Bad Dream

I was taking tours of haunted houses. I met each ghost I passed. Many of them were on stairways.

I woke up and rolled over onto my left side. I was half asleep, and I felt a strong wind suddenly blowing against my back and heard it clearly. It stopped. I thought about it, and then it came again. When it stopped, I got up and turned on the overhead light and lay on my back to look around. I was too afraid to close my eyes, and I didn't want to turn my back on anything. I didn't like the pattern the ceiling fan made against the walls as it spun. I thought there were ghosts in the room.

Tara was visiting me in a small town with a desert nearby. The prom was that night, and I decided I wanted to go, but I didn't yet have a dress. I was in charge of picking up Tara's dress from the dry cleaners, and as I was walking back to the chapel where we were staying, I decided to try to find a dress for myself. I went to my closet and began to pick through the clothes to see what I had that I might be able to wear. As I moved each hanger aside, the clothes bunched tightly together, and a bright light created a glare so that I couldn't see anything directly. The clothes were hard to move; I couldn't slide the hangers smoothly aside, and the number of clothes to look through seemed so daunting. I tried on different dresses, anything that was shiny, but they kept falling apart or shrinking as I put them on. The prom was going to begin at 7:30PM, and I thought that maybe I should just go shopping. I finally found a white dress, and opened up a package of white ballet slippers to wear with it. I found only one of a pair of 9s, and they were ivory anyway, not pure white like the dress. Finally I found a turquoise and purple pair of shorts with a short skirt to wear over them, and a fitted, turquoise top. I really liked it, and put it on in front of the mirror. Tara stepped up to me and took me by the arm out to the front of the chapel. We sat down on a concrete ledge near the parking lot. She shook her head and told me my outfit was really quite awful and didn't fit well. I was sad, and I watched her walk away in a pretty red dress.

A bunch of carrots began to grow out of the side of my knee. They were white and very closely bunched together, almost bristly. Each carrot was as big around as a small paint brush, and they were two inches tall. I ran my hand over them and felt an itchy pain inside my knee where I imagined they must be rooted. I decided to pour some alcohol over them to kill the infection I thought they must represent. I used the palm of my hand to separate them into smaller bunches and poured the alcohol on. Blood welled up between them. Later I went to the doctor. When I got there, the carrots had turned into a bushy, green plant that poked up from the top of my knee. The doctor asked me a series of questions. I could only say, "I don't know," and shake my head.

Manatee

I had a large, ceramic pot filled with dirt and three or four different plants. One of the plants had a thick, tubular stalk, and stood taller than the others. Its top was like a clam shell, halfway emerged from the stalk. It hatched one day and produced a strange animal who ran away. I alerted the authorities in case it was dangerous, and we all went looking for it. I spotted it in a residential neighborhood, half a block away in the intersection. It had grown into a small, light gray, fuzzy, goat. I managed to catch it and was carrying it to a baby crib. When I got to the crib, I realized it had morphed into a green mask with mouth and nose holes and attached itself to my face. I peeled it off and put it in the crib. It looked like a small water creature now, and I knew its name was Eric. It told me something. Then I began to think of it as a manatee, and it grew and grew.

I laid on my back in a bed. Several people stood around and watched. There was a bright light in my eyes, and I couldn't see much. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate. There was a hidden box above me. It was in the air, but it was also in a cabinet. The people watching knew about it and were protective of it. It had a small light in it. I knew there was something above the box, too. I concentrated as hard as I could and pictured entering the box. I began to think of it as the God box. Every time I made it into the box, the light became very bright, and I was jolted out of it. The air vibrated and I felt paralyzed. My heart felt like it would stop. I came to rest again on the bed on my back. Whatever was in the box was terrifying, but I kept trying to go back into it. Each time I was spit out. Finally I woke up gasping.

I was riding along with a large group of mind-reading warriors of the Mongol Empire. I was one of them. We rode our horses across plains and surveyed the landscape from the tops of bluffs.