Nightmare

Just now I had one of the scariest nightmares I can remember having for a while - the kind where you are still scared after you get up. If you are interested, I have documented it below:

Place: Grandma Gannon's basement, our family room/deck, WI/WA

Theme: Things that had to be their way - poltergeist

Characters: Laura A., a short freaky girl and a tall freaky girl, painter from long ago

Dream Prelude: I was a passenger in a Jeep driving to the house (which was in my parents' neighborhood/our neighborhood) and we were having a hard time getting there. There were 4 of us in the car, and for some reason we were afraid of being stopped by the police. I thought it might have been because one of our backseat passengers didn't have his seatbelt on. He refused to buckle it, which I thought was very strange, but there seemed to be something else I didn't know about that made the situation dire. But on this paricular foggy night there were accidents EVERYWHERE, and police everywhere. Every road we drove onto had an accident that had just happened, so we had police rushing around us all the time. Fortunately they did not stop us and we got to the house without any incidents of our own.

Weird stuff in the house started when I noticed that someone had used the same bedsheets all of the time. I had recommended putting different sheets on, but they said, no they liked it the way it was. I tried changing them myself when no one was around, but they would always be mysteriously changed back.

Every day we would walk to and from school/work through a fairly complicated web of stairs and pathways that were part indoor, part through parking garage-like structures. We didn't walk together, but I would frequently pass the tall feaky girl. One day a friend of mine (don't know who) told me about the route she always takes. I remarked, "Why does she go that way? It would be so much quicker if she took !" The friend told me, "But that's the way that's best for her. I don't know why, but she and a bunch of other people have taken a blood oath not to tell others about why they do these things. One day I was walked slightly behind her, and turned off at the short-cut that was so obvious she should have taken. But when I got to the point at which we should have met up, she was already somehow well ahead of me.

Then I noticed that the short freaky girl I shared a bedroom with always wore the same boxer shorts when she went to bed. I gave her some new boxers to wear, but she never wore them. I asked why she never wore them, and she said something like, "Because I have to wear these." I asked her why, and she said it was a secret. I tried coaxing her into telling me, but she said, "I'm sorry, I swore that I wouldn't tell anyone...I can't, I'm sorry."

So that was kind of weird, and the situation had this underlying sense of evil about it. And then finally, Laura A. had a habit that she couldn't break as well. I really tried prying this time. And Laura said, "Well, you see, there is a reason that many of us have to do things a certain way. That's just the way it is. But if I tell you, you would need to take a blood oath." Well, I didn't want to take any blood oath because I wanted to expose this phenomenon once I found out what it was.

So, I went upstairs to our living room. We had guys who were painting the ceiling (and it was dark), so I said, "Oh, you all need some light in here!" But when I went to turn on the lights, they turned off as soon as they flickered on. I kept pushing the lightswitch, but the same thing would happen. The lead painter (the painter/wallpaper guy who worked on my parent's house when I was a kid) got down from his ladder and explained that there was a force in the house and things just had to be the way that it wanted them to be. (And apparently the force wanted the lights off.) As he was telling me this I noticed that the outside grill was on, even though I hadn't turned it on. I wouldn't accept the painter's explanation, and I tried the lights again. This time the lights flickered but stayed on very dimly. The painter went back up to paint, and the lights flickered off. The next thing I knew, the painter came up behind me with the plastic torch part of the light fixture, and said I had to hold if it I was going to fight this thing. The last thing I remember before getting up was him putting the fixture in my hand and a flash of light.

Crazy, huh?