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I had another one of those bizarre dreams last night. While it was a little less blood n’ gore filled than the last one, it was none the less an interesting one. It took place at some sort of amusement park or carnival and, in some way which can only be attributed to the odd world of dreams, a clubhouse that I used to hang out in was hidden amongst the rides. The guy who the clubhouse belonged to was not in the dream nor where any other people that I knew. There were a lot of amusement park goers around, but they were all strangers.

As with so many of my dreams, I was being pursued by something. I have to call it “something” because I never actually saw what or who it was. In fact, save for a giant jack-in-the-box that tried to grab me, there wasn’t even anything actually after me. I just knew in the dream that I was being hunted down. I was constantly on the run. I hid on the roof of different buildings… in a filthy toilet stall… and eventually inside the clubhouse I mentioned above. Except the clubhouse had a couple of add-ons since my days of actually being there. The most notable of these additions was a room hidden by a curtain and lit only by a couple of torches on the wall and a roaring fire in the center.

Pretend for a moment that fire is safe inside of a wooden clubhouse. The room was very ominous. Its occupant was even more so. A man, seated on the opposite side of the fire from me, staring wildly into the flames. He spoke and told me he was going to give me something. It wasn’t my birthday, so I can assume he wasn’t going to be handing me a cake or a present. When he finally looked up at me, all I could see in his eyes was the reflection of the fire. I didn’t know him (in the dream or in reality), so I didn’t stick around to find out what he had in store for me. I ran… again.

I awoke perplexed… and wanting to go back into the dream… to find out why I’m always being hunted down in the world of my subconscious.

Even when I was little, my dreams were almost always those of being pursued. Back then I was usually trying to allude a monster or a murderer. When I was five, my entire family was staying in a hotel room as we prepared to move. My parents and my sister shared one room while my brother and myself shared an adjoining room. Mom and dad had some sort of lock on the television that prevented us from watching anything other than what they were watching. Late one night, they bought A Nightmare on Elm Street on pay-per-view. Apparently it was a new release then. It was well past my bedtime, so I assume they thought I was asleep. Several hours after I’d “gone to bed”, the television in my room flicked on, awaking my brother and I. We both crawled to the end of our beds and watched, in horror, as the movie unfolded on the screen.

That was the start. That movie traumatized my five year old mind. I couldn’t sleep right for years after that. I jumped out of my bed in the morning so that my feet wouldn’t be close enough for something under the bed to grab. I slept on the top bed of a set of bunk beds so that nothing could hide directly under the bed and get me through the mattress (which I now know is funny… because the bottom bunk was always empty… and the perfect place for a monster to hide). Every dream I had for years was filled with Feddy Kreuger or Jason Vorhees or Micheal Myers… or something like that. Literally every dream.

I think my current dreamscape owes many of its dynamics to these early dream worlds. For one, I taught myself how to forcefully awake from a scary dream. I can’t describe it. It’s almost like a switch that I can throw. If a dream becomes too disturbing or I anticipate something about to happen that I won’t like, I will tell myself in the dream to wake up. And I do. Instantly. I also think that the reason I don’t remember a lot of dreams is because of the early ones. My mind created some sort of defensive mechanism that shields the contents of dreams from my consciousness. I could write it off as poor sleep or some other biological reason that keeps me from either reaching REM sleep or remembering the dreams I have. But I went from having nightmare after nightmare as a child to remembering no dreams. Period. For years and years I slept without a dream to recall in the morning. I went from waking in terror night after to night to more than a decade without a single dream to recall.

It has only been within the last couple of years that I’ve been able to remember a dream here or there upon waking. I can count on my fingers how many I’ve remembered in the last few years, too. But here again I see the “being hunted” theme reemerging, albeit in a new form. One of the first recent dreams I can remember is an oddity in which I ate a Stove Top stuffing filled Freddy Kreuger. Oh yes… you heard me… he was filled with Stove Top stuffing. And I ate him. No doubt the psychological equivalent of getting over the traumatization that he caused me as a child. However, even though Freddy is gone, new things have emerged to chase me. A giant Mr T… zombies… and now some unseen amusement park foe.

Dreams are certainly odd. And the theories on their existence and creation are as varied as the subjects of dreams themselves. Some say random neural firing causes a dream. I don’t buy that. What of recurring dreams? If they were caused by random brain farting, how would a recurring dream “randomly” surface over and over again? Some say that the stimuli encountered during the day that were not fully “processed” during waking hours resurface in the dream world to be experienced and dealt with. Others believe a Jungian “collective unconscious” plays a role in our dreams. And still others think dreams are our mind’s way of communicating with us in its own, bizarre language.

All I know for certain is that I’m running from something. I’ve been running from it my entire life. My unconscious has been trying for almost twenty years to show me what it is, but I have yet to be able to interpret the message. At least when a deer is being hunted down in the woods it can see it’s hunter. Camouflage may shield the hunter from it’s prey sometimes. But when it’s all said and done, the deer can see its assailant standing over its body as it dies.

I guess I’m doomed to the same fate. Some day I’ll figure out what’s after me… probably as it stands over my dying body… laughing a villainous laugh and raising it’s gun into the air in celebration of victory…