The Silohuette Of A Dog...

When I was about eight years old my sister used to give me her old Stephen King novels to read after she had finished with them.

The first one that I read was called Salem's Lot, which had me terrified for many years that vampires would come scratching on my bedroom window; then there was Fire Starter- which for many years had me convinced that I was latently telekenetic; and I'll never forget how Pennywise in It made me feel when he talked about them all floating down there; but it wasn't until I read Pet Cemetary that I began having the nightmare about our little dog coming back from the dead.

In this dream I am at my Grandfather's farm and it is that brief moment in time when the purple of dusk becomes the black of night. We are sitting on the verandah that goes almost all the way around it, calling for our little dog to come home out of the dark, when there is the sound of a large truck to be heard rumbling up the long road to the highway. As it approaches we see our dog's silhouette in the head-light shine but there is nothing we can do and the dog is run over by the truck and instantly killed. The dog then has to be sewn back togrther and is buried intact with much sadness and crying.

Then it suddenly the next night.

Once again it is just past dusk. It is just like the same night all over again. A truck rumbles up the road from the highway and in the headlight shine is the silhoutte of a dog, amazingly our dog, who has returned home to the farm tonight just as she returns every other night. But as she gets closer we see how she has changed, none of it good. The hastily sewn stitches are gaping at the seams like Frankenstein; she is missing skin, is bloody rather than bleeding, emits a foul odour and is covered in dirt. Strangely, she is happy to be back with us, and we are happy too, but it soon dawns on us that we should not be keep this spirit trapped in it's fetid decaying shell- and that there must be some pretty heavy magical stuff going on for our dog to suddenly be able to come back from the dead, shit we shouldn't get involved in.

So we decided that we would have to end the dog's life for her, which unsurprisingly, doesn't go down too well with the dog when she 'discovers' our plans, as she was rather happy being somewhat alive again and had probably decided it was better to be half-dead and mangled than to be completly dead and buried for good. The dog gets cunning now and is dangerous. It should just run away if it wants to survive but it's instinct is to stay with those it once loved, so it stays hidden during the days. It becomes more decayed each time we see it, now slobbering blood-flecked spittle which is a remnant of it's latest meal. A bit too much like Cujo for me to not point it out. For all that she is dead it is alive still and still wants to eat, though it has no need to anymore. Eventually we manage to kill it in a horrible way- but not before it has tried to do the same thing to us a few times.

When I wake finally I am glad that it's all over. I don't like to see my little dog, who I loved so much, looking so evil. Man I hated that dream. I still have it every couple of years, and every time I recognise that I'm having it I think Oh No. Not this again- but I still allow it to continue to play on in my mind. The death is always different but has the same result of the dog dying.

I also hate the dreams where all my teeth fall out, especially in the ones where I am choking on my teeth, which you wouldn't really find all that surprising if you ever have the misfortune to see them. The first thing I'm going to do when I'm rich is buy myself a new smile- but if you think that's bizarre then I should tell you about the dream I had where about one thousand toothpicks shoot up into my open mouth, straight out of their box, and I had to pick them all out- one by one- all these bloodied snapped off little toothpicks. Don't bother trying to find a definition for that one in a dream dictionary, because I looked, and there wasn't one.

I also have a lot of dreams that I am choking on glass and other sharp objects, and of course there's the flying dreams where I start off walking or running and then end up swimming freestyle through the air, which is fun- unless you're being chased that it. And you can fly much faster than Grandpa Joe did in the fan room of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory- remember; after they stole the Fizzy-Lifting-Drink? His is actually a pretty good technique to use if you are new to flying in dreams; especially for getting up high quickly and for 'take off'.

It helps me to get around anyway.