Sunday, August 3, 2008

Seeing Dead People (Again)

My house is now full of ghosts. So I am told. Everyone who lives here seems to have encountered one.

Lights mysteriously turned on and off while Trisdee practiced the harpsichord in the dead of night. And these were not power failures; the switch actually moved. Jay heard music playing from the music room … the Chopin A flat major etude … only it was in the minor key. But no one was in the music room at the time.…

While performing my office in the lavatory, I distinctly heard a Jewish chant coming through the pipes. There is indeed a synagogue in the neighbourhood … half a mile away!

Now, my orchestra manager, says he's had some kind of "experience" too. But he's too frightened to explain it. So, it would seem, terror is stalking the hallways of the Bangkok Opera.

As reported in my dream diary, themes of mortality and dead people seem to be recurring more and more in my dreams.

For example, two nights ago I had a familiar dream of being lost in a labyrinthine science fiction convention hotel. It was a huge hotel — in fact, I think it was the Fontainebleu in Miami, where I attended my very first worldcon. I'm lost after some huge party and trying to get to my room.

someone tells me it's faster to go down one floor, turn left and go all the way to another elevator located at 21J. I go there and find the elevator — it's dimly lit and old-fashioned. maybe a service elevator — take it, find myself in a completely different hotel.

And now, I am running towards what I think is my room. It's a dank alley outside but I reach the end and I see row upon row of white houses, built with wooden facing, all with motel room like doors. The walls have white wooden planks which I call pickets, though even in my dream I know that pickets are not planks on walls. They do have picket fences as well. The houses are a bit like a cross between suburbia and Auschwitz barracks. They are dreamlike, perfect rows, scrubbed clean, sepulchre like, I run like mad and I am thinking, Why do I always see these houses in my dreams, and never dare to go in?

You see, it has become a lucid dream. I am aware of everything, even that it is a recurring dream and I can change something.

And so I stop and push open a door.

It's dark. A row of dormitory beds. Someone in each bed, completely covered in a brownish greyish blanket. They are like shrouds or body bags. I shout, "Someone say something! you people never say anything!"

All the blankets move at once to reveal a row of bandaged, mummy-like heads, they simultaneously lift their heads to look at me. As I wake up, I realize they are dead, yet they are staring at me.…

... Yes. My house has become full of ghosts.

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