Devil at the Party

This was one of the dreams in which I'm sometimes observing the action, and sometimes a direct participant.

I dreamed I was at a party of some kind, with lots of people just sitting around in a living room or a patio. At first, I was sitting there, enjoying myself, but then I started to realize that a person sitting across from me was actually evil. This person seemed to shift from a man to a woman, so I couldn't say for sure which it was. But she/he was evil.

As I came to realize this, the devil just kept staring at me, and I knew that she/he knew that I'd figured it out. Somehow I feared that it could sort of read my mind.

Then I switched to observing. A younger kid went to the bathroom and figured out that the devil was at the party. He poked his head out of the bathroom and signaled to his mom to come to help him. But he really wanted to tell her about the evil person. She came to the bathroom and decided to give him a bath. But when she turned to get a towel, the boy seized up and just died instantly. She fished him out of the tub, where he'd sunk. She was scared and freaking out, but she knew she had to keep a low profile.

Then I was back in the living room. I knew what had happened in the bathroom, and then it suddenly became clear to me that the dead kid was really my sister. I started trying to signal to a friend that this evil person was in the room. I still suspected, however, that the evil person could read my mind. She/he just kept sitting across from me, wearing a small, ironic smile that was just for me. She/he knew that I was going to try to spread the word, but she/he also knew that I was afraid that more deaths would take place.

Movie Roles

The other night I dreamed that I was in another Mel Gibson action movie (the odd part of that sentence is the last five words).

When I'm in the movie, I'm both a part of the plot and aware that it's a movie. This was a kind of home invasion movie in which Mel and I had to sneak into the house of the bad people. I was carrying a seriously big and bad-ass machine gun. It was huge and heavy, and I was worried about being able to use it while moving.

Mel and I started outside, where we loaded up our guns and split up. I entered the house through a bedroom on the first floor. I think this one had a woman in it, about my age, and I shot her with the gun. The bullets from the gun seemed to move in slow motion, even though I was trying to move very fast. I don't remember this scene very well, but I remember that the shooting didn't work, or my gun ran out of bullets, because I ended up having to smash her head over and over with a chair or something.

I proceeded on through the house, wondering what Mel was up to. Of course I was surprised by a young guy with a gun. He started shooting at me, and I could see the bullets moving in slow motion toward me. I couldn't feel anything hitting me, but I wondered if I was injured. I was shooting back at him, and I noticed again how heavy the gun was. I was kind of diving behind furniture and trying to keep shooting at him at the same time.

This guy wouldn' die, though. At one point, he was down and I walked over to him and shot directly down into his head and body and, thinking he was dead, I started to walk away. I looked back over my shoulder and saw him propping up on one elbow, trying to shoot me in the back. I had to run back and shoot him some more. I may have used a chair on him too.

I left the bedroom and started to creep quietly up a metal spiral staircase (just like the one at the back door of my apartment). I wasn't sure where this would lead, but I realized that since it was a movie, Mel was probably taking care of things in the other part of the house. I also thought about whether I was injured, but realized since I was in a movie, the injuries wouldn't last too long even if I was in fact injured.

Civil War Distress

This was part of a larger dream, which I don't remember. At some point, I was in the garage of my mom's old house with my boyfriend, B. We were just hanging around when we heard and saw someone hobble past on a crutch. This person was dressed in rags and was clearly injured very badly, with one foot/ankle wrapped in a very bloody bandage.

Somehow I knew that this was a victim or combatant in the Civil War (i.e. the American Civil War...don't ask me how that got mixed up in my dream), and that this person was a minority of some kind. Not black or white or anything, but more like an ethnic minority of Eastern Europe or something. Anyway, I realized that this guy (it was a young guy) had been gravely injured and was fleeing from combat. He looked just like you'd imagine an Ethiopian refugee might look on TV.

He hobbled past our door and didn't say anything to us, but we could tell he stopped just past the door, because he was making these moaning and whimpering sounds. We didn't know what to do because we could see when he walked by that his whole foot was nearly off, just sort of dangling by the tendon at the heel. You could see daylight through the ankle. And I think he was injured in other ways too.

Eventually he ended up inside the garage, where he started begging us to kill him because he was in so much pain and we couldn't do anything for his injuries. His hair was shaved close and he had huge eyes. He kept asking us to kill him, and crying.

Finally, I went to the garage shelf and got my revolver (??), went over to him and, before I could lose my nerve, I shot him in the head. He died immediately, and I felt kind of relieved for him. But then it occurred to us that it might not be viewed as a mercy killing by anyone else, including the law. We started trying to think of what to do with his body. We were going to bury it in the field, but there was a guy (from my workplace, oddly) out there making dry ice (??) right where we wanted to bury the body.

I was starting to get really upset when I woke up feeling very relieved that I didn't just kill someone.

Now Starring Demi Moore as The Murderer

My whole family and the family that is super good family friends of ours went on a vacation. We went to see an art museum filled with some guy's amazing work, "They should throw him a parade!" [as an aside, I really wish I could remember what they looked like... then I could paint them and someone would want to buy them, they were AH-Mazing.]

Then we went skiing. First we had to cross-country ski, and we encountered and old man who cross country skied with a golf bag on his back. The bag was filled with clubs and guns, "cuz you never know". We nodded sagely and continued on. Then we got to the point where instead of skiing we decided to go down the Zip Line.

Everyone was taking their turn, and it was really fun, even in a dream to go down a ZipLine. It was at the bottom of the zip line that I learned that the son in the other family was dating Demi Moore. It turned out that the Ashton Kutcher thing was all a fake and she had actually been dating my friend this whole time. He just didn't want the spotlight, so they made up a fake marriage for her. Annnyway, everyone was joking that the last time they went down the zipline, she was wearing a full length beaded gown. They she appeared and everyone got really serious because also, apparently, that last time, they found a dead body, or killed someone, the details are a little sketchy, so everyone thought it was terrible of them to just hide the body instead of telling the police about it. They wouldn't admit to it, but they did agree to go down the zipline again, "in case there was anything suspicious". I took this to mean that this time they were going to find it and pretend like it was the first time they were seeing the body. I was relieved.

tiger

the tiger woods scandal made it into my dreams the other night.

i was in a car with my father. we were driving through my parent's neighborhood when a large west indian man with dreads came walking towards us from the side of tiger wood's house (tiger was my parent's neighbor in the dream). the man look frazzled so my dad slowed down the car, rolled down the window, and asked him if he needed help. the west indian man quickly shoved a pile of bloody clothes into my arms and said that he was tiger's house cleaner and tiger had just given him the bloody clothes and told him to "take care of these", meaning to get rid of evidence. the man believed tiger had just killed his wife and wanted us to call the cops and give them the bloody clothes. we took the clothes back to my parent's house and while my dad was trying to call the police, my mom kept digging through the clothes which frustrated me because she was contaminating the evidence.

mafia!

Last night's dream was the scariest in recent memory. Somehow my husband and I had gotten embroiled in the Mafia. I don't know how it happened, but we had been roped into helping them safeguard a huge amount of money. The money was stuffed in one of those bank envelopes* and put into a safe deposit box in a very fancy little bank, and we had the combination.

There were a lot of complicated details involved in the deal, but it was coming to a close and it was time for them to retrieve their money. I had been supposing that our involvement with them would end at the time they took the money away, but it was slowly dawning on me that we were in a very dangerous situation: we knew what they had done, and it wouldn't be wise of them to leave us around on blind trust that we wouldn't spill it to anyone.

The main three or so guys showed up at our house (a second-story apartment) with wives, children and aged relatives in tow. They were all milling around, the guys with gigantic firearms, and it seemed like the big crowd was a show of force. One of the Big Shots gestured to me and said that his wife was now going to give me instructions on how they were going to retrieve the money. She was a nondescript, skinny, washed-out blond with messy shoulder-length hair** and an air of resignation--like she might once have objected to all this mafia stuff but had become hardened over the years and was now not at all likely to help me get out of the almost-inevitable rubbing-out. She gave me a rundown of the procedures and asked me for the combination for the deposit box. I thought desperately, "Hey! I'll give them a made-up code and then we can go get the money for ourselves and run off with it." Then I realized that 1) the minute I had that thought, I simultaneously forgot the actual code; 2) she probably was asking me as a test--they couldn't possibly have been so stupid as to not take note themselves of the code; 3) my "forgetting" the code was going to look really suspicious. I recited a number that sounded familiar, but I said that I wasn't sure I was remembering it right. To try to look cooperative I said, "What happens if it's not right? You'll still be able to get it from the bank, right? Because I'm sorry, I'm really not sure if I'm remembering it right, and I can't find the paper I wrote it on." She just gave me an inscrutable look, which freaked me out even more.

The wife went off somewhere else, and the three or four Main Men lined up in a line in our dining room. They raised their huge machine guns toward the ceiling, and everyone reacted in a way that indicated that this was a traditional mafia way of celebrating the clenching of a deal. They fired several rounds into the ceiling, which I could see really made my husband mad (up until this, he had been somewhat excited about working with the mafia and impressed with their Coolness, which annoyed me because he was being juvenile and foolish; now I could see him mentally calculating the cost of replacing the drywall).

After that the extended family members started leaving. I saw the wife who had given me the instructions, and her hair had changed from messy, youngish and unintimidating to a frosted, stiff helmet. I thought that didn't bode well for our survival and that it was symbolic of a hardening of her attitude [for some reason I was still hoping that she might be the key, maybe convincing her husband to let us go].

The emptier the house got, the more freaked-out I was, because the main mafiosi were still hanging around in the dining room, glowering and posturing with their guns. There were still some scattered relatives around, and I realized that when they were gone the mafiosi were going to rub us out in a hail of gunfire. I briefly thought about trying to hide in the oven, in case the metal walls would be protective, but that was hardly the solution since they were practically in the kitchen [and for numerous other reasons that didn't occur to my dream incarnation; the only other objection I had to the oven idea was that the bullets would make shrapnel of the metal and the shrapnel would kill me if the bullets didn't].

My husband had disappeared into the bathroom just after the ceiling-strafing ceremony, and I went and knocked on the door. It seemed like he was either in the shower or getting ready to take a shower, and he didn't want to let me in. I persevered and opened the door a crack to see him dancing exuberantly and without a care in the world, in a pair of "eurotrash"-y jeans that he had gotten from the mafia guys, apparently having gotten over his anger about the bullet-riddled ceiling. I was really annoyed, and desperate to communicate the urgency of the situation. I said, "They're going to kill us!"***

He was pretty unimpressed. I tried to go very quickly through the whole scenario so he would see that the only logical outcome was that we were going to die if we didn't leave right now. I knew we didn't have much time, but saw that he was determined to keep dancing in the bathroom and then take a shower. I finally said I was going to try to get away, adding "I'm so scared I want to take a gun". I hoped that would finally alert him to the danger, since he knows I hate guns and wouldn't want to carry one unless it was really necessary. He seemed excited that I was taking an interest in weaponry and said, "Oh, in that case take the pistol. That's the best option for you." [Apparently we had a stash of guns in our freezer.]

I woke up around then, completely freaked out and also feeling guilty that I was going to bail out and leave him there to face an almost certain rubbing-out at the hands of the mafia guys.

*How can it have been that much if it fit in that small envelope? I'm disappointed in your reasoning process, subconscious!
**Interesting detail: all of the mafia women had the same shade of washed-out blond hair.
***Actually, I remember it was a mixture of French and English: "Ils vont nous SHOOT!" I think I was thinking they wouldn't understand French--so why did I say "shoot", the most tipping-off word of the sentence, in English?

[Once again, here I am using all the unsavory labels.]

murder and houses and babies and dogs and rainn wilson

not sure where one dream ended and the others began...

i had gotten some sort of a flier and saw a commercial simultaneously about ridiculously fancy homes with all kinds of amenities - hot tubs and lookout towers (?) - and the commercial and flier touted that these homes could be rented for super cheap. i showed the flier to my now roommates and told them that i didn't know if it was a hoax but maybe we should check it out. we went to one of the homes at night and met with the realtor lady. oh, and a big selling point was that you could have has many dogs as you'd like while living there. somewhere during the meeting/tour, it was determined that the owners of these super nice houses had all been murdered and that's why rent was so cheap. and that's when i had a flash back to a sentence on the flier that said "why let a little murder stand in the way of living your dreams"? oh, i thought, that's what that meant. i also learned during the meeting/tour that most people who have participated in this special "offer" came home to find that their dogs were killed. we decided to pass.

at some point one of my roommates was pregnant. she was very calm and collected about the whole thing, which surprised me because of the not being married and having a strict chinese mother thing. she asked if i would be ok with having a baby as a roommate as well because she didn't want to move. i was fine with it.

i was at my old place of employment (hospital) and was wandering around for some reason. i had a shopping cart. a 20 something girl came up and stood next to my shopping cart and smiled at me as she combined tomato juice and vodka in a secret container for her to drink while at the hospital. she then put the rest of the tomato juice in my cart, leaving it to drip where ever i went. i was very angry about this - like super angry and offended that she would do such a thing to me! i found the complaint desk and made a formal complaint and felt very vindicated in doing so. i think i also called her a bitch as she got into her car to drive off.

i was walking in a downtown area looking for a place to eat. i realized that i was with an ex and was confused about why we would be hanging out and having dining together. i decided we must be friends now. we had dinner at a chinese restaurant and the whole experience was rather lovely. when we left the restaurant it was raining. i did not have an umbrella, he did. he left me to walk back to the car in the rain as he ran off ahead with his umbrella. i mumbled something along the lines of wow, he is still such an ass.

i was outside of the hospital i was at a couple of sequences ago. it was night time. a man ran up to me asking me about a little boy named "walter". the man was frantic. i realized the little boy was rainn wilson's (dwight on the office) son and that the man was the boy's uncle and rainn wilson's brother. it turned out the boy had died while in his uncle's care. i felt so sorry for both rainn for losing his son and for his brother for having to carry the guilt.

more violence

Not only are my pets provoking bad dreams, now it's my husband. He watched something last night involving organized crime and witness protection. I must be extremely suggestible.

I don't remember the backstory, but I was with a diverse group of people who had been thrown together because they were in some sort of undefined danger. We were all in a house waiting for something to happen--I think we were waiting to be taken somewhere. At this point the dream switched to a movie-within-a-dream. I was aware that it was a movie, but I think we were watching it out the windows and it was happening outside the house instead of on a screen.

In the movie-within-a-dream there was a group of people (very much resembling the group of people in the dream) who had been involved somehow with organized crime. I think they had witnessed something rather than committing anything themselves, and the criminals were after them to "rub them out" so they couldn't testify. They (like the people in the dream) were waiting to be escorted to an undisclosed location to enter completely into a witness protection program (they were in the initial phase and thus in a somewhat-but-not-completely-undisclosed location). A couple of armored vehicles showed up with a group of SWAT-team type officers, their faces concealed by their uniforms. They ushered all the people out to get into the vehicles, then opened fire on them and killed them all. One of the "officers" raised his face shield and it became clear that he (and thus the rest) were hit men who were impersonating the police in order to wipe out the witnesses.

The woman I was in a room with while watching this through the windows was understandably freaked out about it, since the movie situation so clearly mirrored her own. I wasn't as concerned because I had the impression that I was just there as a bystander and not implicated.

I don't know why my subconscious seems to have it in for me lately. I haven't been feeling particularly disturbed in real life. [I'm also loath to add yet another tag for "murder", "crime", "organized crime", etc. because it makes it look like I'm obsessed with violent deaths.]

the Floodlight Murderer

I had a really grisly dream snippet the other morning. I think it was unrelated to whatever I had been dreaming before, but there was apparently a serial killer on the loose. He was leaving his victims propped up in upright positions (most with expressions of shock on their faces), with a big hole cut out of the middle. In the hole, he left a big floodlight-type flashlight as his trademark (not on, just sticking out of the hole). I told my husband about it and he was somewhat offended because we have a flashlight just like that, and thought I was making him out to be The Bad Guy (although he was not one of the suspects). Oddly, I didn't find this dream all that alarming; it was more like idly watching one of those crime programs on TV--actually, it was significantly less alarming than those programs.


[Out of 5 dreams tagged "murder", 4 are mine; and the only two dealing with serial killers are mine. What is my problem?]

Murder

I had a very short dream about a friend of mine who was run over in a hit and run accident. I think the car was tan and big (like one of those cars that look like boats from the 80's/90's). I just remember her being in jeans and a sweater, crossing the street, being hit, and then bouncing off of the car and landing on the road.
Everything was very dark around me, all I could see was black and grey. I was horrified, ran to her, and yelled for someone to call 911.
That is all I remember from the dream; I didn't even realize that I had it until I was checking myspace this morning and saw a post from her.

family gatherings, etc.

I had a weird dream over the weekend in which I was at a large family type gathering (not my family--what's with me being at all these not-my-family family gatherings lately?). I was wandering around and noticed a crayfish-like insect dressed in overalls writhing around on the ground. It looked like it was suffering, so I thought I should put it out of its misery, though my motives were mixed somewhat; I was also repulsed by it. I was beating it with some kind of implement I can't remember now, when it morphed into a healthy cornfed country boy in overalls. By this time it was too late and I had to finish the job because the insect/young man was pretty far gone (this part was vague, not too graphic). Then, wanting to leave the scene, I went over to a walled-in porch and sat down at a table. There were two teenage girls arranging and rearranging and commenting on various slices of cakes and pies that they had made (none of them on dishes, just on the tablecloth, and amazingly durable what with all the handling). They were excited because the wholesome young hero was going to be coming by and they hoped to impress him with their desserts. At this point I realized that I had just pummeled the wholesome young hero to death and felt intensely uncomfortable.

As a prelude to this dream, there was another episode involving my having acquired several pets (a mixture of cats, rabbits, turtles, and possibly a bird). I had taken several of them to work with me and had lost track of them. A whole day had gone by and I was getting really worried because it was time to feed them, and not only did I not have a food/water setup ready for them, but I wasn't even sure where they were. I haven't had a neglected-pet dream for a long time, but I used to have a lot of these. I'm sure it indicates an unhealthy level of guilt and anxiety.

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Then night before last I had a couple of other unsettling dreams. The first involved a lot of people from my high school class reassembling, as if we were still in high school. The setting was more summer-camp than high school. It was at an abandoned building way out in the country, next to a creek. The really unsettling part was that there was an elaborate system for disguising the building when we weren't there, including a very convincing huge fake live-oak tree. I knew that something was amiss if so much effort had to put into hiding the location.

The other dream was another movie dream. This was one of those movies that probably started out as a play because the setting was so simple and it focused on the interactions of a very small group of people. It was vaguely 1950s and involved a desperate, depressed woman in an abusive marriage. She dug a hole in her yard in which to conceal her two children, then was trying to figure out how to leave her husband. A couple she was friends with showed up, and then immediately the husband also arrived, somewhat drunk and quite belligerent. The friends were trying to mediate and keep the husband from getting too violent. The whole atmosphere was very dark and depressing, although I was impressed with the costuming/sets/makeup. I woke up--somewhat unsettled--before I could learn what the outcome was.

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And finally, last night I dreamed that I was at another family gathering, this time with people I was actually related to. It was mostly my dad's side of the family, and it was supposed to be an Easter communion service. I wasn't sure how that was supposed to work out, since there are several different religious persuasions involved. Interestingly, everyone seemed to be wearing cowboy boots--after seeing some really nice ones on a cousin, I looked at my own feet and discovered that I too had on cowboy boots.

After a lot of milling around, we finally made our way into a sort of private room in a hotel/restaurant where this service was supposed to take place. Just as everyone was getting settled, though, a large curtain on one side of the room was swept aside and the whole space (now triple the size) was invaded by a film crew who insisted that they had the whole place. I was excessively angry and accosted a passing waitress type who said she was the manager. I started yelling, really in high dudgeon, about how my family had reserved this space before the film crew.

I feel like I deserve some nice, funny, carefree dreams now.

the cell phone murderer

I took my cell phone on vacation to use as an alarm clock, and most of the times I set it at night I forget to choose a nice ringtone, so it ended up being that hideous AT&T default da-da-da/ da-da-da/ da-da-da-DUH! The last night we were there I had a terrible dream right before waking up, pretty blatantly stolen from Japanese horror-movie plots. I dreamed that there was some sort of serial killer afoot, and he has choosing his next victims based on a complicated equation generated by cell phone ringtones. When your phone went off, his computer-like brain would quickly analyze it to see if it matched up with the pattern he was looking for (kind of like the meter categorizations of hymns in the hymnbook). I don't know how he was capable of hearing all these cellphones going off, but apparently in addition to the computer-like brain he also had extraordinary aural perception.

Anyway, I was dreaming this for the first time just as my cellphone went off, and I had to grope for it, terrified, trying to shut it off before he could parse the rhythmic code and locate me. The worst thing is that I put it on "snooze" and had to repeat the terrified scrabble to turn it off when it went off again five minutes later.

teen horror flick and a runaway truck

started with me on a random college campus at night. i meet up with a group of girls and one of them was looking really rough, like she had just been beaten up and she had petechiae all over the side of her face, which i immediately knew to be as a result of someone bashing her head against a wall (what?). i recommended the group of girls take this girl into the bathroom and sit with her (she was very much out of it) while i run to the campus police/medic to get help.

when i made it to the campus police/medic i was asked a series of questions that i can't remember but all i do remember is that it was taking too long and i was getting frustrated. then the police guy/medic had to take a nap and pretty soon it was two days later and we were just now leaving the office to go to the bathroom where i had told the girls to wait.

of course the girl was dead by then. i then went home all distraught only to find that my new roommates were the dead girl's friends (there were like six of them now, girls and guys, all living with me) and i quickly figured out that this group of kids were responsible for their friends death and had planned the whole thing. so i of course got scared because i knew that they knew that i knew and so i kept to myself in my bedroom.

somehow everything morphed into me and my family standing in a parking lot and my brother's red truck began driving itself around the parking lot, gaining speed with each lap. i jumped into another car to chase it around the parking lot. the truck ended up leaving the lot and making it out into traffic. i continued to chase it. i could steer the truck from the car i was driving but the truck had to be in my line of sight. this was difficult because the truck was now going 100 mph and was far ahead of me. i just knew that it was going to crash into someone and kill them and then my family was going to be responsible. finally, the truck crossed a bridge and so i steered it off of the bridge into a large pile of dirt. the truck was ruined but no one was dead.