I had a dream this week. An extremely vivid dream. Very rare for me to remember my dreams and so let me write it down! Here it goes:

I’m in the dark. Nothing can be seen. This is a place I have never been before, but felt familiar. I live here and, knowing my home well, I knew that the ceilings were very low - I could feel it in the dark without reaching out a touching it – and I was crawling to avoid hitting my head. The house is old: Victorian. I live in a bedroom on the 5th and final floor.

There is a window to my left. I know this but cannot see it. I move toward it, crawling slowly. I know I am moving but cannot feel the floor beneath me. There isn’t any sound, but then I hear a voice, “Hey! Mr. T Perry.” I reach the window and look down from my 5th floor perch. It is night. I see a driveway with a car I have never seen before, but it is my car. The driveway is just like my parents’ driveway: A black rectangle that ends with a 4 foot drop. There is a small camp fire and standing nearby is my real life friend, Eric (aka Ebo). “Hey! Mr. T Perry.” I’m not sure if he repeated what he said or if I knew he was going to say it before I got the window. Either way, I want to go down to meet him. A thought races through my mind, ‘I’ll be right down’, but doesn’t leave my lips. Yet Ebo understands me somehow.

I turn and now the room is very dimly lit. It’s decrepit and dirty: Holes in the horsehair plaster and pieces of wood and nails strewn about the floor. The ceiling isn’t as low and I walk normally toward the door. Yet again I feel my movement but do not feel the floor beneath me.

When I reach the door, it is open. I stand in a stairwell that spirals downward into total darkness. Despite limited sight, I know the stairs because it is my house and I start running down the stairs. Now I lightly feel each step I hit and I skip many. Bounding along, the distance to the bottom floor seems to increase, but I make progress. I stop at a floor that has an interconnected suite of tiny rooms. Each room is very ornate, but messy: A bathroom with scummy tiles, a bedroom with a twin-sized bed that is completely painted red, a study overfilled with books . . . Each room has old radiators and brass piping and painting and other art I don’t recognize or pay attention to.

I continue down the stairs.

By the third flight, something unknown brushes past my leg. It tripped me! But instead of falling, I appear on the ground floor. It is just bright enough to see that I’m in a long entrance hallway. There is a wide entry to a room that is too dark to see straight ahead, a closet to the left, and the main entrance to the right. Before me is the thing that tripped me. It is a five-foot-tall figurine with a human, bipedal body and the head of some sort of demented teddy bear or other cartoonized animal. It has the ability to move, but is solid, inarticulate, and made from molded black plastic like a huge lawn ornament. It’s freaking me out and it flies toward me. I punch it back and it flies toward me a second time. I punch it yet again and it flies back only to regroup and come back toward me. This continues back and forth. My punches grow less and less effective and the plastic thing gets faster and faster. I feel like I will lose and it will kill me. I’m certain it will kill me even if I don’t know how.

Without warning, I appear outside in the driveway next to Ebo. I had somehow punched a hole in the plastic teddy bear thing and I had carried its now lifeless body outside with me. At this point I see that the driveway abuts a giant, empty athletic field that seems to go on beyond the horizon. It’s still really dark out as if the world is in perpetual twilight.

I show the black, plastic figure to Ebo and tell him through my thoughts that it had attacked me, but it seems to be dead now so I will leave it with him. Ebo looks at it quickly, “That thing is dangerous and creepy. Don’t leave it with me.” I stare at him for an eternity wondering why he wouldn’t want to take the thing from me. Then I look through the hole in the plastic: It is hollow and has a few circuit boards inside. I reach in and yank out the circuit boards and throw them into the campfire in the driveway. There, I thought, now it won’t come back to life. Ebo reaches out for the figurine . . .

My roommate crashes into my room. He needs a ride to an auto body shop “pretty please”. I don’t know what happens in the dream. Maybe I’ll be back someday.