Day 160 - Nightmare Story

Nightmare Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

It was the first heavy storm of the summer; it had been muggy and humid and the clouds finally broke and the rains came. It rained all day and all night and into the next day. It was a day of unease and a night of nightmares. Rachael had recently developed two recurring nightmares and that night she experienced them both.

In one dream Rachael was lost in a cornfield, where the stalks of corn grew so tall they were above her head and she couldn’t see anything but corn. The stalks were dry and brittle, and scraped her as she ran past them. The more she ran the more lost she got. The more lost she got, the more panicked she became. At the beginning of the dream it was always day. She could see the blue sky and the clouds. It always seemed peaceful at first, but then came the realization that she was lost. And that was when the nightmare and the running began. Suddenly it was night. Time didn’t work correctly in a dream. There was never a sundown or an early evening. It was always just nighttime. But she knew she had been lost and running all that time. Her dream self understood that time was supposedly passing and that she had been running for so long that it always became night. After awhile she would drop to her knees, sweating, tired and scared. She couldn’t remember if it was still night at that point or not. For some reason her brain didn’t register the time of day. But she would be there, on her knees, afraid, ready to cry, and that was when she would wake up. She never remembered that dream very well, just flashes of corn and flashes of running.

The second nightmare was always much more vivid and much more frightening.

In her other dream, Rachael was playing hide-and-seek in the woods with Leland Palmer from the television show ‘Twin Peaks.’ It wasn’t the actor Ray Wise; it was his character from the show. It was Leland after his hair had suddenly turned white in season two. It was the crazy and dangerous Leland, the version that was delusional from loss and love and fear and hate. There he was, playing a children’s game, wearing a nice grey pinstriped suit. He wore a white dress shirt with stripes on it and a maroon paisley tie. It looked really classy, but totally inappropriate for a game of hide-and-seek.

This dream was perhaps the most frightening dream she had ever had in her entire life. Rachael had watched Twin Peaks when she was far too young and was therefore far too scared when she witnessed the events of Leland’s descent into madness. Leland Palmer was perhaps the most frightening character ever conceived on network television and the death of Maddy Ferguson was still one of the most frightening scenes ever filmed. Rachael could sometimes make herself a little bit scared just thinking about that scene, and that was when she was fully awake. But being asleep made it so much worse. And it wasn’t like Leland was doing anything in her dream. He acted like a nice friendly father-figure that just wanted to play a fun and leisurely game of hide-and-seek. Nothing creepy happened in the dream. Nothing sexual or dangerous or anything. But his look – he just looked like madness incarnate. That was the unbearable part.

When she woke from that dream, she always felt uneasy and anxious for far too long the next day. It was unnerving, even though she knew it was only a dream.

During the night of the storm she had both dreams. She could think of no good reason to be having nightmares. Rachael normally loved the rain. She loved the smell of fresh rain and the amazing way that it could break the summer heat and suddenly everything was chilly again. But that night she had nightmares. Terrible nightmares.

She woke up confused and unhappy. The day was still humid and it was already too warm. Her head hurt and the dreams from the night before still had her on edge. She took a deep breath and sighed. She felt foolish. Still, the image of Leland Palmer peeking out from behind a tree with a sinister grin was stuck in her head and she wasn’t going to be able to relax anytime soon.