Ghosts in the Parlor

MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 19, 2009

This turned out to be one of my favorite dreams in a while.

My friend Eric explained to me how he and his band had been tapped to record an original song for a web site. The site apparently got unsigned and under-the-radar bands to pick a Christmas song, record their own interpretation of it, and then they posted them in a gallery online.

Eric's band had chosen "Here Comes Santa Claus". They had done it as entirely instrumental, with ambient and electronic sounds. It was pretty cool. Then he showed me there was a video for it, which consisted of the band members sitting on a large, dirty old couch in a small dark room as they played their instruments.

The next thing I remember is Eric and I were riding around with Melissa. We passed a building that I think was a school, and I saw that big old couch from the music video just sitting in a ditch in front of the building. I asked Eric if that wasn't the same couch and he confirmed it was, going on to explain that they'd gotten the idea for the video when they found that couch in that ditch. They brought it in to the studio to record, but no one wanted to keep it, so they returned it to the ditch afterwords.

Somehow Eric and Melissa and I ended up inside some building that looked really vintage, like from the turn of the previous century or so. Parts of the building had been restored for modern use, but parts were still in ancient disrepair. I can't remember the specific turn of events that led up to it, but Eric and I became convinced that one of the decrepit rooms--it looked like it may have once been a parlor room--was haunted!

We kept trying to convince Melissa that this place--at least this room--was haunted. She didn't believe us at all, which is weird, because in real life if any of the three of us were likely to believe something was haunted, she would be the one! We took her into the room and were trying to show her why we thought it was haunted.

She still didn't believe us until at one point I said her name, and it echoed loudly throughout the room. Nothing else I said echoed--only her name. I tried it again, and again her name was the only word that echoed. She tried it. She said my name...nothing. Eric's name...nothing. She said her own name and it echoed as though she'd shouted into a ravine. By now we were all fairly creeped out. "See?!" I told her, "The ghosts are trying to prove to you they're here!"

At this point the room instantly transformed into what it probably had looked like in its heyday. Then it was filled with uppity socialites, men and women, dressed in their finest period garments. We knew we were seeing the ghosts, and we observed them as they conversed and laughed and carried on.

I specifically remember one fat gentleman with a walrus mustache. Someone offered him a smoke, and he declined, saying he was giving up smoking because it was, after all, what had killed him in the end. The other ghosts gave a hearty "Here, here!" At this point, I went around and collected the cigarettes from each of the individuals who had them and threw them away. It was my only actual interaction with the spirits.

I think this is about the point that the surreal nature of the experience woke me up.

I vaguely remember some dream I had later in which I was watching a movie from the early 80's. I noticed that everything in the city--every building, every billboard, etc., had some sort of Pac Man decoration. Just the little yellow Pac Man shape, everywhere. An arial shot showed that even the roofs of some tall buildings had Pac-Man-shaped air conditioning units and Pac-Man-adorned water towers. But this hadn't been created for the movie; I somehow knew it was real footage of what cities looked like in the early eighties!