Nightmares

In all my life, I've had very few extreme horror-movie type nightmares. My nightmares tend to be more subtle, and the subtle ones recur.

Here are two awful motifs.

The first one is the House on the Hill. Sometimes, it's a House on the Cliff. Either way, it's a very familiar house, externally a two-storey sprawling white mansion on a topographical high point. It's home to me, always. I am always comfortable with the house itself; it's not the house that's the enemy, but what happens inside.

I remember at least three of the House dreams in great detail. In one of them, I remember strolling along a long corridor with a lot of classically-executed oil paintings in bronze frames. Idly, I decided to look at them, and then I realised they were all nice portraits of my friends. Beautiful! I was happy until I looked down at the bottom of each frame and realised that the brass tags there said things like, "[Real Name Withheld] Lim, 6 Jan 1967 - 20 Jun 1995, Basal Cell Carcinoma." I woke up feeling rather odd.

The second one is what I call the Long Urban Meeting Sequence. You're doing something pretty normal, like doing your laundry at some Laundromat in a big city. Or shopping. And then... you keep encountering people from your past. It's like a story by Harlan Ellison (some of you will know which one). My most recent one was when I dreamt I was queueing up at a dry cleaners. Then a netball team came in and occupied the whole place. The odd thing was that I knew all the players, from a long, long time ago.

I'm not afraid of the blood and gore and dark terror things as much as I am of the odd human quirk incidents. I think Rod Serling's Twilight Zone TV series has a lot to do with that.