Dark Dreaming

So I finished the serious post first today, because I sincerely doubt that my brain will be working very well as the day wears on. I was awoken by thunder, torrential rain and hail at three this morning. And then at five, I awoke with an achy stomach and inexplicably terrified after having the scariest nightmare I've had in years. Or maybe ever.

So this is what it was: I was hanging out in this living room that looked like a mix of the townhouse I lived in on campus last year and the living room of my old house in Columbus, IN. Supposedly, the power was out due to a storm, but I was watching TV with [mind ninja] and [your cat is evil]. Then this ad for a horror movie came on and I was like, "Ooh, I've seen this trailer before! This movie looks really scary!"

So this preview starts with this girl, who looks to be thirteen or something, all dirty and with a bandage on her shoulder from playing soccer. She takes off her jersey and poses topless in front of this teenage boy with a camera and all these other guys were leering behind her, along with other girls watching. They were like in some sort of abandoned house or something and this girl pinned a flower in her hair while the guy took a video of her posing and saying, "I am Diana Villers" (haha, my subconscious decided to steal and misspell a name from Patrick O'Brian's books. Great).


Then it cuts to the same girl, still with the flower pinned in her hair (a white rose, to be precise) kneeling over this old well or sewer entrance that's covered by this locked grate and full of water. She's looking at her reflection or something and then, in the water, she can see the guy who took her photo swimming to the surface of the water. How he got down into the water, below the locked grate, is a mystery. He grabs on to this railing screwed into the stone walls of the well (which look like rungs for someone to climb down on) and just as he's about to pull his head above water, something grabs him by the legs and jerks him down. The girl can't see what; all she can see is his terrified expression. He's clinging onto the rung for dear life but the screws are being pulled out of the wall. With one final tug, the rung comes loose and the guy disappears into the dark water.

Then there's this scene of the police opening up the grate, breaking the lock to get into it. A creepy breeze comes up and clouds build, foreboding that some sort of power has been released.

Next, there's this large group of people standing around in a neighborhood, waiting for the guy to be found (apparently, the police are searching for him in the sewers in the neighborhood). A bunch of people in this area of town are talking about how some train broke down or something and now they're stranded here, or that a bunch of people took a certain train to get here for some event (child beauty pageant? I feel like I remembers something about that) and there was some issue with transportation and luggage. One girl is amongst this group, a younger version of Vanessa Hudgens in High School Musical (hey I didn't choose the casting; blame my subconscious). She's supposed to be going somewhere with a foster parent or aunt who doesn't take very good care of her.

All of these people end up in an old hotel, where a bunch of local women are doing the same poses as the girl with the rose in their hair did and saying, "I am Diana Villers" in front of a mirror. They explain that it's a local legend, sort of like Bloody Mary. Diana (who kind of looks like Jennifer Connelly) was a woman from the 19th or early 20th century who was killed in some body of water and now, if you say her name in front of something reflective or in water at night (or apparently to cameras) you might provoke her into appearing. It's supposed to be just an urban legend, but clearly things are getting weird. There are all these plumbing issues in the hotel and the Vanessa Hudgens girl starts getting these weird feelings and seems to think she has some link with the dead woman.

I started to wake up by this point, and was thinking about how the ghost in this movie reveals some kiddie porn ring in town, which has something to do with the child beauty pageant and with the woman's death (a rather disturbing rape and murder, seemed to be hinted at). She's out for revenge by killing people linked to the pageant, by appearing in bodies of water and drowning them. I woke up, terrified that the ghost was going to be able to appear from the bottle of water I had next to my bed. It sounds stupid now in broad daylight, but I couldn't fall back asleep until the sun started coming up and I was sure I could turn off the light in my room and not have to worry about creepy things lurking in dark corners.

I hate dreams like this, because they're so ridiculously hard to get out of my head. I keep trying to figure out where I got all this dark imagery from. Some of it's from the movie Dark Water, which looks really scary but I've only seen 20 minutes of on TV last year, right after we moved into the townhouse (which is funny, because it stars Jennifer Connelly, who's married to Paul Bettany. So maybe it's my brain just trying to fuck with me because I've seen a bunch of Paul Bettany movies this month). Also, the well sequence reminded me of The Ring. The stuff with creepy shit appearing in reflective surfaces seems to be from this terrible Sci-Fi Channel movie called Mothman that my father was watching the other day. And the Bloody Mary reference probably came from me listening to Lady Gaga's song "Bloody Mary" before going to bed. The bit with the sewers is also something that's an urban legend - I got a chain email years ago about how some girl fell down a sewer drain and died and, because no one helped her, she apparently will come and drag you down into the sewer if you don't pass her story on. Why I remembered it now of all times, I haven't a clue. How exactly this whole convoluted mess ended up in my dream, I don't really want to know.

Jennifer Connelly, what did I ever do to you?

If this was the only weird and crazy dream I'd had recently I'd just be like, "well, that was really strange" and move on. But it isn't. Just the other night, I had another creepy dream, also about water, also slightly invoking the plot of Dark Water in which a girl, who's in love with this guy who's dating someone else, purposely causes a leak in the roof of this apartment building so that it would cause a lot of mold, the other girl would get sick and die, and the leak-causing chick would have the guy for herself. In the dream, [Львица] and I were building managers of this apartment complex, inspecting the damage and trying to see if the evidence could prove her guilty. I remember squishing the carpet to see how wet it was and having water gush up around my hand. It was apparently one serious leak.

This, of course, come from the fact that we had a leak in the new apartment building. And that we found a former building manager's living will in the boiler room. And that there's still a giant hole in the wall of apartment 103 where they had to fix a leak, not to mention the water in the toilet of that unit looks absolutely disgusting. It's also the unit where [Львица] and I will be moving into this weekend before our actual unit opens up in September. So apparently as a nice little house-welcoming gift, my mind decided to dig up all the stuff about creepy leaks and haunted apartments and freak me out with it, even if that meant referencing a movie I've only seen twenty minutes of! Fuck you, subconscious.

But then, this is what I get for joking the apartment is haunted. At least we know Ainsley Elizabeth Riley, she who is writer of the will, isn't dead - she's just "a special person," as the current building manager told us. I'm sure things will be fine moving into apartment 103 - besides, it's only for a few days. But I apologize to [Львица] in advance if I have any bizarre dreams after we move it. Blame my id.