Bad dream

I don’t usually have bad dreams.

Well, that’s not one-hundred-percent correct.

I sometimes have bad ‘thoughts’ right as I’m falling asleep…a flash of a monster, or one of the kids crying, or my body falling, but it’s at such an early stage of ‘falling asleep’ that I can wake myself up, screw my head on straight, have some good thoughts/fantasies, and fall asleep with nary a wrinkle in my sheet of dreams.

But last night?

Oohgrrgawd.

Last night was terrible.

In the dream, I walked down one of our city streets and noticed the body of a small child…a girl, blonde hair, her doll beside her, lying face-down on the sidewalk. Her playmate, dark-haired, lay near her. I was…horrified…(I’m close to upchucking right now just thinking about it). I turned the corner to see an entire city block, one of the city parks, full of bodies…FULL. Children, women, men, some singular, some in piles, all dead. No blood. Some survivors sat amongst the bodies, grieving, crying, shocked.

Then I saw THEM.

The Killers.

They looked like a cross between the Reavers in the movie Serenity and the dreadlocked-alien creature from Predator. Mean sons-o-bitches. The thing is, they didn’t have to touch you to kill you. They had some power…what power I didn’t know…to take your life. They were going from house to house, street to street, killing indiscriminately. One family huddled in a corner may have one dead, two dead, all dead, whatever THEY wanted.

I ran home.

I began closing the drapes in the house, telling my husband what was going on in hushed screaming. We got the kids together, and were trying to figure out where to hide, when I heard music. Something sweet and sappy, from the 1950s, a female voice in a lullaby tone. I knew. Instinctively. The Killers used music to sooth us, and then they’d capture and kill. Two windows were left uncovered, and as I ran to close them, all I could see outside was green grass and sidewalk…but I knew. I knew they were out there. Death was at the door.

I woke up panting and afraid. The alarm clock said 5:05. I tried to shake off the dream, but it wouldn’t leave my head. I tried everything…thinking of my ‘special place’, thinking of the kids laughing and playing, fantasies of Boyfriends, DIRTYSEXY fantasies of total strangers, planning my day…nuthin’. I lay there, and tried to close my eyes, but then the screaming started and visions of dark Killers. I didn’t get back to sleep. I sweated my way through to 6 a.m., wondering Why. That. Dream. What did the Killers represent? Was this just a dream, or a premonition? WTF would I do tonight when it was time for bed, would sleep come? Or would it stay out on the sidewalk, in the shadow of something sinister?

I blame the Discovery Channel, those commercials for the Black Plague, or maybe the Sci-Fi Channel, for jeebus-knows-what. Or maybe that piece of pumpkin bread I had before bed. Or, perhaps, my brain just had to unload a lot last night, and dammit, fear is the best way to clean house.

What was YOUR last scary dream?