Prompt 270-Dream

Describe your most recent dream you can remember.

Most nights I dream wild things all night long. It’s really a problem because I do not wake up feeling rested at all. Most mornings I remember enough details to recount those dreams. They always stay with me for days at a minimum.

Of course, because I had a prompt this week pertaining to dreams, my traitor brain promptly forgot all my dreams upon waking this week, and refuses to recall any of my other dreams from recent weeks. Aside from the Avengers dream (which I detailed already in a Sunday update a few weeks back), I can’t think of any interesting dreams I had. Heck, never mind interesting, I can’t remember any of them.

So, instead of a recent one, I will tell you about an ancient one. The very first nightmare I remember from my childhood.

I was probably about 5 or 6. My grandma (my mother’s mother) lived in a different town on a fairly large property. The house itself wasn’t that big. It was a split level ranch, with the lower level turned into an apartment they rented out. Poppy’s workshop was in the garage half of the lower level, and there was a door out to the back yard, under the deck. He was handy with wood and built all sorts of birdhouses and decorative signs and I’m pretty sure a rocking horse or two.

The upper level had three bedrooms at the end of the hall. Grandma and Poppy’s room was on the left, the “kid’s room” (where we slept when we stayed the weekend) was on the right, and the spare room was at the end of the hall. The living room had a large wall window looking out over the front of the yard and up the sloped driveway to the road. It was open to the dining room, with a wall separating the kitchen from both. The kitchen had a wrap-around counter that ended in an island to further delineate the kitchen from the dining room. A sliding door led out to the deck which overlooked the large back yard and Grandma’s garden. The stairs off the deck were to the left of the sliding door, and they led right to the garage.

She sold the house shortly after Poppy died and moved into a two bedroom apartment with a similar layout, but much more manageable for an older widow living alone. I still dream of the house when I have dreams about her or visiting her. It’s never the apartment, always the house. And it was the house where the nightmare took place.

We often had big family dinners there, and my dream started out that way. We were all sitting about after a meal chatting and laughing, my sisters and I playing with our cousins in the living room, when something told me to look out the window.

Up on the road, there was an old Victorian style carriage, open with no top to it, with a very affluent-looking couple sitting in the front, driving along. The woman was in a high necked gown fringed with lace while the man was in a suit with coattails and wearing a monocle and top hat. They gave me a very bad feeling. They ought to have seemed out of place on their appearance alone, but they were remarkably normal compared to what was pulling their carriage.

They were not being drawn along by horses, oh no. These very wealthy people were evil, and they had a velociraptor to pull their carriage. Now, I can’t remember if it was really a velociraptor, but my mind assigned that word to the dinosaur in my dream and I have pictured it as a velociraptor ever since. A big, toothy predator was what they let loose at any rate.

I saw them untie their pet and knew they were setting it on us, though I did not know why. All I knew was that I had to get my family out of there before we were all dinosaur food. Apparently, I was the only one who seemed at all aware of the danger we were facing. I urged everyone out the back, because I knew the velociraptor would be coming in the front (dream logic, who truly understands it), but no one had any urgency.

They all continued to chat and laugh as we walked down the back deck, and back in through the door under the deck, into the garage, careful not to knock over Poppy’s projects. Then up the stairs again, through the living room and dining room and back out the deck in a horrific loop. There was a monster on our tail, and everyone acted like we were just getting some light exercise after a heavy meal. It was horrifyingly frustrating.

On the third pass, I realized my blankie was in the kid’s room. A hand sewn quilt my grandmother’s friend had made for my birth, I never left home without it. I was afraid to leave it behind, in case the velociraptor altered course and decided to tear through the rest of the house. So I ran down the hall to the room to grab it.

I’m not sure if having my blankie in my hands warded off the scary monsters (dinosaur and people alike), but the dream fizzles out from there. I don’t remember if we continued on in a lazy loop for a while longer or if the mean old couple and their pet dino gave up and left, but my memory of the dream ends more or less with the acquiring of my blankie.

I am almost 30 years old, and I still remember that dream very vividly. And I still have my blankie, somewhere. (Teddy too, though I don’t remember I grabbed him in the dream too or just blankie.)

Reminiscing about this dream reminded me of others I’ve had recently, if not within the past week, but perhaps I will save those for another time. I’ve regaled you with childhood memories enough for one night. It’s your turn anyway.

We made it through another week! And now it’s a holiday weekend. I will be traveling, but I still plan to post my usual update, whether I schedule it in advance or post it ahead of time. There shouldn’t be any interruptions to the normal posting schedule anyway. Enjoy your long weekend (if you have it)! See you Sunday!

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