Last night I had that same old dream
It rocked me in my sleep
It left me with the impression
That the sandman plays for keeps
~Larry Norman
We were in a castle. My best friend was sitting in a window sill. Over his shoulder I could see a hilly landscape on a sunny day. Suddenly and strangely, the dream turned ugly. My friend, laughing, ordered a man with both Down Syndrome and an axe to kill me. I ran away, completely overwhelmed with terror. To make things worse I started to feel an incredible fatigue, almost as if I was, ironically, falling asleep. My steps shortened and my muscles relaxed, but my terror remained. I stopped running and crumpled to the ground, incapable of any kind of movement yet still very aware of my surroundings. My friend was still laughing.
I woke up, terrified, as the axe blade started to bite into my neck.
Years ago, I was plagued by nightmares. Even more frightening than the nightmares themselves was the thought that perhaps some there was some supernatural source for them. How else can you explain otherwise pleasant dreams that would take a sudden, creepy turn for the worse? Never mind that “mystery thing that can do stuff” isn’t actually an explanation. It’s still damn scary!
The one consistent feature of the dreams is that fear would creep into them. It didn’t matter what was happening before I felt afraid. A stroll up the driveway at my cousins’ house would transform into a scene from a horror movie. I could feel a presence; something watching me that was very, very evil. Was it Oprah?* We’ll never know. I woke up from the overwhelming terror before she could get me.
Was it the terror that woke me?
Hold that thought. I have another memory of a dream. This was when I was still in grade school. In the dream, I was ambling up our road along the edge of the ditch, looking for frogs. I looked to my right and saw a fat little duck waddling towards me. It came right up to me, quacking softly, and leaned against my leg. I could actually feel its weight!
I woke up then, because my Mom was waking me up. She had come into my room and sat on my bed. In fact, she had misjudged a little and a goodly part of her ass-cheek was pressing down on my leg. “Quack quack,” she said.**
Okay, so I knew from experience that things happening in the real world could leak into dreams, even if they didn’t necessary take the same, um, shape. But what could possibly be happening in the real world to cause such fear in my dreams... and wasn’t that even more frightening?
A few strands of sleep-related thought wove themselves together one night after I had awoken on my back from a nightmare, heart racing. The first one was my position: I was on my back. I don’t sleep on my back. I sleep on my stomach. The second was the duck, by which I mean the idea of real life leaking into dreams. The third was snoring. I knew that I snored, mainly because sometimes it woke me up!
It can be a little tricky judging your own sleeping patterns, but I knew or could guess a few things. When I’m stressed, I turn over onto my back. When I’m on my back, I suffer from some kind of sleep apnea where the soft tissues at the back of my throat relax and let gravity settle them down, cutting off my air flow. I don’t know how long it lasts, but it can wake me up just as I’m snorting down some air. If I happen to be dreaming at that time, the feeling of being unable to breathe - even if for just a second - will leak into my dream and turn it into a nightmare.
As soon as I realized that, I relaxed. I turned over onto my stomach and went back to sleep. From that night on, when I would wake from a nightmare, I’d laugh a little, roll over and go back sleep. It no longer had any power over me.
I had always wondered about the word nightmare and in one of my trawlings of the internet I discovered that the “mare” part comes from an old Germanic word that means a type of spirit or goblin “which rides on people's chests while they sleep, bringing on bad dreams”. That makes so much more sense than a female horse. A further and unexpected point of interest is that nightmare really refers to what’s now called sleep paralysis, something that fits the description better and sounds a lot more terrifying.
I once had an intimate encounter with Natasha Henstridge in a dream. I woke up with my pulse racing and feeling agitated after that one, let me tell you, but the bad part wasn’t the dream it was the waking up.
Fevered dreams are awful, more haunting than nightmares because they leak in the opposite direction. I recall reading a book while I was fevered and when I went to sleep I continued reading it! When I woke up, my memories of the book included both versions mashed up together - the real one and the dream one. Fortunately, it wasn’t a very good book so I didn’t feel it was terribly diminished by the nonsensical fevered-dream inclusions.
I’ve dreamed of girlfriends and those dreams are rarely happy ones. They’re usually dramatic and confusing. Big surprise, eh? Anyways, in one dream I was standing outside a fence, looking across a large expanse of lawn at the White House. On the other side from me was my recently-ex girlfriend. We shared a meaningful moment of eye contact that was interrupted by a friend of mine, who - in the dream, anyways - had glowing yellow eyes and was holding a ghettoblaster playing an REO Speedwagon song.
I mention the song in a vague way, in spite of the fact that I know which song it was, because when I was telling the story of this amusingly disturbing dream to my friend Jordan the next day, I couldn’t remember the name of the song. For reasons of comedy, though, I had the “best” of REO Speedwagon in my CD collection downstairs so I wanted him to hear it; to get the full effect of the absurdity of the dream.
As we were walking down the hallway, Jordan began to sing, “I can’t fight this feeling any more...”
“That’s it!” I exclaimed, startling him.
“What’s what?” he asked, still a little bit alarmed and definitely confused by my seemingly random outburst.
“That’s the song; the REO Speedwagon song!” I explained. He had no idea that was an REO Speedwagon song. No conscious idea, anyways.
Nothing is as unsettling as a dream that includes an REO Speedwagon song. Go ahead night mare, sit on my chest and cause my dreams to darken. But if you dare sing “One Lonely Night” to me while you do, I swear I’ll track you down and sit on your chest while you sleep. I weigh 200 pounds. Oh, and I know all the words to Copacobana***.
Hmm... maybe there is something as unsettling as a dream that includes an REO Speedwagon song...
* There are only two people that I consider to be evil: Oprah Winfrey and Walt Disney.
** No, she didn't.
*** Shut up. I did it for a pretty girl. Hey, I was only 17. Cut me some slack!
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