Recent Nightmares

A couple of weeks ago I dreamed that I was camping at the state park that is across from my house and there was this creepy old lady in a trailer nearby. I knew she was evil and it turned out she was a vampire. I was in the trailer and I was going to have to stay with her because her daughters were leaving and her husband had to go to the store. I really didn't want to because she scared me but for some reason I couldn't get out of it. She was really small and skinny and she was trying to turn into an evil creature so I wrapped my arms around her and started praying. Then I woke up. Usually when I wake up from nightmares like that I am still enveloped in the terror but this time it wasn't so bad.

The other night I dreamed that I wanted to be a midwife (super not anything I'd really want) and I was at the hospital helping a woman I knew (though no-one I know in real life) and there was another woman there who was having a difficult labor. She was kind of like the actress Tara Reid. I was talking to her and she told me that she hadn't told the doctor's that she had a C-section during a previous pregnancy because she wanted to have this one naturally. I urged her to tell the doctors because something could be blocked up and that was why the baby wasn't coming out. Finally she did and had the baby. I was hanging out with her later when the baby was a couple of months old. He kept making his face change, like the color of his eyes and the shape of his nose. At one point he was barely crawling and then he suddenly stood up and ran across the room. I knew there was something wrong with him so I decided to bring him to my pastor, since the girl was his youngest, estranged, daughter. (Again, not at all connected to my pastor's real family.) When I brought the baby to his house and told the pastor about the things he'd been doing the baby wouldn't do any of them, just layed there in his carrier like a normal baby. The pastor was starting to think I was crazy when I looked and the baby had only one eye, like Cyclops. I pointed it out and the pastor said, "No, Heaven, he has two eyes like normal children." I knew then that the baby was some kind of demon thing and was showing me one thing and the pastor another. I kept trying to convince him and then the baby grew fangs and latched onto my hand. I was trying to fling it off, like when you flick your hand to get a spider off, but it hung on. The pastor saw that and finally believed me. Then I woke up. That time it was really really hard to shake the nightmare terror.

When I finally got back to sleep I dreamed that I was driving up to my house and there was a huge car parked in the driveway. Just as I got there it pulled out and another car pulled into the same spot. Both of them were driven by huge black guys and somehow I knew that they were gang members and they were doing something criminal. I also knew they were going to kill me. I parked my truck on the side of the road and was getting out. I had too many things that I was carrying and I was wearing a dress. I was trying to figure out how I was going to get away from them with all this stuff and not being able to run in the dress. I walked up to my front door, as I unlocked it I was thinking, "I'll go inside, lock the doors, run upstairs, change into a pair of jeans and figure out how to escape before they get inside." My alarm rang, mercifully waking me up!

So, what's the deal with dreams? I sometimes wonder if they're a window into alternate universes. Looking at the first two one would wonder if my Christian faith is informing my nightmare world-good versus evil. There's a reason that I don't watch scary movies or read scary books. I'm too easily influenced. After all, just the shot of the manacled hand at the end of the season premier of "Desperate Housewives" prompted a nightmare.