LATE 1984 TO ABOUT MARCH 1985
I was living at home with my parents, it was just the three of use who lived there, two of my sisters had married, and the youngest, J, had moved away in early 1984. I spent my time going from job to job, working in the afternoon until late evening. It was the perfect shift for me, starting late enough so I could sleep in and getting off early enough to party until the sun came up. So I slept in the mornings until I had to go to work, getting up at about 1PM in the afternoon or much later if it was my day off.
It was about this time that I started having dreams. I never dreamt much in my life, I don't know why. The only recurring dreams I had in my life was one about finding a dead body buried in the yard. It wasn't any particular body, no gender or anyone I knew. It was just a generic dead body. That dream would show up about every five years or so until I was twenty or so. Also, I could always count on having a dream about school every August, just before the start of the school year. Those were the kind in which I couldn't find my locker, or I got lost in the school building.
I even had one of those in the year after I graduated high school (graduated in 1978) and one while in college (graduated in 1994). That one during the college years was a funny one. In my dream it was exam time. I looked at my exam schedule and found out that there was a class on my schedule that I had never attended. I just forgot I had signed up for it, or whatever. So, I went to the teacher to see if I could take the exam. She said it was OK if I did and she would give me a passing grade of D if I passed the exam. The funny thing was that it was a kindergarten class, or maybe first grade. I tried to fit into the chair, but it was too tiny. I woke up then. Never did know if I passed that class.
But the dreams that started in 1984 were different. It was as if I was in the state of being only half awake and I was talking to people. I clearly remember one of the first. I was half awake, screaming and rolling around in my bed, sometimes slamming the sliding door of the headboard on the bed. And then I heard my older sister, G, banging on the door, saying, "W! Wake up." I woke up for a few seconds, was quiet, and heard her going down the stairs.
These "dreams" became very frequent, and turned into question/answer sessions about me, what I want and what I thought of other relatives. For instance, I half-way woke up once when I heard a scraping noise outside my door, the noise of a chair sliding on a floor. And I heard my mother say, "Here, M, you can sit on this." It was my mother talking to my aunt. I probably said something, because the next thing my aunt said was directed to me, used my nickname from childhood and said, "Oh, B, it's ok." Another time was kind of funny. I was halfway awake, and thinking about some friends of my parents, and I must have said what I thought of them, which was not at all nice. The next thing I heard was someone stomping down the stairs and slamming the front door. Moral of that incident for them would be: If you think you might not like what someone thinks of you, don't ask them...especially when they're sleeping.
Those incidents could be explained away as having a dream triggered by a noise, that would be perfectly plausible. But one instance convinces me that the dreams/question/answer times were triggered by real people and were not spontaneous. And I got a big clue who put herself in charge of it. I had dreams of remodeling the upstairs floor, where my bedroom was. Once I dreamt of making a doorway into the room next to mine. Then again, I dreamt of connecting to the room directly below mine with a staicase, a spiral staircase -- that would be the way to go. I dreamt of that more than once. Then, one day I was downstairs, in front of the door to that room, and my father was there in front of the door, too. Then he said, in a voice louder than usual and using a lot more gestures than usual, "You know, we should get stairs in this room. Stairs that go round and round." He was a foreigner, so I don't think he would have said spiral, but the strange thing was that my younger sister, J, was standing there, too, and she just looked at me with the weirdest stare and grin on her face. It really was too much of a coincidence. And my sister J shows up again in these weird things I'll describe later.
The last thing I can say about the question/answer dreams is that somehow, they triggered thoughts of death. I remember one of the dreams, I sat bolt upright and said, "I wish I had AIDS." Then, I think someone must have said that it was fatal, because I thought/said "I'll get over it." Dumb. And I started to have, I don't know if the right word is 'ideation' or 'thought' of suicide. I would look over to my bedroom window, while I was wide awake and not half dreaming, and picture myself jumping out of it. It's just two stories up and I probably would have broken a leg, and nothing else. And I noticed that my head would jerk back twice, involuntarily and at no particular times, and the first thought I had after the two jerks was that I had shot myself in the forehead. Yeah, I know, who could get two shots off when shooting themselves in the forehead? Never did try suicide or even have any thoughts of it before, except the time I heard when I was a teenager that too much aspirin would fatally thin your blood. I took some, but I'm not dead. I don't think of killing myself.
So, the upshot about my life at home at this time was all about getting interrogated while I was sleeping, and telling people off in my sleep, and having dumb ideas about being dead. I remembered those dreams shortly after waking up, just as anybody else would remember a dream. The sudden interest in what I'm thinking, and being in a state where I actually answered questions, as if I had no choice but to answer, made me angry and led to some paranoia.
I had no relationship to speak of with my relatives. Three sisters, from oldest to youngest: T, G, and J. I had not seen or spoke to T since about 1974, we don't get along; G got married and moved five years prior to these events, hardly saw her at all; J had moved the year before these events had just had a son, I hardly saw her either. I guess you could say I had the barest thread of a relationship with my parents, we never talked of anything personal or of any importance, and they didn't know who my friends were or how I spent my free time. And I didn't care about the friends they had. Hell, they didn't even complain that I smoked pot at home.
My dad, since deceased, used to say that I treated the house like a hotel, just a place to sleep when I wasn't working or going out. Hey, I mowed the lawn and I did my own laundry. Considering that I had no trouble with the police, never had guests over, and never had many phone calls coming in, I really don't understand why they suddenly took advantage of my sleep time by asking nonsense questions like, "What do you want?" or "What's your problem?" I wanted them to go away and the problem was their bothering me while I was sleeping.
NEXT: MORE QUESTION/ANSWER FROM.....FRIENDS? PART I
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