot to me like a mix of reflecting on the worries over the process of resolving issues, and a little bit of a reactive imagery to things that you've been watching/reading/listening to recently. Freud refers to it as memories of things that aren't from immediately before the dreamer went to sleep, but aren't completely out of the dreamer's mind. I like to call it "back burner memories" - the thoughts that you've moved from the front of the stove to the back burner).

Yeah, I did. So there was probably an audio stimulus there. Sort of drifting in and out of my sleep, in a way.

So it's basically my shadow side not being fully integrated, I guess. It seemed to be a mixture of the original and the remake Michael Myers, all things considered, but the Loomis in this dream was very much the original Dr. Loomis. (He's a character I have mixed feelings about. He is a great, heroic character, and Donald Pleasence did an amazing job, but I wouldn't really trust him as my kid's therapist, mostly because...maybe it is just me, but I'm wondering if he really tried in terms of trying to help Michael Myers when he was a kid. And I just remember his treatment of Jamie Lloyd in Halloween 5, as well as his overall behavior in Halloween 5, was pretty unsettling, if also fascinating. It was sort of how-far-do-you-have-to-go-in-terms-of-good-intentions-before-you-go-too-far) I remember the original Michael Myers being more like...well, your expected Hollywood creepy kid, and the remake version was more of the troubled-kid-from-a-broken-home thing. So maybe it's a bit of an attempt for myself to be more compassionate to my kid self, as well as my 2013 self who was going through all these issues. A bit of examining who I am and what I want in my writing because I don't think I could ever write the just-plain-evil villain (even though I do love the Halloween movies.

I guess it ties back to some of my guilt in that flash, because the strange thing I got from it was "why didn't I realize something was wrong, why didn't I fight, why didn't I run away" even though honestly...I was a kid. And it's making me wonder if it was actually from when I was eighteen months because I didn't learn about



until I was older; I couldn't have had the words for it at eighteen months. I might have been a teenager when I started really learning about it and usually they focused on dads as the perpetrators. In those old Chicken Soup for the Soul books, nobody really focused on women as perpetrators. So I must have jumbled different memories together. (Weird, but it happens) But I can't think of anyone else who could have done it.

In terms of things I have to feel guilty for...well, I said something offensive as a kid without really realizing its connotations (several, actually. Maybe that's normal for kids, but I did read a lot when I was a kid. I should have known better), saying some awful things to my father when I was probably nine years old, going too far in protecting my brother from a bully (because I really do love my brother. When he was first born, I was a toddler at the time, and resentful of him, but accepted him after a long while. There's even a bit in my journal from elementary school -- one of them -- calling him "the sweetest boy in the school". And he was, honestly -- he was a sweet kid. Still is, actually), and I guess that's all I can recall. There's probably more. And maybe I should just brush them off as kids' mistakes and move on, but I guess sometimes I don't feel like the sweet kid that Mom and likely others remember me as. Like most of my sweeter moments are just in journals and videos and I can't recall them for myself. (Maybe that lends another layer, I suppose, to the whole five-year-old-self-getting-hurt dream. I either had some issues at age five, or did some stuff at five that I realize wasn't okay. I mostly have bits and pieces from age five, though...most of my most concrete memories start at age six, and that was because my first grade teacher kind of got in my face and yelled at me -- she might have clapped a hand on my shoulder too. I mostly remember that because of how scared and guilty I felt at the time -- because I grabbed my coat during a fire drill when I wasn't supposed to. She wasn't all bad; I do remember instances when she and I actually had some correspondence and such and she could be kind and encouraging, but she was also really strict. Mom told me that she was one of those teachers who didn't know how to deal with my learning issues and by and large, the school system didn't know how to deal with it either, or any other kids with learning issues or other problems. And from what I can gather from a friend of mine's mother, it's a recurring theme with public school I guess) And I think first grade and fifth grade were where the whole "bad, evil child" thing kind of became an issue, but I think there might have been traces of it in third grade as well, mostly because of my attention issues (before my third grade teacher became a bit of an ally. We did some correspondence through an old journal I had and it seems even then I had a bit of a thing for saving people because my first entry was ranting about some sort of bully who was causing people problems). And I think that I also felt really, really alone at times, helpless, not really strong like the heroines of the books I read -- I'd be on the swing and fantasize about what would lie beyond the school, what kind of adventure was out there. (I'm in college now and that adventure hasn't come yet) I'd escape into books a lot -- I remember in middle school when things got too much I'd escape to the upper level of the school (my class was on a lower level, all on one floor, and on the upper level was a library and such) and pull out a copy of one of the Babysitters Club books (I know, give me a break. ) and make up my own stories involving that. And in elementary school, I remember going over to shelves during class and picking up books to read; Mom says I got in trouble for reading during math as some strange act of rebellion.

I guess Michael could represent my shadow side, and how I feel about who I am now, and how I felt about myself as a kid. Loomis can represent everyone who kind of misunderstood me or let me down, and my anger because at the time that I discovered the Halloween franchise, I was angry, and I needed sort of a way to stuff that anger down (I'm now in a situation where I can't afford to do that because it might actually kill me).

I think so. I can't really recall what the kidnapper looked like, although he might have actually been overlapping with one section of the Halloween 2007 remake and Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton's version) was being attacked by Michael Myers on the way home from school. (It's not because I've seen the movie; I only saw the 2009 sequel. And Compton!Laurie looked more like she did in the 2007 version, curly hair and all) And Nancy Holbrook, I think, from the Elm Street remake was the mother trying to rescue her child. So it could be my fears of what happens when those different parts of myself assimilate -- my shadow's trying to kill another part of my shadow, the one who had nightmares and things like that (I never went through what Laurie did, thank God, but I've definitely had nightmares, feelings of not being strong enough, a lot of anger, things like that). And Nancy -- I really did identify with this Nancy when I was younger (15-16) because she was a lot like me. Quiet, shy, things like that. I don't know what the kidnapper looked like, but I think he was based on Charlie Manx from NOS4A2 who...well, basically, the guy's a creeper who brings kids to a place called Christmasland where they can stay kids forever. (Make of that what you will) And yeah, the cannibalism could be the negative portrayal of self-assimilation, especially since there were times when I described my mind as eating itself when I first had my breakdown. Now looking at it, I think some of my previous issues were crying out for help, and that was why I had my breakdown. (I guess what makes it really devastating was that prior to that, I was in a good place. I wasn't perfect, but I was in a good place)

Considering that the intruder looked like Colm Feore in Storm of the Century, I think that you are right. I am worried that people are just going to call me crazy, a liar, a stupid little girl, things like that. And I'm also worried about what I'm going to find as I dig deeper into things, so there is that. Especially since one theme in Storm of the Century was the villain pointing out the townspeople's various sins, and in the end, manipulating them into doing the absolutely unthinkable. Plus his opening scene where he kills a woman? It's sort of a representation of ugly truths and searching for the answers and trying to assimilate myself kind of banging on my door, asking to be let in (I've also compared my bad thoughts to the vampire at the window in Salem's Lot,, so I guess it could also be a metaphor that I can't really shut things out forever). So it's kind of the whole self-assimilation process. And how scary it really is. I'm scared of changing, I'm scared of finding out the truth, and I kind of feel like my world is being yanked out from under. I guess life has a talent for doing that, but it doesn't make it hurt any less. Best I can do is try and fortify myself for what comes. The good news is that the more analyzing I do, the more of my memories return -- some good, some bad. In terms of bad memories...it's just weird that even though the initial flash had nothing to do with school, a lot of my issues seem to have had something to do with school and my learning disabilities and such.

So yeah, it definitely could be my still-resolving issues, as well as listening to the Stephen King Cast. I might have to try another tactic -- and try and get myself to bed while reading. Also, very interesting thing about Freud -- seriously!

^^ That moment when the person you're interpreting for begins to interpret for themselves and you feel so happy for them ^^

Edit:: Also, I had to read Freud's "On Dreams" for a class in college. After the first third of the book it starts to feel like a text book. Jung is so much more entertaining :P

Thank you so much! Yeah, mostly I'm working from the information that I've got and sort of connecting the dots from here. And it's actually getting cool because it's like my memories are returning the more layers I peel back.

Haven't read Freud's "On Dreams", but I did try reading Freud's "Dream Psychology". It's...as interesting as watching paint dry, at least in my opinion. So, I can definitely relate there.