To Have Dreamed the Ridiculous Dreams

When I was a kid, I had the most vivid of dreams. There were times I’d wake up con­vinced that what I had “expe­ri­enced” was real; at other times, I’d wake up in absolute ter­ror, com­plete with cold sweat.

And still other times the dream would be so inter­est­ing that I’d fight against wak­ing so that the dream would, with any luck, con­tinue once I drifted back to sleep.

It is that third type of dream which I most com­monly have today, but the dreams of child­hood still stand out as the most vivid of all.

One of the ear­li­est dreams that I can recall was of walk­ing down Clark Street with Dad. Most of this dream van­ished from mem­ory rather quickly, but what has always remained — this is one of those things which seems like I’ve known it my entire life — was that dur­ing the walk, Dad pointed up at the sky and directed my atten­tion to a fly­ing trol­ley. Yes, a trol­ley.

Trol­leys were by no means an every­day part of my life, and so for sev­eral years I was con­vinced that those things could fly! It didn’t help mat­ters that this dream was one of those which fell into the cat­e­gory of “I freakin’ swear that hap­pened in real life.”

Another dream which stands out very dis­tinctly is one of the few dreams I recall hav­ing from early on which had friends in it, not just fam­ily. I’m not entirely sure how old I was when I had this dream, nor am I entirely cer­tain that this wasn’t two or more dreams spread out over a few weeks that I’ve amal­ga­mated into one extended pro­duc­tion. Yes, that does mean I’m not entirely sure how to put this one into words!

The inte­rior scenes of this dream were clearly shot in a mod­i­fied ver­sion of what was then our house on Clark Street. The exte­rior shots were filmed on loca­tion in the scenic yard of my mater­nal grand­par­ents. And mak­ing a promi­nent appear­ance in the dream was my first friend, Laura B., from across the street on Clark.

The dream began (as best as I can recall…) out­side of my grand­par­ents’ with Laura explain­ing to me that she was going to start going to an all girl school and that we’d never get to see each other again. (Okay, yeah, I know… Keep in mind that I couldn’t have been more than six when I had this dream, and Laura wasn’t much older… not that the real life age of any­one affects how they appear in dreams… what­ever.) And in the yard was set up four or five large tables cov­ered with pic­tures our par­ents had taken of us. It was all very emo­tional and heartwrench­ing, but that whole theme quickly changed once the dream(s) switched to the interior.

The house — back on Clark Street — was quite a bit dif­fer­ent in the dream than in real life, with one room — where the liv­ing room should have been — had no grav­ity. Yes, yes. The room was also the only safe room, which is impor­tant because the “Won­der Years” spe­cial of a friend mov­ing away was becom­ing a made-for-television night­mare. With no idea of who or what was chas­ing me, I some­how helped sev­eral peo­ple (pre­sum­ably my friends at the time, but I don’t recall their faces) back to the safe room.

On the last trip — to find Laura, of course — I found myself hid­ing under­neath a bed as the Enemy drew near. I very vividly remem­ber his enter­ing into the room, and though I only saw him from the shins down, he had a “dog” with him — imag­ine Zuul from the first Ghost­busters movie and you’ll have a pretty close image. This dream ended when the crea­ture dis­cov­ered my pres­ence under the bed.

All of that must have been pretty intense at the time. Cold sweats and ter­ror are the only cred­its that rolled on that picture.

I’ve always had a spe­cial inter­est in my dreams. When I was very young, they made for very dis­tinc­tive mem­o­ries, not to men­tion great school bus dis­cus­sions. When I hit mid­dle school and my head-first inter­est with the super­nat­ural, dreams played an inte­gral part in that as well: for exam­ple, there were sev­eral nights that a cou­ple of friends and I would plan to think hard on cer­tain sit­u­a­tions as we went to sleep to (we hoped) force our­selves to have the same dream in order to test the idea of dream sharing.

That never worked quite as planned, but I did have some amaz­ing dreams dur­ing that period, such as the one where I was liv­ing through the End of the World, com­plete with giant Jesus & giant Satan sword fight­ing in a city, “Power Rangers” style.

Any dreams you’d care to share?