A shadowy escape

 Dec 31 2021

Sophia writing.

Dreamed I was at some sort of suburban house living there temporarily.  There was a lot of stuff of mine lying around in a basement apartment, unfinished.

Lalein was with me, his dark cloak brushing the cement floor as he watched me put things away in plastic baskets.  We were having some sort of conversation between us, not the sort with words spoken out loud.  I was very on-edge, hearing footsteps upstairs.  Something about my landlord was wrong, something predatory that elicited a traumatic reaction from me.

At some point this landlord came downstairs, a huge pot-bellied man with strange chestnut-orange facial hair and a giant balding head framed by the same colour hair left around his nape.  He laughed and came towards me.  I dodged him, making jokes, placating him as he lumbered around the room watching my every move.  I went into a closet of sorts and my mind raced as I put toiletries in my baskets.  I felt Lalein's heavy gaze on me, like a reassuring seatbelt.

Then the man lumbered, bored, into the boiler room. That was when I leapt into action.

I went out of my closet to something in the corner of the room - a cement mixer that was placed there by whoever had been doing construction in this basement.  Faster than it could be real, I turned on the machine and began to cube the cement into bricks that formed almost magically under my fingers.  "Help me," I told Lalein, who wordlessly slammed the boiler room door shut.  There was a moment when the landlord panicked, fighting Lalein against the door, but we both leaned against it and Lalein rapidly began to brick up the door and slather wet cement in fistfuls.  As he busied himself slathering, I finished up packing my things - it was an awkward, adrenaline-fueled haze.  I had too many things, and kept discovering more.  Distinctly in the dream I thought, I need to get rid of my attachment to objects.  

Once the landlord was fully boarded up, his shouts and cries for help were so muffled they sounded like they came from the neighbour.  Lalein was shedding cement off his hands with cement tendrils.  I gathered the baskets in my arms, overflowing and awkard, and decided it didn't matter what else I left behind.  Lalein gathered me into one arm and as the landlady was coming down to check on me - a skinny woman with an 80s reddish perm, dressed in a bizarre subdued fuschia pencil skirt suit - we leapt.

My head would have crashed into the ceiling of wood and exposed wire if not for the fact a glob of black shadow swallowed us, passing us through to the floor above like a portal.  Once upstairs in that house proper - a stark white kitchen with white furniture - I panicked realizing my work laptop was still anchored into the desk.  Lalein patiently shielded me as I unplugged it from all of its surroundings, stuffing it into my backpack.  Then we fled outside into the sun.

There was a little more in this dream but this is the gist before we woke around 10AM - far past my 8:30AM alarm which failed to wake us.  

disturbing doll

Dec 22 2021

There was a prolonged nightmare for Colleen this morning when we fell back asleep.

I was a maid for a rich family that was mistreating me... The master of the house was an abusive tyrant even though the people around him were kind. He was a potbellied brunette with a bulbous nose and red face. I was invited by his daughter, a pretty slender brunette girl, to play (we were all teenagers). We sat in my small bedroom with her friends, two pretty women who crammed themselves on my single bed. Since it was Christmas, they insisted on helping me change clothes out of rags and into something more presentable. They were kind, laughing and joking and including me on things. 

Going downstairs to the main hall, it was decorated beautifully. A high ceiling stone Lodge with a magnificent Christmas tree behind railing.  I tidied and decorated dutifully, shifting a fireplace with what felt like the abilities of someone in a furniture decorating game. I hung stockings and moved a rocking chair and positioned a smaller Christmas tree to the side with cushions and presents. As I busied myself, the master suddenly appeared and seized me by the arm. He shouted so loudly in my face that I felt his breath hit me in waves, demanding why I thought I had any right parading around in his daughter's clothes. I looked to her in a panic to explain, but she avoided my gaze. The master slapped me across the face and told me I was fired, to gather my things and leave immediately. Some of his guests gasped in horror watching him strike me, shrinking away. They parted for me to stumble back to the stairs. 

I wandered upstairs and in a daze began to gather my things. The women were still there laughing. I began to pack and they barely noticed me. As I rifled through my things I found a cardboard box which housed two of our ball jointed dolls inside... The blank Valor and one that was featureless.

The featureless doll morphed into Girly, or at least, a doll version of her. We switched. 

Girly seized her own doll by the throat and began to strangle it. She hissed, "If you're me, then I hate you, because I hate me."

She began to squeeze the doll which struggled and failed mutedly. Sophia immediately tried to seize front and they wrestled. Meanwhile the doll began to bleed. When the doll stopped struggling, Girly collapsed too. Sophia then took front and the doll transformed to the Lalein doll we own. She looked at the two women on the bed who didn't notice any of this, asked them to help her pack the dolls. They did, and she began to pack a rolling suitcase of everything else. We don't remember taking the things with us as we left. 

There was a segment of a dream where we wandered the downstairs of the lodge which had game rooms for pool and televisions. We wandered into the daughter again and she cheerfully called out, then froze seeing the blood splattered on our chest. 

We journeyed in a haze further downstairs into a garden with a waterfall that served as the entrance of the lodge. As we were crossing a wooden bridge, walking againt the traffic of guests moving into the house, the master suddenly appeared in our minds and we turned around. He was on the bridge laughing and charming his guests. Something came over us and we strode up to him and pushed him off the bridge. He shouted as he fell into the moat below, not enough to die but enough to have people panic to help him as we stood and watched.

There was a bit more to the dream but we woke up late and the rest is swept away.