I just had the worst nightmare in my entire life, as far as I can remember. I'm so freaked out right now that I can't go to the bathroom, and there's no way I'm going back to sleep. If you don't like scary stories, don't read the rest of this entry. I mean, it might not be as scary as other ghost stories or whatever, but given that I'm a pretty rational person, and that this happened fucking personally to me (as opposed to happening to a friend of a friend, or being completely fictional outright), I think that might add to the scary factor: It really did happen.

The dream starts off as a non-nightmare: I'm on a school field trip, though everyone seems younger than me (like ages 8 or 9) while I'm still in my 22 year old boy, though I guess this might be a reflection of my emotional/intellectual age, 'cause I seem to fit right in an nobody notices. The teacher on the field trip is one of my teachers from McGill who's pretty incompetent and never seems to know what he's talking (not gonna name names). For example, he said that there are 8 wires in a typical Ethernet LAN RJ45 cable, and 8 bits in a byte, so each wire transmits one bit (that's not even close: First of all only 4 of the wires are actually used in RJ45). Anyway, in the story of my dream he's incompetent too.

Anyway, at one point, for whatever reason, we stop off at this kid's house (this kid is a young boy, 8 or 9 years old as well, and isn't a student of my class, perhaps not even my school) and he has a party or something in his basement (it's never made explicit in my dream), so everyone starts heading down this door in the back of his garden into his basement. I'm not the last one, but one of the last ones to go.

That door thing looks like those hatches where you hide in case of tornado, like in The Wizardo f Oz. You know, double wooden doors, angled to point down into the underground. So I head in as well, followed by a girl, and we're making our way down these corridors, and it's getting darker and darker. As we're going down, I hear the host 9 year old boy singing a 4 line song (I can't remember it now, but the last line was something like "and have sex with your mate"; it sounded like a drinking song a dwarf or hobbit might sing in Lord of the Rings) for which my first reaction was just to laugh, 'cause it seemed so out of place. The corridors are narrow and made of wood painted black, like those "haunted houses" at amusement parts (though that similee doesn't occur to me yet in the dream). For some reason, I also knew the 9 year old boy was running around (via a seperate set of corridors) with a lightbulb in his hand. I know this because, like a movie, the "camera" cut to film him for a while, holding the lightbulb, before cutting back to me. I did not see the significance in this yet.

At one point, down the corridor, it turns into a mini spiraling staircase type thing (like maybe one spiral, and not very high of a drop) and rather than walk around the spiral, I just decided to hop down onto the floor below. Well, as I'm hoping over, my hand brushes over something that feels like it's from an arts and craft thing, like carboard, thin foil, that sort of stuff. I land on the floor below, wondering what the hell that thing was when it lights up, and it's like a lamp with a little ghost-looking thing stuck to the front using tin foil. The 9 year old boy-host had turned it on, and meant for it to scare us (me and the little girl behind me) or something, but it sort of screwed up on me, because I skipped ahead, and so I didn't see the ghost thing from the front; from the back, it was obvious that it was just a carboard cut out with thin foil.

Anyway, so I'm like internally rolling my eyes, when the kid runs by me, forward, perhaps ready to prepare the next trick. That's when I realize that he's taken all the lightbulbs out of the regular lamps (and when he ran by, he turned off and unscrewed the lightbulb for the tin-foil "ghost") to set up this big haunted house thing to scare us. Well, I don't like being scared (even if it hasn't occured yet), so I'm like "fuck this, I wanna leave". While I'm thinking all this, the boy himself seemed to be source of light (as in so many video games), so as he was skipping away, the corridor I was standing in was getting darker and darker, and by now it was pitch black. Suddenly, that 8 year girl who was with me, she's all pale translucent white (i.e. a ghost) and rushes at me and grabs my arm, not in a hard way as in to kill me, but as if she were a child who was scared and needed to hold someone. At any rate, that scared the shit out of me. I immediately screamed, and as soon as I did so, she disappeared, so the whole thing took a fraction of a second.

That's when I realize this whole thing is a nightmare, and so I find myself lying in my bed, with my eyes closed. When I try to open my eyes, everything is warped and dark. I've experience this before (actually pretty often), and it means I'm not actually awake yet. Sometimes I dream that I'm trying to wake up, but I'm often unable to (this is pretty well illustrated in Spotless Sunshine of a Beautiful Mind). "No problem", I think. I know Meiko is sleeping with me, so I'll just get her to wake me up. So I'm feeling around in the dark, and I can feel a body to my left. So I'm tapping her with my arm saying "Help!" because in this state, I have low control over my body, and sometimes I can't even get the word "help" out, so I'm saying it over and over again, maybe 75% of the time actually succeeding. And she's like "Hmm? What? What is it?" And I'm frustrated that she hasn't picked up, so I'm trying to say "Wake me" and shit, but she's just not responding.

Then it hits me that Meiko is sleeping on my right side, and I'm holding someone on my left side, and this body I'm holding is really squishy, like it has no bones in it. So I'm like "Oh fuck!" and let go of that body as fast as I can and roll around over to the other side and start whacking Mei as hard as I can with my arms, screaming for her to wake me up.

This goes on for a while, as it typically takes me quite a while to voluntarily wake myself from a dream (and I realize now that I'm awake that I was only dreaming that I was nudging Mei, so in "real life", I probably wasn't moving very much at all). Finally, I do wake up, and this time I "know it's for real", because I'm getting a lot more feedback from my nervous system (you know, like the pressure of the bed pushing up against my body that's being pulled down from gravity). When I'm dreaming, I "think" I'm awake, but I never seem to think rationally about it. When I'm actually awake (like now), I can be sure I'm awake (Buddhist philosophical comments on what it is to be awake aside).

So now, this is real life stuff. I'm lying in bed, and I fucking see a blurry face projected onto my wall via a play of lights and shadow, and the fucking crazy thing is that it's moving as if it were breathing, and it's in synchronization with the breathing I'm hearing right now. Now I know the breathing I'm hearing is Mei's breathing, but there's no fucking way that blob of light is Mei's shadow (or the inverse thereof). I'm freaking out of my mind, and the breathing is (perceptually, not really) getting louder and louder in my mind, driving me crazy. Then a chill hits me as I wonder "is it 3:33 AM?" Ever since I played Eternal Darkness on the gamecube, that time has freaked me out. I know it's not exactly a rational fear; more of a Pavlovian one from associating an event in a game with that time in the game. Anyway, so I turn over to look at my clock, and it's like 3:35, so that fucking dream was going on during 3:33. I went to bed at like 9PM (long day), and if it were not for the nightmare, probably would have slept onto at least 7AM (that's being generous), so what are the fucking odds that I would have a bad dream at 3:33?

Anyway, so I'm lying in bed, freaking out of my mind. I want to bolt out of bed to go turn on all the lights, but I'm scared of moving. So I'm just staring at this face on the wall and hearing the breathing, and it gets louder and louder until I can't take it anymore, and I leap out and say "I'm turning on the lights!" (as a warning to Mei) and do so. Obviously, she's pissed, 'cause she wants to sleep. Somewhere along all this, I told her I had a nightmare, but I didn't give her the details, or mentioned the face, or the clock or anything, so she knows why I'm turning on the lights, but she's not happy about it.

I get on MSN, and luckily a few people are online. Friend or not, I message them, just to get a sense of normal reality back for a bit, talk about DDR and shit. I really need to go pee, and I ask Mei to come with me, but she won't, so after a few MSN convos, I can muster up the courage to go to the bathroom alone.

When I come back, I start typing in this blog entry, but Mei has sinced wrapped herself completely under the blanket (presumably to block out the light), and when she moves around, I hear a creeping behind me, and all I see is a mound of blanket with maybe an arm or two sticking out, and it's not helping my state any, as at any moment, I'm expecting for the blankets to be flung off and a undead version of Mei to be underneath or something.

That's the end of the story. So in case it isn't clear, the scary part (for me personally) is the clock, and (for everyone) the breathing face. And it really did happen.