The Dark Definitions

April 8, 2012 by Cassidy Frazee | 5 Comments

There was this recurring dream I would have.  I’d be at my uncle’s house, wandering about the “common areas” like the living room, dining room, kitchen–all the stuff most people see when they visit.  The reason I think of this as being my uncle’s house is that, when I was growing up, my mother’s brother was rich.  I’m talking like worth twenty million in the late-1960′s, which was some real walking around money then.  In 1966 he built a house in the western suburbs of Chicago, said price of the house being $150,000–and he used to tell us it was the cheapest house in the neighborhood where he lived.  It was a big house, or at least a lot bigger than the houses of anyone I knew at the time, and it used to fascinate me greatly.

Anyway, in this dream . . . there are all these areas that everyone sees, but it always seems that I find my way into other sections of the house.  And I know all these sections have things in them.  You know what I’m talking about:  things that Man Are Not Meant to Know.  The two parts that always come to mind is a study that you have to reach by walking through all these twisting corridors and connected rooms, and when you finally come upon the study, it’s long and paneled in a dark brown wood, and there is dim light filtering in through yellow curtained windows, and at the far end there’s a door with a small window in it, and there is no light coming from that window:  it’s pitch black.

I’ve always wanted to find out what’s on the other side of that door, but something in the dream keeps me away.  I can never approach it, I can never get near it.  Because when I do, I feel my fear increase.  There’s something on the other end of the door that scares the hell out of me.

Then there’s “The Big House”, or so I call it.  It’s a very long corridor which enters these large rooms, and the further along the corridor you walk, the older and less maintained the rooms and corridor become, so by the time you’ve passed through three or four large rooms, you can see the paneling falling apart, and the ceiling plaster beginning to flake, and the light grows much dimmer . . .

This part has always scared the hell out of me because I know there is something in the shadows–and I don’t mean “The Shadows That Melt the Flesh“.  Whenever I’ve “walked” through this part of the house, I’ve felt it.  It disturbs me.  A few times I’ve reach a part of the corridor where there is nothing but darkness beyond.  There is solid darkness.  There is a void that light cannot reach.

It’s pretty freakin’ scary.

I haven’t had this dream in a while.  The last time I did, back in mid-December, I blogged about it (when don’t I do that?). And something that happened in that dream sort of ended up in a story I was writing at the time–that story being Echoes.  But three things got me thinking about this when I got online this morning–

One, I checked my blog stats, and found that someone had Googled my blog–and they’d done so using the exact title of the post I linked to above.  I consider that one of those freaky things that happen in your life.  It’s almost made a bit creepier when I found out it was done at 2 AM my time.

Two, yesterday someone Googled my blog using my name, followed by “Wide Awake”.  Not me, people.  And that was one of those things that also set me back on my heels, because no one has every come to my blog before using my name.  They usually find me by Googling “erotic slave girls” or “alien girls experiment”, which are two actual search terms from the last seven days.  (I also had someone find me using the phrase “tseluvki”, which also happens to be in the titles of one of my posts.  Freaky.)

But, three:  last night was another of those strange nights.  I burned through Chapter 6 of Couples Dance, and it was all good.  I ended up with a bit over eight thousand words for the chapter, added just over 380 words, and bringing the total word count to a little over 37,100 words.  Between bouts of editing, I looked hard at the story and wondering, “Do I need to add something?”  Was there anything that needed to go into place that would make the story better?  That’s always a good question, because if you add something to your story, it damn sure had better enhance the experience.  I’ve always said that a story should be a long as it needs to be, and anything else is just taking away from what you’re trying to say.

When I was doing the first draft of Couples Dance, however, I kept thinking, “I’m leaving something out.”  It always felt like I was missing something.  I looked at my Scrivener cork board and thought, “What am I missing?”  And then I had a thought; something in the house, something at night, something that brings out the goose flesh on one of the main characters.

So I threw in a note card and that was that.

Then I went to bed.  And had a dream . . .

There were a lot of things going on, but primary were two.  One, there was all sorts of shadows around me.  Dangerous shadows.  I knew that because there was this feeling . . . it was the same sort of feeling I’ve had when I’m in the Big House, and I find pools of black.  There’s something there; don’t go.  This was very unnerving, however, as I seemed to be surrounded on all sides at times by these shadows, and while they never got close to me, their mere presence scared the hell out of me.

And there seems to be some kind of on-going dialog on this electronic device.  It was telling me about love, and how love was defined, and how, for me . . . well, lets just say I was coming up a loser in that area.  It kept informing me that something I wanted I could never have, and the harder I tried, the less of a chance I’d have to achieve my goal.

It left me disturbed when I woke up, because this dream seemed to go on and on for a long time.  And it always came back to shadows and the inability to find something I desired.

I’m trying not to wrap my head around this too much, though I feel there is something there, in that dream, that was related to my editing.  Perhaps it’s telling me something, and I haven’t heard the message yet.  Or, perhaps, it was only messing with my mind.

Perhaps there is something far more ominous there, and I haven’t seen it–

Because I’m afraid to venture into the shadows.