Literal take on the eerie recurring dream that won’t go away
One recurring dream grabbed me by the throat when I was in twilight mode and refused to let go until the Witching Hour at 3:34 a.m.
I stand outside that dark, dank, crumbling home. One with a single occupant hunched over with age. He’s seated in a frayed chair, staring at a blank television niched into a chipped entertainment center.
Every light in the home is dim, casting a frightening glow over what was once a magnificent home.
Outside, I turn to an old two-car garage that once hosted summertime parties. The man’s family and friends came from all over, enjoying life with cookouts, music, and bonfires well past midnight.
Across a vast, weeded yard stands an old, wooden shed. Its paint’s peeling and wooden frame’s weathering. No one’s opened it in years.
That yard was once well-fertilized and lush. A narrow, cement pathway led to the other end of a home, where a small, country diner regularly attracted locals and strangers passing through.
Today, that diner’s nothing but a rusted-out building, hosting nobody but the rats that inhabit it. Sometimes an old stray cat will find temporary shelter there.
The stools are rusted out, and the booths and checkerboard floors have tarnished. I walk into the old kitchen, and you can hear the constant drip in the vast sink that’s full of mold and bacteria, and the air reeks of grease gone rancid and wet wood.
This recurring dream has been haunting me all year
It’s like when Harry Potter kept dreaming about the Department of Mysteries in Order of the Phoenix. What’s weirder is, I get closer every time it hits me.
The other night, when I was back there again, I woke up on my back. Weird, since I always sleep on my left side.
What’s weirder? I had sleep paralysis for a few seconds. I snapped out of it, and found that my right arm was dead asleep.
After a short “rampage,” as I call it, my arm woke up and I got out of bed right then and there. Like I always do when I have a sleep paralysis episode.
Still, the dream haunted me all day until I had some free time during my workday and wrote about it. Again, I should add, since I talked about it over a month ago.
Who’s the old man, and where is this place?
There’s no one man and there’s no one place. My theory? The man’s an amalgam of those I know who are aging and frail. No longer the men I’d once known.
Two locations outside of my hometown. I’d say about a fifteen-to-twenty-minute drive. Both places once sang. Now, they’re rotting. Losing the battle to nature and time.
They brought fond memories at one point during my younger days. But now that I’m a good eight months from my thirty-fifth birthday, there’s nothing left but melancholy and ghosts of a vibrant past that are fading with time.
I wonder if these ghosts are warning me — that what once sang can sing again, but only if someone cares enough to turn the lights back on.
Hidden inspiration?
Book I in my dystopian survival trilogy, Beyond the Lost Horizon, features a main character who sees time as an antagonist in the book’s opening chapters.
While there’s no near-abandoned home, frail old man, withering two-car garage, or boarded-up diner, it wouldn’t surprise me if Quinn Cozens also had a recurring dream like this.
But Quinn’s reality is way more complicated, with a coordinated attack on America going on while he’s stuck looking after a sharp-tongued K-pop idol he stumbled upon during the onslaught.
What in the past is Quinn longing for, and how bad is his current situation? Find out in Beyond the Lost Horizon.
