Kitchen stove, stuff of nightmares

It was the worst nightmare I'd had since I was a child dreaming that Sleestak, reptile men from “The Land of the Lost,” were invading our house through a hole in the basement wall.

Nightmares. We all have them. Dreams are the brain's problem-solving mechanism working overtime while the conscious mind sleeps. When we have a nightmare, it's because the subconscious is trying to warn us of danger. “Stop watching 'The Land of the Lost!'” your brain screams. “Get dad to patch that hole in the basement wall.”

The truth is, there was no hole in the basement wall of the house I grew up in, although I did have an older brother Bill. We used to watch “The Land of the Lost” together on Saturday mornings, and we got along so well that sometimes he even appeared in my dreams, at least until the Sleestak got him. He stopped appearing after that.

When you get down to it, this was a fairly stupid dream to be scared over. It's kind of like having a dream in which your oldest brother becomes a dancing skeleton, and you get so scared that you lean over the railing to your bed and throw up on your younger brother while he's sound asleep in the lower bunk. You just can't help but feel a little silly afterward.

This particular nightmare was nothing like that. It was legitimately terrifying, with horrors beyond anything Stephen King has given us. There were zoning law violations, bad computer coding, defaced kitchen appliances, questionable H.R. decisions, and ultimate evil loosed upon the earth after a long captivity. Nightmares don't get worse than this.

In my dream, I was married to the president of the board at the Christian school I used to teach at in Bethlehem, Pa., and we ran a private airport out of our home. If the paperwork for that mixed use wouldn't be bad enough, our home was also a church, an honest-to-goodness Assemblies of God church with yellow padded pews and a baptismal at the front of the sanctuary.

I'd like to think that the dream at this point carried some emotional heft. My wife was leaving on a trip, taking the airport's only plane. I'd like to say that our hearts were heavy, our faces besotted with tears that mixed with the rain as it fell, but it was sunny and my wife merely smiled in her flight suit before she donned her helmet, and flew off from the runway that doubled as the church's rear parking lot.

I went inside, where I joined my friend Scott, our lone air traffic controller, in the kitchen; and we approached the stove.

Most kitchens have stoves, and most stoves are unremarkable. They have burners, and they have controls to control the heat. Whether your stove is gas or electric, it works pretty much the same. Turn it up, and the heat goes up; turn it down, and the heat goes down. Your stove may be black, it may be white, and it may be yellow, but probably the most memorable thing about it is how well you can use it to make a grilled cheese sandwich.

This stove was different. Years ago, someone had faced beings of indescribable evil, and with powerful enchantments they had locked them one after the other inside the stove. The stove had six burners, and each one held a different devil prisoner. As long as they were trapped there, the world was safe, but if they were ever set loose, we were doomed.

It was a heavy responsibility to have such a stove. As long as you were careful not to write the name of the imprisoned entity in an opening HTML tag right above the dial before lighting the burner, things were fine. You could even make a grilled cheese sandwich, and no one would be hurt.

“You need to free them,” Scott said. “Write their names.”

“But I don't want to,” I said.

“But you have to,” Scott said. He was nothing if not persistent.

“OK,” I said. He was also persuasive. “But I want to note that I don't agree with this.”

I wrote "" on one burner, and then turned it on. A blue flame blossomed amid the smell of burning gas, and the devil was loose. The horror was getting real, and I didn't even have a grilled sandwich to show for my troubles.

Just as I don't know what happened to Bill — did the Sleestak sacrifice him to their god, or did they torture him and turn him evil? — I don't remember everyone who was imprisoned in the stove. Aside from Satan, the only one I remember clearly is Dootor Doom, arch-enemy of The Fantastic Four.

All I can say for certain is that in one dramatic moment, I saw the armored arm of Doctor Doom rise up from the stove, and I started awake. The room was dark and all was quiet, save for my own rapid breathing. I was coated with sweat and filled with horror that I had unleashed such tremendous evil on an unsuspecting world. (Damn you, Scott. There, I said it. Damn you and your silver-tongued arguments. Damn you to hell, sir!)

It's been 18 years now since I had that dream. In that time, we've seen the worst terror attack on U.S. soil in history, and in the wake of a war that destabilized the Middle East, we've watched as ISIS has thrown the entire region into chaos. Domestically our social contract has unraveled as the wealth disparity between our richest citizens and the rest of us has grown ever wider, and far right ideologues have sought to undo all the hard-won progress of the past 60 years.

When you go to sleep tonight, if you find the stove in your dreams, stay away. Remember, I lit only two burners before I awoke.

There are still four more to go.


Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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(I wrote about this before)

My friend, the witch

Dreamed last night that a friend of mine was invoking the name of Hecate to perform some sort of magic spell on me and a group of other people.

The dream took place in a cave. I haven't thought about Hecate since the last time I read the Scottish play, so I got curious and looked her up online. In Greek myth, Hecate is a nasty piece of work. One of her best-known devotees was Medea.

Wouldn't you know, she is a goddess of the underworld and usually is depicted as residing in a cave. Spells invoking her are cast at night under the cover of darkness.

Well, OK. That was weird.

How do you propose I broach the subject when I see her next? "So, been performing any dark magick on me lately?"

My dreams, and what they reveal

Dreams are a fascinating business because of what they reveal about us.


​I don't mean dreams in the sense of our ambitions, although that also is true. No, what I mean is that I love to hear people share the dreams they have at night when they're off in slumberland. The flying dreams. The dreams that make no sense. The dreams that were terrifying at the time but seem ridiculous in the light of day.

(We still laugh about the nightmare I had when I was 6 years old. I realized a few years ago that it was based on a "Schoolhouse Rock" video, but at the time, I was so frightened that I threw up on my younger brother in his sleep. We all laugh about that detail, except for Steve. For some reason, Steve doesn't find it funny at all.)

Some years ago, I had a dream that Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne were working at the Daily Bugle together. Not only did they know each each other's secret identity, each of them kept dropping hints about it in front of everyone else. "Don't act so batty, Bruce," Pete would say.

Another time, I dreamed about the Justice League. As the dream went on, my subsconscious mind started noticing continuity errors and would correct them. "No, Wonder Woman didn't fight in World War II," my mind would realize. "That was pre-Crisis continuity." And bam! The dream would change, and reflect that it was Wonder Woman's mother, Hippolyta, who had fought the Axis.

Last night I did it again. I've observed several times that we only have the word of the Rebel Alliance that the Galactic Empire was evil, and that the first Star Wars movie comes across more as propaganda than as a reliable account of the Battle of Yavin IV. So it's possible that Darth Vader is actually one of the good guys.

In my dream, the Galactic Empire was known by another name: the United Federation of Planets. It appears one of the responsibilities the Enterprise has had to deal with lately, is dealing with insurrectionists. So we had Commander Riker arguing with Han Solo, and Chewbacca fighting Lieutenant Worf. Plus the 11th Doctor had an appearance.

I told my children.

"She-Hulk showed up in one of my dreams once. The dream somewhat drew on 'Lucifer's Hammer,'" Oldest Daughter shared. "Your dream sounds weirder, though."

What do my dreams say about me? Middle Daughter was to the point: "It's official, dad. You're a geek."


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Nightmare in the water

There is light just beyond my reach as a shapeless terror closes in. It shimmers and flows on the other side of the water that has closed over me, too far away. The water is warm and suffocating. I cannot breathe.

How did I get here? My mind searches for an answer, but comes up empty. There is no explanation to be found, just the terror, and I cannot breathe.

I am straining hard for the surface, and I cannot breathe.

There is something here in the water, lying in wait for me. I cannot see her, but I know she is there, very old and very patient. She moves slowly, like someone who has all the time in the world.

I cannot breathe.

She is there, waiting for me, closing in. The light above is failing, the horizon is shrinking overhead. I kick with all I have and it is not enough. If I do not get free, I will die.

I am sinking. I will die.

The light is now a dimly shivering disk overhead, the size of my hand, the size of a quarter, and it is shrinking fast. There are warm tendrils gathering about me in the darkening water. In a moment I will be hers. I will never be seen again.

Something within me stirs, and I lash out again, struggling, kicking, forcing my way toward the light, toward the surface, toward the air. With a last desperate lunge, I force myself into the open. The blankets lie tangled over me, and the pale blue lights on the clock burn the time 2:34 into my weary mind.

Aside from that light, the room is dark. My wife sleeps at my side, unconscious of my movement. There is a lingering tremor of fear, but nothing else remains of my nightmare beyond associations that fade even as I try to lock onto them.

I lay myself down and close my eyes. I am asleep in minutes, but not as deeply as before. Before the night has ended, I will have awakened in the same manner three more times.

Something is waiting.


Copyright © 2009 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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'if that king was to wake ...'

My dreams are trying to drive me crazy.

About a year ago, I found myself in the kitchen of St. Andrews on the Roundabout in  Rotorua, New Zealand. I realized I was dreaming because my sister-in-law, who has never been to New Zealand, much less to that church, was with me. Several months ago, I dreamed that I was back at my much-reviled former employer, talking with the editor in chief about why I kept having this nightmare that I was back there again.

And last night, it happened again ― almost. I realized I was dreaming, but my dream kept trying to convince that I wasn’t.

At the point where I first realized I was dreaming, I was getting ready for a formal ceremony of some sort, when I discovered I had failed to pack the requisite dress shoes, and in fact had nothing to go with my tux but a pair of red sneakers.

“This is a dream,” I told myself. “And when you’re in lucid dreaming, you can always change things.”

That’s what I’ve always read, but it isn’t true. I put those sneakers into a bag, and carefully visualized the black shoes I would need to complete my tux. I pictured the shoes, imagined how they felt, and even remembered where in the house I keep them, and then drew out the same red sneakers.

So much for lucid dreaming.

I suspect I was too embarrassed to go to the ceremony without the right clothes, because instead of attending, I spent the rest of the evening walking around the city, seeing various people about town, until I finally found the opportunity to discuss my predicament with someone sympathetic.

“I think I’m dreaming,” I told him. “I’m wearing my shirt right now, but a while ago, it wasn’t there, and before that, it was.”

“You could have just taken it off and put it back on again, and forgotten you had done it,” he said. I agreed that he had a point. “When you’re dreaming, there’s usually all sorts of weird things that happen to you. Have you noticed anything strange?”

Now I should point out that so far in this dream, in addition to packing those red sneakers, I was staying a hotel suite with Dame Maggie Smith and Paul Scofield. I had seen Myron and Jessica, two of my friends who are headed toward divorce, wandering about town; she was a street mime, and every time Myron went to talk with her, she turned away and ignored him. In addition to all that, sympathetic ear I had found was Dennis Quaid’s, on Church Street in downtown Nova Bastille.

“No,” I said. “I haven’t.”

“Well,” he said. “What about the world around you?”

Suddenly, that was it. The world around me disintegrated into streams of sand blown in the wind, and I shouted with joy, “I knew it! I knew I was dreaming!”

And completely expectedly, I woke up in a room with a white linoleum floor. I pushed the motorcycle Dennis Quaid had been riding in my motorcycle over to the fellow who owned it ― clearly, its presence in the room where I had fallen asleep had prompted its presence in the dream ― and made some sort of quip about my dreamself owing his dreamself rental money for its use.

The owner, incidentally, was the worship leader at the church we attend. I noticed for the first time that he had two fingernails on his right pinky, one at the fingertip, and one farther down, just at the first joint.

And that’s when Natasha woke me up, for real.

As I rehearsed the dream in my mind so that it wouldn’t fade from memory once I got going with the day, I recalled what my friend Myron had said back when I told him about my dream discussion with my editor in chief about the recurring nightmare: “You must have a really well integrated mind to be able to do that.”

This makes the third time I’ve been able to carry on a discussion between my conscious and unconscious minds during a dream. The first time, it was a simple acknowledgment that I was dreaming; the second, it was something more like oneironmancy, as my unconscious mind explained why I kept having the same nightmare over and over. (I wish I could remember what the editor in chief had said, because it sure made sense at the time.)

And now, on the third time around, my dream is actively trying to thwart my efforts to realize what’s going on. It’s intriguing. I hope next time I get a little further in and see what I can find.

Fatal accident in the winter

I woke up just past 3:30 a.m.

I'd been out in the woods in a carriage of some sort, when it overturned and we were spilled out onto the hillside. I remember scrambling over and helping a few people to their feet and get back to the road, satisfied that they were all right.

That was when I saw a sled overturned in the icy water. I scrambled over to the sled, crawling as quickly as I could across a log, and turned the sled upright.

Rachel was lying under the sled, in her purple winter jacket. Her hair was wet, her eyes were closed, and she wasn't breathing.

"She's not breathing," I said as I carried her up to the road, trying to recall my CPR training from 20 years ago. "She's not breathing!"

I woke up. I was in bed, next to my wife, her presence an assurance from her presence that everything was all right.

That wasn't enough. I jumped out of bed, and went to Rachel's bedroom. I knelt next to her bed, and didn't move until I heard her soft breathing in the night, saw her stretch an arm and sleepily kick a leg. Then, and only then, was I willing to believe that everything was all right.

I hate it when dreams scare the bejesus out of me.

the quintessential geek

A few weeks ago I had a dream about the Justice League of America. Now that's bad enough in itself, but as the dream progressed, my subconscious mind began to correct the dream for continuity errors. For instance, at one point Superman used powers that he had had prior to the mid-1980s revamp of the DC Universe. My subconscious mind actually interjected, "No, that was Superman from Earth-2, which was dropped from continuity during 'Crisis on Infinite Earths.'"

I have never been so ashamed of my dreams.

put on a happy face

I had the weirdest dream last night.

 

As everyone knows, I have psoriasis over a good portion of my body. It's on my scalp, my arms, my legs, my back, and a few places on my belly. It's actually clearing up -- slowly -- with a topical lotion I've been applying, but it remains highly visible on parts of my body not covered by clothes.

 

In any event, lsat night I dreamed that I was a doctor. I suspect I was some sort of dermatologist, since the people who kept coming to me for medical help were all suffering from some sort of skin condition like mine.

 

For reasons that remain unclear to me, my reaction to every patient was to draw a smiley face on their psoriasis patches with a magic marker. Everyone thought it was hilarious, except for my supervisor. (The principal at my daughter's school.)

dream journal

Some time last night I started dreaming about superheroes.

I don't mean that in an unconventional way, like "Abraham Lincoln is my superhero," and I don't mean that I started dreaming of an conventional but nameless superhero forged in my own imagination, like Doctor Eyeball or Captain Asparagus, the sort of thing you might find in City of Heroes. No, I had a dream about Spider-man and Batman, two of the most recognizable superheroes in the world.

It was probably about 5 or 6 a.m. when the dream started. Rachel had climbed into bed with us, as she sometimes will; kicked me  in her sleep, as she often does; and pulled the covers off me, as is always the case; and I started to dream about the two superheroes -- or more exactly, about their alter egos.

Inexplicably, they were co-workers at the Daily Bugle, where Bruce Wayne was a reporter and Peter Parker was once again a photographer. That's about all I can remember, except that they knew each other's secret identities* and kept dropping veiled hints about it in the presence of one another and their co-workers, like Bruce suggesting that Peter should treat his subject like a fly trapped in the middle of a giant web, and view himself as the spider as he goes in for the shot, and Peter saying that Bruce had gone batty.

And although I wasn't a participant in the dream, I realized once again that I was dreaming, since my unconscious mind noted that the two of them were from separate comic book universes and had met only in a DC-Marvel crossover called something imaginative, like "Batman and Spider-man."

Stupid dream, really. You'd think I'd be dreaming about Siegfried and the Burgundians since I've been reading the Nibelungenlied lately, or that my unconscious mind would be turning over the JEDP authors and their anonymous redactor, since I've been reading Michael Grant's "The History of Ancient Israel," but instead I'm dreaming about grown men who run around in their pajamas.

* I guess my dream came before Marvel's "Civil War" blockbuster summer event, since Spider-man still had a secret identity in my dream. No surprise there, since I haven't read anything Civil War-related.

Tracking a childhood nightmare to its source

Last night I discovered the source of one of my worst nightmares as a child.

When I was 5 or 6, I had a dream one night that my family was sitting around the table at dinnertime, when I asked a question. My question was directed at my father, but it was my oldest brother who answered, by standing up, beginning to sing, and dancing his way sideways out to the kitchen. An instant later, he came back into the dining room, still dancing, holding and waving the sort of cheap hat we associate with ragtime numbers. Gone were his flesh, his muscles, and all his internal organs. He was a skeleton, plain and simple.

I woke up screaming, frightened so badly that I started throwing up. Thirty years have gone by, and although I laugh instead of screaming when I remember the dream, it's as vivid now as when I first had it.

Last night, I put Rachel's "School House Rock" DVD on -- given to her, ironically, by her Uncle Brian -- and watched, stunned, as the number "Bones" came on. Before my amazed eyes, a troupe of skeletons danced and sang about human anatomy. They had the same hats as in my dream. They danced the same way as in my dream. And they started all this by jumping out of people's skin.

Schoolhouse Rocky was supposed to reach us about science, math, grammar and social studies. And now I find instead that he taught me the meaning of fear.

Dream a Little Dream of Me

I had a dream last night, that I was in Rotorua, New Zealand, for some sort of return visit to the former Edmund Rice College, the high school I attended while I was an afs exchange student. While I was there, I apparently decided to visit the church I had frequented.

For reasons I still can't fathom, my sister-in-law was there, along with Natasha and the girls. I remember looking at my sister-in-law while we were working in the church kitchen, and asking, "Wait a minute. You're here at St. Andrew's with me. This is a dream, isn't it?"

She agreed that it probably was, whereupon I shrugged my shoulders and simply kept cleaning the dishes I was working on. Nothing fazes me anymore, apparently -- not even realizing that I'm dreaming.

I think I'm losing it

I think it was around six o'clock this morning that I started to wonder if I was cracking up.

That was around the time the phone in the bedroom rang, and I answered it. It was Sam, and he was calling to find out how I was doing. Pretty thoughtful guy, that Sam. I'm doing all right, I told him. Being alone isn't getting to me in the least. And that was when I realized that I was talking out loud to a person I didn't know, on a phone that doesn't exist, in a room all by myself.

Shit, but I had some weird dreams last night. And now they're calling me up to see how I'm doing?

What dreams may come

People sometimes ask me where I find things to write about. In this case, it's a dream.

This particular dream I had was a nightmare that struck about 5 a.m. Dec. 14. It was the first real nightmare I recall having since I was 14 years old and dreamed our basement was being invaded by the Sleestak from "Land of the Lost."

That particular nightmare turned out well, because my brothers also were in the dream, and although the Sleestak grabbed Herb, the other three of us got out just fine.

I never found out what happened to Herb in the dream, since Sleestak never do more than walk around with their arms outstretched, and hiss. Whatever it is, I'm sure it couldn't have been too pleasant, since Herb hasn't had a cameo in a single dream of mine since.

In this more recent, Herb-free dream, I was outside, talking with my wife in the parking lot behind our house.

There are three things rather odd about this. To begin with, our house was a church I attended while I lived in Easton, Pa. Secondly, the parking lot doubled as a runway for a private airport we ran out of our house. Thirdly, my wife in the dream is not my wife in the waking world.

I suppose that's not too unusual, since, as everyone knows, dreams are a strange phantom world where people change identities fairly easily and reality is never stable.

In the Sleestak dream, for example, my oldest brother Brian at one point suddenly became my younger brother Herb, and this went unremarked-upon by everyone. If this happened in reality, several of us would at least raise our eyebrows in consternation.

In any event, my wife -- who looked suspiciously like a member of the board of education of the last school I taught at -- and I ran a private airport out of the house, and at the start of the dream, she was saying goodbye because she had to fly somewhere in our only plane.

Once my wife left, I entered the church-turned-house/airport-combination and met Scott, a friend of mine who probably will be as surprised as I was to discover that he was in my dream as an employee of mine.

Scott and I went to the kitchen and walked over to the stove, where -- this is very important to remember -- there were six beings of infinite evil confined, one in each burner.

Scott for some reason decided it would be a good idea to free these creatures, and persuaded me to do so by writing their names on the burners in the same code I use for formatting the newspaper.

In other words, I wrote "" on one burner, and then lit the burner. Somehow this arcane form of black magic freed the Devil from his prison. One wonders what would have happened if I had tried to boil an egg instead.

I don't remember the identities of all six evil people. One of them was Satan, and another was Doctor Doom, the arch-enemy of The Fantastic Four in Marvel Comics. It could be that a third was Herb, now long-since corrupted by the Sleestak, but I honestly don't recall.

It was when Doctor Doom and Satan started to burst free from the stove that I woke up, breathing fast, sweating, and horrified that I had unleashed such tremendous evil on an unsuspecting world.

Only inches away, my daughter Evangeline stirred in her sleep, disturbed either by my sudden movement or more likely by the malevolent Doctor Doom himself, who had been freed at last by my intervention from the stove where he had been trapped for untold years.

So there you have it. You are now privy to one of my dreams, and like my wife (my real wife, not the one I had in my nightmare), you're probably laughing at me and at the terror I felt. If you're a psychologist, you're probably having a field day with this one.

I mentioned my daughter earlier, and thinking about dreams makes me wonder what she sees when she sleeps. I expect that in another three years or so, Evangeline will wake me late at night with screams brought on by her own nightmares.

I just hope they make more sense than mine do.


Copyright © 1999 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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