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24 April 2009

Dreams - Stories You Tell Yourself

My subconscious told me a really neat, scary ghost story last night, for the first time in a long time; lately, my dreams have been a bunch of confusing images/vignettes with little logic or cohesion, but last night - wow!

In this dream, my husband and I were in Paris. While walking across a bridge over a large, rushing stream (it was only a stream, not the Seine), we looked down and realized that there was a house built in the middle of the water, partially hidden by/connected to the bridge. Intrigued, we went down onto the riverbank for a closer look - a discovered a "for sale" sign.

The real estate agent happened to be right there, and insisted on showing us around - never mind that 1) we weren't interested in buying a house, and 2) there's no way we could afford this stone-and-mullionned window pre-Rafaelite structure. The main entrance, strangely enough, was through a tunnel in the sewers. But when we got into the house, BAM! it did the TARDIS thing of being much larger inside than out. Elegant carved wood walls, beautiful veined marble floors, and furnishings that looked like they came from the turn of the last century.

Turns out this had been the house of a famous writer and his family - his wife had been a painter, and they had a 10-year-old son. My dream-self finds this terribly fascinating, and I can't wait to explore the rest of the house. We find the the cozy room at the waterline of the rushing river (whose leaded windows miraculously don't leak) that has his-and-hers divans, an easel, and a desk with a typewriter and papers still strewn over it. There's also several bedrooms, a palatial marble bath, a garage, and a kitchen - where the cook asks, in French, if we'd like some tea.

Things didn't get creepy until we reached the nursery wing. Again, everything's been perfectly preserved - not a speck of dust anywhere. When I ask why, the real estate agent nervously tells me that the writer stipulated it remain this way. More prodding on our part gets him to reveal that when the writer's son died, both the writer and his wife died soon thereafter under mysterious circumstances. We walk into what was once the boy's room, and immediately sense a presence that tells us to get out. We leave the room; the door slams shut behind us.

I won't bore you with the rest - it played out as the "ghost child looking for a mother" trope - but upon waking I was struck by the fantastic detail and cohesiveness of the plot.

Yow. If only I could write stories like my brain does! Anyone got a direct wetware connection from the subconscious to a computer?

2 comments:

Carrie Lofty said...

Are you my mummy?

Nancy J. Parra said...

LOL- freaky but cool dream. Perhaps it's your story self trying to get you to play?