quite possibly the strangest dream I’ve ever had
This is a long one. And really strange. I’m going to hide it behind a “more” link, just to keep the front page a bit cleaner.
Ok. So I’m in the perspective of a retired police officer turned state social worker. In an insurmountable conflict of interest, I’m given the role of checking up on my ex-wife and our three children (ages 3, 5, and 7).
They live in the strangest house ever made. There are 3 fences, and everything has its security level. The outermost fence keeps the dogs penned into a large area of yard. The second fence keeps the kids closer to the house than the dogs. The third fence is around a graveyard off to the right of the house. The outermost and the third fences are made of sinister looking wrought iron, the middle is chain link.
This house would be a palace, if it were only maintained. But it isn’t, because of undisclosed family drama involving family members living in the top floor — my brothers — who had had some sort of horrible fight that caused them to destroy the support for the upstairs room (basically a tower), causing that room to collapse in sideways on itself, and twisting the staircase going to it into a very creepy tunnel.
The children are freakishly muscular, having a genetic defect that causes their muscles to grow to exceptionally large sizes. They all look like over-juiced bodybuilders, and are stronger than most adults ever will be, despite all being under grade-schooler age. Their mother blamed me for the defect, and after the third child was born with it, divorced me. But she regrets it.
Since then, she’s remarried to a man that I didn’t meet in the dream plotline. He was sexually abusive to the kids, which is why I was assigned to the family. I had to try to maintain my objectivity, in the face of some creep abusing my own kids, who hate me for no good reason after three years of being told by this guy that I’m a horrible person, despite the fact that I was a loving father and husband.
And the youngest child, our daughter, had taken to climbing into the condemned upstairs apartment (a truly twisted place, I can’t describe how incredibly strange it was, but it was literally twisted around on its side, and reeked of some sort of horror-movie funhouse from hell, except that it was only a single room and a hallway). Of course, this was to escape the abuse of her stepfather and her middle brother.
Over the course of the dream, I left, went back to my generic one-bedroom apartment, and spent a week reading classic fiction, including a 2000-ish page novelization of Citizen Kane. And had dreams of burning the house, and the whole family in it, because they’d become such twisted inhuman beasts in my absence that their mere existence was an affront to everything good in the world. They lived in utter squalor, they abused each other, the kids were malicious to everyone, including each other. Their mother turned out to be a horrible parent, incapable of raising them well or protecting them, and their stepfather was apparently quite a monster himself.
Over the course of the dream, I ended up telling my boss that I shouldn’t be working on my own family, because it’s a huge conflict of interest. And when the boss wouldn’t listen to that, I resigned my position and moved across the country, after filing a report detailing the horrors of what used to be my household had degraded into with the state-level branch of the office I worked for. Deciding I had experienced enough horrors for one lifetime, I retired to a piece of property on a large lake down south, and spent my time fishing, boating, and reading, completely disconnected from all of that stuff.
Weird, huh?