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)

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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