Brian, one of my East Coast blog friends, mentioned this morning waking up from a nightmare where someone tries to mug him. At least it’s one where he tries to go down fighting. For me, it brought to mind the Cure’s “Close to Me,” but I also remembered a few nightmares of my own.

When I was around four or five years old, I went with my father on Disneyworld’s Haunted Mansion ride. I don’t remember details about what I saw. All I remember was that I was scared, crying, and hugging my father. For several years after that, I had many dreams where I was on the ride, but the details kept getting more and more embellished with every dream. I don’t know if hands sticking out of a door nailed shut was an original feature, but I frequently saw it. Later on, I saw a gigantic, glowing spiderweb. I never saw any spider, but I was fascinated by how big and bright it was. When I was in the fifth grade and there was a family trip to Disneyland, I had to go on the Haunted Mansion ride. This time, to my eleven year old mind, it was fun, but cheesy. I never had the dreams again, but I would always remember them. All those years I think my mind was just trying to make sense of it all.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I dreamed that I witnessed a gay bashing. Some poor man was chased by another with a pipe and I horrified. I was frozen and all I could do was scream. However, there was no sound and I woke up trying to make noise out of a muted cry. I was in my fundamentalist period at the time, and I now see it as a manifestation of internalized homophobia.

Thankfully, I’ve never had a dream about my head on the door. That would have been too freaky.

Read with caution. You don’t want your boss to peek over your shoulder and see you looking at this.

First, I posted some things on Twitter, which found their way onto Facebook as my statuses:

• I had this weird dream I was a student in a class with Tim Gunn and he took off all his clothes while he was teaching.
• Now I know I’ve watched too much Project Runway. Strange thing in the dream was that no one was phased by his disrobing.

Then, I saw Danny’s Facebook status. I commented, and here is the banter that followed:

Danny is still creeped out from his ‘invasion of the body snatchers’-like nightmare but is amused by the idea of dreaming it in an xxx-rated version the next time ;-}. 7:52am

shindo: Invasion of the Body Snatches has a nice porn ring to it. There’s also some fetish-y thing to it. Someone has to have their body snatched and someone wants to do the snatching. Maybe I’m thinking too much in dom/sub terms.

Hopefully, this wasn’t too traumatic to read.