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My Worst Nightmare
By Catherine Frazier / VOX Staff
The nightmare always comes to haunt me at least one night during the week of Jan. 5, the anniversary of my mother’s sudden death. In the dream, my mother is walking my brother and me along the rooftop of an unfamiliar skyscraper above a bustling city in the dusk of a cool, starry night. My brother and I are significantly younger than we are now — my brotheris 8 and I am 9, our ages when my mother died. She appears as a ghostly figure, only clothed in a thin silk gown. She is missing her once radiant smile, and after an awkward silence she slowly tells us an eerie tale.
My mother says that for three years she had been trapped beneath six feet of earth in the obstructed casket where she was wrongly buried alive, telling in detail her ghostly encounters with her also undead neighbors. Then she says that she was recently resurrected by a group of cemetery workers. I am baffled by the supposed actions of the cemetery workers and I try to question her creepy tale, but my mouth remains locked and I am unable to speak.
After the bizarre story, the dreamy setting grows foggier and shadowy figures appear, floating above. I squint to get a better view of the chilling ghosts, but they remain dark and hostile. Stricken by our mother’s apparent madness and afraid of the evil that surrounds us, my brother and I begin to quietly weep as she recounts her story to us again and again.
I am trapped in this “Groundhog Day”-esque dream. I hear my semi-conscious mind screaming in my head, begging to leave the rooftop, to escape the dreadful dream. But my lips are frozen shut, and I must sit and listen to the tale over and over. Eventually it ends.
Every time I dream this nightmare, I awaken with goose bumps on my sweaty arms. As reality begins to take hold, I contemplate whether I should go back to sleep, knowing that once I lay my head down, I will once again enter into the fantastic realm where my mother walks among the living dead and haunts my brother and me.
I often reflect on this dream, wondering if it entails some hidden message from my deceased mother. Though the images and emotions the dream evokes are powerful, I always come to the realization that it is I who wants to communicate with her through the hazy medium of dreams. But the fact that she always comes back to visit me this way is puzzling and frightening.
I will always dread this nightmare filled with shadowy figures that float above my mother; these evil presences scare me the most. I want my dreams of my mother to be of the cheerful, caring woman that she was, not a chilling reminder of her untimely death.
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