Does anybody else enjoy their nightmares? I actually do, at least as I've gotten older. As a child I often had extremely vivid dreams that I didn't enjoy at all. One that I had repetitively that actually scared me the most involved nothing more than me traveling through some infinite expanse of space, not floating or flying necessarily, but passing through this space that I knew would never end. It scared the shit out of me! Something about knowing that the space was boundless was just terrifying at the time. Looking back, I think it's kind of interesting, though. Maybe the concept of infinity was too much for my young mind to grasp. It was a very specific kind of fear, one that I have only felt and immediately recognized in a small number of situations. Once, while snorkeling I was swimming in an area where the sea floor was gradually dropping away from me the farther away from shore I swam. At one point, the floor dropped dramatically though, and I was suddenly suspended about 50 feet from the "ground". That familiar sense of panic set in, and my instinct was to turn right the hell around. I also feel a small tickle of that sensation sometimes on a clear day when I look up at the sky, and it's nothing but blue from horizon to horizon, no stars or moon shining through. If I stand there long enough, looking at the big blue boundary, realizing that there's no boundary at all, just an illusion of color created by scattered light, and that the only thing keeping me from hurtling through the stratified layers of gasses and out into the nothing is an extremely weak, relatively speaking, physical force, well, it's hard not to feel just the tiniest bit anxious.
Nowadays, I like that feeling, though. Whether it's because of the inherent nostalgia, or the fact that fear is just one wavelength in the broad spectrum of human emotions (all of which I think should be experienced occasionally to keep things in perspective), I'm not really sure. I do know that when I have terrifying dreams these days, I wake up excited, kind of like I've just gotten out of a movie. The instant I know that I'm not dreaming anymore, a switch is thrown and I know that I can go from being scared stupid to remembering all of the crazy, fucked up things that happened in the dream to scare me stupid in the first place. I'm not saying that all of my nightmares are enjoyable, as there are certainly some dreams I've had that tap into more emotional topics, leaving me feeling rather exhausted when I wake, and in need of a hug and a blanky. But the dreams I have that are just downright scary are awesome! Unfortunately, the details of these dreams usually fade fast, and while I've told myself that I need to start writing them down, I have neglected to do so up to this point. I'm hoping that having an avenue to write now will motivate me to start archiving them in the future. There is one, though, that I've managed to hold onto for a few years now without needing to write down.
I was visiting my aunt Catherine one day for an early dinner. Now granted, I don't have an aunt Catherine, but for some reason in this dream I did, though she did look a little bit like my grandmother Evelyn. It's funny how your subconscious fills in all kinds of holes when you're dreaming. Not only were there things happening in the dream in present time, but I had memories of this fictional person, as well as an entire family history to go along with them. I often wonder if things like that, memories in a dream, are created spontaneously in the moment when they're recalled, or if these dream "characters", some of which I'm often playing, are scripted at some other point during REM sleep.
The two of us were sitting in her kitchen nook, discussing family and recent events. It was a friendly conversation, not staggered and awkward like I remember of all my childhood interactions with her. Catherine had always struck me as bit of a stern woman, one who had perhaps grown up too fast and forgotten how to lighten up. I sometimes thought when I was younger that she looked like someone who hadn't cracked a real smile in years. But this supper chat was completely changing my perception of the woman. During the conversation we got onto the subject of Catherine's twin sister Janice. I didn't know much about Janice; she wasn't as close with me and the rest of the family as Catherine was. There had been some recent correspondence between the two of them, though; some sort of reconciliation of a falling out from years before. I was happy for her. My brother and I have stayed in close contact, for our family at least, over the years since I moved out of the house, and it's a relationship that I hold very high, so I was glad for Catherine to be able to have an open and friendly dialogue with her sibling again.
The conversation went on for what seemed like hours, at times turning serious and heavy, and occasionally inciting rounds of hysterical laughter from either or both sides. This was the first time I had felt really close to Catherine, like she was a true family member. It wasn't that I wasn't fond of her before, but we had just never spent enough time one-on-one like this to really open up and get to know each other. There were so many parts of her character that I had been oblivious to. I'd never heard her guffawing to the point of exhaustion, never heard the stories of how hard it was growing up for her, and I'd never noticed the distinct difference in the color of her eyes; brown on the left, and blue/green on the right.
We continued talking as it began to grow dark outside. I was seated with my back to a large window out into the back yard. She had a small garden with these giant sunflowers looming over it. She had scolded me once when I was about 5 for trying to chop the sunflowers down with a set of branch loppers I had found in her shed. Catherine began clearing off the table, and I got up to stretch my legs, turning around so I could peer out the window at the sunflowers, remembering how angry she had been and what a little shit I could be when I was that age. She turned the light on in the kitchen, and the her reflection became subtly visible on the glass surface. As she was walking back towards the table, her reflection was facing me, and I noticed something about it that was concerning. It wasn't an entirely clear image, but I could tell there was something different. She looked so serious all of a sudden. We had ended our conversation on a high note, her offering coffee before I headed for home, me mentioning that I'd like to meet Janice if she ever decided to visit. Maybe their reconciliation still had a ways to go. I hadn't meant to upset her, so I turned around to ask if she was okay. She stood before me, with two cups of coffee in her hands, holding one out towards me, with a large smile on her face.
She began to speak, but I wasn't really listening, just looking at the way the wrinkles formed around her mouth and eyes, unmistakable in their shape. I was confused and unsure why. Sipping my coffee, I turned back around to look out the window again. There was her reflection, standing behind me, still talking, no smile to be seen, not even a hint of a smile line with the corners of her mouth pointed slightly downward. It could have just been a trick of the reflection, that's what it had to be. I was probably just more tired than I thought, seeing things, or the glass was distorted somehow, subtly curved enough to distort the features of her face in a way to make is seem like she wasn't the jovial person I'd spent the entire evening talking to. The view from outside could also be altering what I saw in the reflection too, explaining why I saw someone with two dark brown eyes looking back at me, dour and sad.
"I guess we talked for too long, I was hoping you wouldn't see her," Catherine said to me, my back still to her. I didn't know what she was talking about, and didn't have time to reply, as she reached around with one hand and placed it over my mouth. I was frozen in place, and beginning to panic. The person in the reflection was there, one hand over my mouth talking to me from behind, but it wasn't Catherine's face, as I could see that her lips weren't moving anymore, even as I heard Catherine's words in my ear, spoken quietly from only inches away.
"It's an odd thing being a twin. There's a bond between my sister and I that seems as difficult to define as it is unbreakable." Her voice seemed so close I thought it might be coming from inside my head. "All those years we were apart, not speaking, separated by thousands of miles, I could still feel her misery. She had a family, a family that included her in their lives, and she still managed to be so serious and loathing of life. She was completely unable to let go of the past, and I could feel it every day. It made me sick how someone could have so much and feel so little."
"I came back to try and put her out of her misery. I've always wanted a family of my own, and I saw no reason why hers couldn't be mine." I could feel her moving around behind me with her one hand still over my mouth. In the reflection, I saw her free hand go up to her face. As the hand came back down, the face mouthed a single word. "We weren't identical, but it's easy enough for some simple magic to convince everyone I'm her, provided I have just the right thing of hers. It's just too bad I had to keep her body in the basement for this glamour to hold. Though I don't think I could have buried her far enough away to keep her from appearing and meddling with my new life."
It dawned on me just then, the word that the face in the window had said. "Sorry," the last word that went through my mind, just before Janice reached around my face and removed her hand from my mouth to slide Catherine's dark brown eyeball inside.
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