Once again there's no weird topic so this one too gets stuck under mystery.
I’ve had my fair share of weird, scary, sad, happy, et cetera dreams in my life but the reoccurring dreams are the weirdest, usually.
I’m one of those ‘weird’ people that dream in color, with feelings, scents, tastes and tactile sensations. When one of my dreams isn’t in color it’s usually a nightmare, which is extremely rare.
Growing up I had a reoccurring dream that can still freak me out to this day because every once in a while I have it again.
I grew up in a North-West suburb of Chicago in a pretty quiet little city. We knew almost everyone on the block and whoever lived directly behind any of us that we knew. That doesn’t mean that we were all ‘friends’ but everyone looked out for everyone else’s kids and if they yelled at you then you could guarantee your parents would find out about it! There were even a few occasions where someone would swat us on the butt for what we’ve done, assuming that whatever we had done deserved it.
I’ve written about the fire and this dream started before that.
Please keep in mind that our house sat on the smallest lot, was the lowest piece of land, and that the house was long so that the front door was facing Eli’s house (left side of the house when facing the house). Also I honestly don’t know if Eli’s house had wood siding like ours or vinyl siding.
I walk out the front door on a beautiful afternoon. I can smell the summer air and feel the light summer breeze blowing through my hair. I close my eyes and turn my face into the breeze to enjoy the feel of it on my face. When I open my eyes I’m looking towards Eli’s back yard.
I stare in amazement, as there’s a hole in the siding of Eli’s house. I slowly walk towards the corner of the house and I feel drawn to enter the hole. As I slowly walk forward I can smell the cherries growing on the cherry tree that sits pretty much on the property line between our house and Eli’s.
The feelings won’t go away, even as my mind gets distracted from the hole. I get the feeling that there’s something important awaiting me that I have to get to and find.
As I get closer to the house I feel like the whole world is spinning but as I look closer at the hole it’s spinning. It has greens and reds swirling around the hole and everything tells me to turn and run but I don’t.
I approach the hole and the closer I get the blacker it gets. I finally get right next to the house and the hole stops spinning and the colors go away. I cock my head and look at it and as I start to get up to walk away, possibly to go call my mom at work or to even go see if Eli is home so we can call his mom at work, there’s a strong feeling of need.
I finally decide to crawl through the hole and boy was it a tight fit! I barely have enough room to squeeze into the pitch black hole (keep in mind that the dark and I got along at this point in my life).
I shimmy my way further into the hole and can’t figure out how I can possibly be in the side of Eli’s house because the hole wasn’t far enough away from the corner of the house. The hole was only about an arms length away from the corner and I had crawled in at an angle. I should have exited on the back side of the house way before I completely got into the hole.
I shrug my shoulder as best I can and continue to shimmy my way through. After what seemed like an eternity I see a light ahead. My whole body aches from there not being enough room and from the exertions I’ve had to go through to get where I was. I contemplate shimmying back out of the hole but as I move my toes back to start the backward shimmy I feel something solid against my feet.
Under any other circumstances I might have panicked as I’m rather claustrophobic but I just sighed and moved forward.
Once I finally get to the light I’m breathing hard from the exertion and I can feel the aches in my whole body. I stop to relax a bit to catch my breath and realize I have to crawl forward far enough to get most of my body out of the hole so my hands end up on the floor of the little box looking thing I was now staring at.
I take a relaxing breath and shimmy far enough to get out of the hole and into a squatting position on the floor.
At this point I’m awakened by Chalie (a Blue Merle Shetland Sheepdog) as she jumps onto my waterbed and makes huge waves. I use the bathroom and realize I’m covered in sweat and can feel my heart beating faster like all the shimmying I had just done in my dream really happened.
I wet down my face and dry it and go crawl back into bed. I throw my arm around Chalie and snuggle down to a peaceful sleep.
The next night’s dream started the same way only this time there was a little more room and the trip through the narrow hole seemed much shorter.
Once to the square box like thing I took the time to look around some more. It was made of plywood, the good stuff not the knotted cheap stuff, and smelled like fresh cut plywood. There was a light but I couldn’t tell where exactly it was attached. All that mattered was that there was a light.
As I turned, in a squatting position, I notice nothing to get me any further and as I turn back towards the hole I see a ladder out of the corner of my eye. I raise my eyebrows and think one of those childish thoughts of ‘it’s about time you see to my needs’ type of thing.
It takes very little time to get to the top and once there I manage to squeeze myself onto the small platform as I watch the ladder disappear. I look around as much as possible in the fading light and finally see what looks like the board you slide to the side to gain entrance to an attic.
As I slide the board aside there’s only enough room to barely squeeze through. I felt pain as I got my shoulders into the hole and had to back out so I could stick my arms through first, over my head. I felt around for something solid to grab onto but found nothing so as I stood up on the platform I placed my hands on the sides of the hole. I hoisted myself up and finally managed to get my butt onto the edge and sat there with my feet dangling into black nothingness.
I pulled my feet up and moved far enough to replace to board. Once it was in place I looked around. I was suspended in mid air, with nothing but the board I was now kneeling on. I looked down and saw a staircase I could safely jump down to so I did.
Feeling like I was on solid ground I looked around. There were umpteen million staircases and it made me feel like I was in an Escher painting, not knowing which way was truly up or down.
For some reason I decided to go up the stairs and walked for an eternity. I finally stopped and looked around again and saw myself walking above me on another staircase. I turned around and started to walk down the stairs.
As I was walking down the stairs I smelled jasmine and cinnamon, two of my favorite scents. Normally they don’t smell the greatest together but I could smell them each separately. I decided to follow the cinnamon smell as it usually led to something scrumptious coming out of the oven.
After walking down three different staircases, all made of the same wood and varnished to a beautiful polish you could see yourself in, I finally got to the bottom floor. I looked around and sniffed the air but all I could smell was the jasmine now.
I took in my surroundings and I was in the foyer of a very large house. There was a staircase on both sides of the room, made of the same wood. I don’t ever recall seeing any other staircases made out of cherry but they were definitely made out of cherry. There was a landing at the top of the staircases with a door up top on the landing and a door directly under it right in front of me. The door in front of me was, obviously, bumped out so that whoever was in the room below the staircase landing would definitely hear someone coming out of the top room.
I could suddenly smell plywood, jasmine and something I didn’t know what it was until much later in life. All I knew is that it was unpleasant. I heard footsteps and a door close so I looked up. As I looked up all the other staircases were still there and I was walking down them again. I shook my head and looked up to the landing again.
There was a sweet looking, older lady standing at the rail with her hands on the rail. She asked me if I was waiting for Amy and then I woke up.
The dream reoccurred for a good percentage of my youth and suddenly stopped in the middle one night.
It wasn’t a dark and stormy night, it was just a summer night before eighth grade. I still slept with a night light on, with my faithful horse Emily and with my blanket to cover my ears on those cold or stormy nights. It was a night like any other night except something had woke me up.
I had learned long ago to get up and use the bathroom if I was woke up for apparently no reason in the middle of the night. Sometimes our bladders know better than we do and it had been an extremely long time since I had wet the bed. Matter of fact I don’t remember actually wetting the bed, waterbed bag leaks yes but wetting the bed, no.
I used the bathroom, washed my hands as quietly as possible and crawled back into bed. I was, once again, glad to see Chalie sitting there waiting for me. I threw my arm around her and fell back asleep.
My dreams was pretty uneventful for all of that time and I had pretty much forgotten all about it until I rode over to my friends Gramma’s house to see if she wanted to go for a bike ride in the summer before high school. I knocked on the door and heard someone call that the door was open and to come in. This wasn’t unusual growing up, locks were for night and when no one was home.
I slowly opened the door and was assaulted with the scent of jasmine. As I politely closed the door and took a few steps into the foyer I noticed a beautiful cherry double staircase with a landing at the top, a door up top and a door directly below it. My knees almost gave out right then and there. I started to take a step backwards, to run, when I heard footsteps and an older lady came out of the top door and put her hands on the rails.
“Are you here for Amy?”
My throat went dry and all I could do was nod my head. She looked exactly like the sweet older lady from my dream! I pointed to the front door, to indicate I’d be outside and tried not to run out of the house. It didn’t take Amy long to come out of the garage with her bike but it seemed to take forever for me to come to my senses.
Amy noticed something was wrong but I couldn’t tell her where her family might hear so I indicated for her to follow me and I rode the couple blocks to the park we liked to sit in.
I told her all about my dream, when it started, and when it ended. She never laughed at me, she never scoffed, she just sat there and listened. We talked till almost dark (okay so it might have been two or tree hours before dark) that day and I told her about some of my other weird dreams, she told me some of hers. We also discussed our dreams for life and what we wanted to do with our lives. We laughed about our silly dreams and listened intently to the serious ones. It was a good day and I was happy on the ride home, even though I had to hustle almost seven miles to get home before full dark.
Every once in a while I have that dream again but I’m now too big to get up onto the platform and once I figured out I could stand on the ladder and open the little hatch thing I couldn’t fit through it. Needless to say I was extremely disappointed because I’d love to see Amy again, even if it’s only in my dreams.
Amy died of Cancer, second semester of freshman year of high school.
I had never been in the house before that day and I have never set foot in it again but the dream and memories of Amy are ingrained in my mind.
All Carson Reno Mystery Series Books are standalone novels. It is not necessary to read them in any particular order.
A famous author is murdered, Carson is at the scene of the crime and considered a prime suspect – but he doesn’t remember anythi
When Juliet, a young English woman, disappears from a Festival in Nerja, Spain, disgraced veteran detective Leon Prado of the Spanish National Police suspects an elusive serial abductor. A curious videographer, Amanda Salisbury, inadvertently films J
