Chased By A Madman

MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 18, 2007

The following, rather intense dream was I think partly inspired by the book I’m currently reading, as well as a book I just finished before that. Other parts of it are more random. My dreams aren't always as intense as this, but it was so richly detailed it seemed a fitting dream to begin the online journal with.

I was aware that there was a very dangerous, murderous madman who was trying to find and kill me. And I knew for a fact that I could never successfully hide from him—he would find me sooner or later if something didn’t stop him first. This knowledge did make me nervous, but it didn’t fill me with terror like it would in real life. I actually sort of felt more like I was a main character in an exciting book or movie. Which, it turns out, was half true I guess.

My first memory is driving my car, and my friends E and D were with me. It was early evening, and we were passing through a suburban neighborhood. At one place there were two cars out in the street that might possibly have just had a fender-bender of a wreck. Several people from the surrounding houses had gathered around.

I was frustrated, because this scene prevented me from quickly getting through in my car, and I knew the madman was somewhere hot on my tail. I knew it wasn't good to be stopped for long. And wouldn’t you know it, that’s when I saw him in my rearview mirror! The madman in his car, slowly coming up the road.

Somehow I sped my car past the neighborhood scene and back onto the main, two-lane road with my enemy in close pursuit. By some means of stunt-like driving I’ll never comprehend in the waking world, I eventually managed to lose him in traffic. The relief was temporary, as I knew it was only a matter of time before he caught up to me again. (My friends, by the way, were still along for the ride this whole time. We were just too engaged in escaping with our lives to be having much interaction.)

The next place I remember, we arrived at some old, abandoned mansion, which I entered alone. The place very much had the feel of a classic haunted house, though it wasn’t actually haunted; it was only empty and neglected. I explored the place myself, hoping it would prove a refuge from the madman and not a trap.

I found a secret passageway in the form of a series of narrow, winding hallways that went seemingly nowhere. Somehow the passageway was well lit, but the strangeness of this didn’t factor into the dream. Finally, the passage ended with a small door that led into a very small room. The room had apparently been a bedroom at one time, but was as long abandoned as anything else in the house. One look out the dirty, cobweb-covered window told me this bedroom was very high at the top of the house.

A second doorway in the bedroom then led me into a gift shop of sorts. In stark contrast to the house it was apparently connected to, the shop was alive and bustling with customers. It was mostly stocked with all sorts of books, but also had a variety of novelty items and collectibles.

A lady who worked at the store soon approached me. She was obviously at least a little older than me and rather attractive, dressed in a long, wispy black dress. There was something about her that made me feel uncomfortable. She began telling me about a new graphic novel by Neil Gaiman that she thought I’d almost certainly enjoy reading. She apprehended one of those rolling ladders like you might expect to see in a very large bookstore or library and wheeled it over to the some very tall shelves.

The graphic novel in question was at the very top of the shelf against the wall. She brought it down to me and began explaining it in detail. The book itself, a hardback, was huge. Not especially thick, but about two feet tall and a bit over a foot wide. It was apparently some sort of re-envisioning of Mother Goose stories, because the cover had art of a rather creepy looking old lady riding a giant goose through the air. The art looked to me in the dream like the work of Charles Vess.

After looking through the book, I thanked the lady and told her I wasn’t interested. It was simply too huge and expensive for my tastes at the moment. She seemed really disappointed, but I went on and continued looking through the store, glad to get away from her.

I was browsing a little rotating display stand of paperback books when suddenly the madman appeared from behind it, almost as if from thin air. He said something like, “You’re a tough customer to please!”

He was very ugly. His flesh was grayish and looked almost plastic, as if he were a poorly made toy. His eyes were round, bloodshot, and bulging, completely free of eyelids, as his mouth was free of lips. He wore a battered fedora and trench coat. I glanced beyond him for a moment and saw the determined lady who had tried to sell me the book now lying motionless at the bottom of her rolling ladder, apparently dead.

He immediately began to attack me, but to my relief several people in the store all helped me fight back. We were able to hold him off for the moment, but he obviously had superhuman strength. I grabbed some item from one of the shelves in the store—I think it was a pen or a pencil—and managed to stab him deep into the neck.

It didn’t feel like stabbing flesh should feel. It felt like stabbing a hollow, plastic toy. I heard and felt a rush of air poof out as the pen went in. The madman began screaming in pain, and he soon collapsed, deflated, and fell dead.

Everyone in the store cheered. Though the whole dream had been about the madman chasing only me, it was as if all of these people had been freed from the exact same burden—as though the madman had taunted them all, and now we had teamed up to defeat him.

In the last remembered scene of the dream, I was leaving the mansion I had entered earlier, only now it was Hogwarts school from the Harry Potter books. I was with the Weasley family. Fred and George were teasing Ginny, and they were magically making dirty words appear on the walls. The words had something to do with their teasing of Ginny, because she would get very agitated and quickly use magic to blot out the words they were writing. Fred and George then took off down the hallways, magically writing on the walls as they went, and Ginny was in hot pursuit, blotting out as she followed.

This is what was going on when my alarm went off and woke me. The end