I was moving a lot. I had to draw upon distinct parts of my personality to relate to all of the people around me that I was encountering. I wish I could remember more about these details, but it was all overshadowed by the fact that, at one point, a man requested that I help him die. His chosen method: self-immolation. Rather than burning to ash, though, he burned like hard, melting plastic, growing smaller and smaller but still communicating with me somehow, even when he was a warped, melted gray disk in my hand, begging me psychically to finish it for him, that the pain was excruciating. I'm f*cking sure it was. By the end I felt like a torturer and a murderer.
My mother was aware of this, and tried to console me on this matter. With her, we wandered through a quintessentially southern bayou scene to a little shack where an old blind person - not the first blind person I'd encountered in this dream - a completely androgynous wise elder figure of ambiguous ethnic descent who told us some very interesting stories that I wasn't able to hear properly. People began to show up, drowning out their voice with their own surfing adventure tales and complaints about their home life. I eventually drove off with some of these people, prompted by something having to do with water.
My moving finally came to a close in my second dream, in which I moved to a house in a Portland that came across much more like the Seattle of my dreams often does. I had to climb great staircases alongside eerily silent freeways to get into my neighborhood. The top was at Lombard, but Lombard backed against a thickly forested, steep hillside and no houses were to be seen. For being four lanes wide, it was remarkably devoid of cars as well. I turned around and went down one flight, realizing my mistake.
The house I was moving into was absolutely gorgeous. It felt stable and strong and new and fresh (although, I'd been told, it had been built in 1908); it had a very polished, metropolitan aesthetic mixed with a log cabin kind of feel. The rent was a bit much, but the place was so lovely that I was prepared to stay there forever. The owners of the house were a 30-something couple, maybe with a baby and a dog, who were calm and peaceful and creative. A girl around my age, or maybe a little younger, also lived there, possibly with her boyfriend - also a very stable, friendly person. My room was the only one upstairs, in a peaked-ceiling attic loft space.
Ian was staying the first few nights with me while I made myself comfortable. Just before going to bed, having sat around a warm fire and chatted with my new roommates for hours, they warned me as an afterthought that the house had a ghost, but that they rarely had to deal with it. When Ian and I went up into my lovely room, a chill immediately became apparent. As soon as we lay down under the soft sheets and I turned off the light, Ian said, "Oh, I see why they never have to deal with the ghost; it only lives in this room." I could feel it descending upon us, falling over us like a quilt, a malicious, morose energy reminiscent of a wailing banshee. I tried to move to turn the light on or somehow escape, but I couldn't. Initially horrified by the sleep-paralysis, and a little weirded out that it was happening so tangibly in the middle of my dream, I fought against it, only to give up thinking, "what's the worst that could happen?" Which of course led me to fight it again.
When I finally broke the paralysis, I was awake in my real bedroom, staring at the window, for a full minute or so unable to comprehend where I was. I had not expected to break back into my waking life at all. I guess I was having a more classic version of sleep paralysis? The kind where people claim demons lay on their chests and aliens abduct them and such? Usually, my sleep paralysis is entirely conscious and banal; I know exactly where I am and what is around me - often I even know the time of day or night, and what the weather is like outside - I just can't move. Nothing creepy but a fear of the unknown nature of comas in that case. But ghosts descending on me - that is art, man.
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