Nightmare Archives - The Pure Life of Dreams

May 17, 2024July 8, 2024

The Pain of Things Left Unsaid

It was my last day in Hong Kong and I hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye to Dee.

We’d only met up once during my visit and I was doing my final walk back up the shoreline path in Lamma. Lamma, with its narrow paths and hustling stalls on either side.

Hopefully I would see Dee on my way.

People, many people were pushing past me as I climbed the path. I knew not where else to go, though I knew that Dee’s house was somewhere off to the right at the end of the path, somewhere after the path split into two.

At the fork, the right turn followed the shore, the left went into the forest, but I reckoned I’d have to turn around before then, to head back to the pier. Any later and I would miss the ferry back to Central.

Further down the path I’d left one of the restaurants and was pushing past people up the hill when, as luck would have it, I saw Dee coming down towards me. She was with a girl.

Dee saw me as she approached. She was wearing a formal pale green frock with pleated skirt. Her hair was short bob blonde.

Once she was near I spoke, “I’m leaving Hong Kong today.”

Her friend carried on down the path to give us some space to talk.

“Oh,” Dee replied, and we hugged.

Her skin was pale, her shoulders rounded and plumper than I remembered, against the pale green straps of the dress.

We embraced and my face was close to her ear. I wanted to say, “I love you,” but her friend was still in earshot and I was afraid.

I thought I would say it just as we were parting, but before I could spit it out, suddenly Dee said goodbye and turned away.

Instead I continued up the hill, following the line of the shore, knowing that I’d missed the chance and that it was gone forever unless I double backed and caught up with her; unless I caught up to wherever she was going.

I was still kicking myself as I approached the fork.

The stalls either side of the path had thinned out.

A couple of lads were walking towards me and one of them made a joke about the other. I caught the joke and tittered as I passed them, and then the first one, the joker, said, “You think that’s funny?”

“No,” I replied, even though I thought it was. Yes, I’d got the joke even though I hoped he hadn’t realized it.

His friend squared up to me and began to push me, and so did the joker. So I pushed the friend backwards until he stumbled and fell hard onto the path.

The joker was harder to deal with, and only when I pushed him against the low cut wall that separated the shore from the path did he fall. He fell over the wall onto the pebbly beach below, and when I looked over the wall to make sure he was OK, all I could see was that he was riled up.

The joker stormed back up the stairs to the path and squared up to me again.

His friend was still lying groggy on the path.

This time I used the joker’s momentum. He ran at me and instead of pushing him away I deflected his force and projected him over the wall good and proper.

By this time the joker’s friend was coming to – just as the joker fell head first over the wall. The joker’s arms and legs were splayed apart as he landed.

I wasn’t afraid of his friend – instead his friend looked over the wall at the joker with me, but the joker looked like he was out cold this time. He looked unlikely to get up any time soon.

Photo by Judy Gallagher via Flickr.

April 4, 2024April 4, 2024

The Fishmonger’s Toilet

My dream has a sense of foreboding.

I am in a flat. It’s night. I think it’s Dee’s flat but she’s away and there is nothing to eat except for two family size bags of cheese puffs. They are unopened and I don’t want to open them without her say so.

The curtains are drawn, and it feels like I’m in a dorm room although we are on the ground floor.

I leave the flat, the sky gunmetal grey, billowing clouds, the bright lights of shops shining in the dark.

I need to find something to eat…

Instead, I am in an Uber coming back to the flat. The driver asks me, “Can I drop you here? It’s just through there,” he points.

We are in a parking lot behind a row of shops or office buildings, like you would find at the back of a strip mall. Presumably my road is on the front side of the building. The Uber driver can’t go any further.

He points at an alley behind two green industrial dustbins, and the other side of the bins, and through the alley, I see the lights of Main Street.

After I am back on the road, after I’ve wandered some distance, I realize I am lost and I don’t know my way back to the flat. I try to Google Maps the way, entering the word ‘Northeastern’ but I keep misspelling it. I try again, only shorter this time: ‘NEU dorms’ but still my phone auto-corrects the spelling.

A group of young students (or are they a family?) pass me by on a narrow market street. I’ll try them, I think, although I never ask for directions.

I’m already missing Dee. Like I should call her.

“Do you know the way to Northeastern?” I ask a tall young man from the group.

He is tall and handsome, short black hair with a square jaw and rugged American-like features. He looks like an athlete.

“Sure,” and he points with a firm palm towards the market building ahead of me.

The market was from where he came. “I’ll help you,” he says. “Through here.” He comes with me into the building and we walk together along narrow paths between the market vendors.

We pass the meat section and cross over to the fish stalls. A fishmonger ahead of us, his fish laid out on chopping blocks looks up at me as he brings his cleaver down on a silver tuna’s neck. A clean strike reveals the clear red meat of its torso. The spine shows as a single bloody circle in the middle of the meat.

“Continue on through there.” The young student points left side of the fishmonger’s.

“Yes, I can make it from here.” I tell him.

And I continue past the fishmonger’s. The shiny market floor tiles are red, they are washed with the water that flushes the entrails of fish to the gutter that passes along the center of the aisle.

Beyond the fishmonger’s is the exit, the other end of the building. I am about to leave when, across the way, I spot a toilet. It is nothing but a large rusted door encased in a wall, a metal clasp slightly open, the door panel with the symbol for a man, barely visible, etched in the panel.

A sign on a metal plate says ‘Staff Only’, presumably it refers to the fishmonger’s, but I reckon they won’t mind and so I enter.

The toilet has dark rough hewn walls but inside it’s bright enough as, from a small opening at the top, the light comes from the fishmongers outside. The light casts a glow across coarse white painted walls and floor.

The stench of stale urine is unbearable. It attacks my nostrils. In the far corner of the toilet is a hole, the end of a sloped floor, where I presume you piss. I am about to set myself to do just that when from somewhere in the ceiling, water pours down the walls and across the floor, presumably to flush the toilet.

The water spills across the coarse floor. It comes close to my shoes, but the stench of piss is still in my nostrils.

I step back enough to avoid the water as it drains down the hole.

Photo in public domain from Raw Pixel.

February 29, 2024April 7, 2024

The Mouth of an Actress

Her hair is short straight, dirty blonde, and combed back exposing a pale white forehead. An actress she is; her right cheek is close to the camera, angled up at her from below, showing the sharp line of her jaw.

On the tip of her nose, there glistens a single tear drop, hanging.

June 23, 2023July 1, 2023

The Frog and Cat – Part 2 Back at the Hotel

After dozing off again, I find one of the frogs back with me in the hotel room. I have to let him lie in a small container of cold water for a while, to let him recuperate.

I put him in a long rectangular Tupperware, and put a lid on it so he cannot escape, but every time I put down the container, he starts hitting the lid with his head, almost knocks it off.

So then I fill the bathtub in the room, it is filled quite high, and I let the Tupperware float in it so that this time, if he escapes, he will only escape into more water.

The bathtub is only filled with water from the tap and is not the boiled, sterilizer water I used for him but I’m sure it will be OK for the time that he needs to get better.

Then I leave the room.

And it is only when I get back that I see the horror.

Artie is floating under the water of the bathtub his small body rotating slowly under the surface, the frog paddling around him, the Tupperware up-ended.

Artie must be dead, I think, as I pull him out. A bit of claw catches my hand and comes away from his paw, lodges with a piece of fur at the soft base of my thumb.

I lie Artie’s limp body, belly down, across the lip of the bathtub. I stroke his back, and press hard, up from his hind legs with both thumbs, push his fur up towards his throat until the water ejects from his mouth into the bathtub. And I repeat it again and again until the water spurts out, until after the third or fourth time he splutters into life, and rolls out of my grip onto the floor.

“Oh Artie,” I cry as he walk away.

He no longer has his buff coat but looks more tabby and smaller than he was before; when he was chasing the frogs.

I leave him to return downstairs where they have the constructors out on the patio. They are mending the tiles, resurfacing them with white squares in a diamond shape, white to match the balcony wall which surrounds the patio. And I want to see how the construction is going.

When I get there I’m surprised to see Artie once more. This time he is lying on his back, his body splayed across the balcony wall. A small but deep gash is visible across the white fur of his belly, bleeding,

“Artie,” I cry out once more as I rush towards the wall.

Next to him sits a contractor and, at the far side of the patio, two more. They wear grey hard hats and are eating sandwiches, it’s their lunch break. And they stare back nonchalantly at my commotion.

Then a second cat bounds out from the French doors of the hotel, across the patio and up onto the wall to my dead cat. Only it’s Artie who ran out of the hotel and the dead cat is not Artie after all, although he shares the same tabby markings and size.

Artie sniffs at the dead cat briefly before leaping towards the two contractors at the end of the patio. He ducks between them as they slouch and chew their sandwiches.

“Catch him!” I yell before he disappears under their legs.

Photo by Eu_eugen via Pixabay

April 20, 2023May 2, 2023

Attacked by a Drone in the Old Fort

Attacked by drones in the old Moroccan fort.

Siobhan, Liam, Lizzie and I went on holiday to Morocco or a place like that and after we had arrived and settled into our hotel, we went wandering around the souk. It was nearby and still filled with people in colorful costumes so we took lots of candid pictures.

The souk was quite open plan but still dusty, and had rich ornate rugs swung over the wooden frames of the stalls to protect the shoppers from the sun’s dusty glare.

The locals’ costumes were many striped, in reds and orange, golds and blues, the colors of the rainbow, and you had to be fast to get the pictures but I played with the iPhone buttons instead of the app button and snapped them really fast. I was not even looking to frame each picture so that even if a head got in the way I would still snap it.

I looked at one photo and sure enough I had frozen it in time. The focused head of a man captured through a blur of people. I was proud to have gotten a good picture just like the kids showed me.

And later on we walked over to an old fort which had a broken wall and an old blue door; you could walk around the right side of the wall, to the other side without opening the door. Behind the wall was a moat and a series of steps that went down to the water line and then came back up again to the rear side of the door. And intersecting the moat was another wall that acted as a bridge, that you could walk across the top of, that was quite wide and able to accommodate all four of us side by side.

We walked along the bridge and a drone flew by; and the drone was bowl shaped and black with a yellow trim up by its wings. It hovered briefly over the water before snapping out of sight.

And once we turned back and were returning to the fort’s front wall we noticed the water level had risen, perhaps because of the tide, and the drone was back again. This time it was a bit more menacing. It flew closer to us, just missing Lizzie and I, and then it went after Siobhan who had walked ahead. She was up by the intersection where the bridge and the wall’s steps met.

Siobhan ducked down to avoid the swoop of the drone and dived into the water which now covered the steps. Then she surfaced where the steps rose up close to the door. Only her head and right arm visible, she was holding onto the top step, but also she looked dazed.

Liam and I ran back along the path and I thought to walk down the first set of steps and up the second to where she was. But then I would have gotten my camera wet because all but the top steps were covered in water. I didn’t think it would survive that amount of time in the moat.

Then Liam had an idea. “Why don’t we try the door from the front?”

And so we walked back around the wall. And the door was old with chipped paint and we weren’t sure we were allowed to open it. I turned the heavy round silver knob of the door and we stepped through.

No one stopped us.

“Good idea, Liam,” I acknowledged as I closed the door behind us.

Next to the door sat an old cart leaning with its wheel barrow handles on the path. It was right next to where the steps began, where Siobhan held on.

But there was no trace of Siobhan.

A few bathers were paddling out in the moat but she was not one of them. We looked out across the water, and briefly one woman in the same dark brown bathing suit as Siobhan surfaced, but she had long dark brown hair.

Perhaps she had slipped unconscious while holding onto the step.

We peered into the water but it was murky and there was no way to see anything deeper than a few feet. And this time I thought to dive down to see if she had drowned.

Then Liam cried out.

“Mama,” he wailed in a plaintive voice.

Photo from Wallpaper Flare