Sleepwalking Stories: Coins

About three years ago, I was at my friend Alex's house. A group of about 8 or 9 of us decided we were going to read scary stories in the dark. I don't remember the stories being very frightening. In fact, I don't remember the stories at all because I fell asleep.

Now, as you might imagine, it is not a good idea for me to fall asleep in public places. I try to avoid sleeping on public transportation, for example. Imagine if I started talking, or worse -walking in my sleep while on a plane. I would probably do something to get myself arrested.

But I fell asleep at Alex's house. It wasn't the first time either.
The first time, there were maybe four of my friends watching confusedly as I walked around demanding my cactus book, and putting pillows in the freezer.

So they were prepared for this. When they saw that I was asleep, they chose not to wake me. Especially since I had already started moving my hands, spelling words in sign language. I soon opened my eyes and demanded my cactus book again.
Ok, maybe I should talk more about the cactus book.

Cactus Book Tangent!
In my undergrad in California, I lived with a girl named Laura. The first time I ever did anything in my sleep in that apartment, she was walking by my room at 4am. I screamed "LAURA!"
She walked into my room. "what?" she asked, sleepily.
"Where's my Cactus book?"
"Your what?"
"My cactus book. I lent it to you, and you never gave it back. I need it."
"Are you asleep?
"They're coming, Laura. The cacti are coming, and I need my book!"
"Go to sleep, Lizzy."

She then went back to her room. I lay there, still sleeping, and now very annoyed at Laura. I got up, went to the closet between our rooms, took out a large shampoo bottle, and dropped it from chest height onto the floor. I did this with several other heavy objects until Laura came out of her room.
"What are you doing?" she asked, still sleepy and getting annoyed.
"I'm looking for my book!"

For the three years I lived with Laura, I asked her for my Cactus book many many times while sleeping. It became quite the theme.
My friends joked that they should just buy a book about Cacti, and give it to me. But they never did.

I had an elaborate dream about the cactus book, in which the Cacti were a species from another planet. In the Cactus culture, Etiquette is Extremely important. If anyone breaks a rule of Etiquette , they were killed. The Cactus book was a book of Cactus Etiquette , that I was studying because I was chosen to be the ambassador to their people when they visited Earth.
Sounds pretty damn important to me.

Back to the Coins story!
So, I'm sleepwalking at Alex's house. After a while of signing random words, and gazing around me for a while, I asked them who was at the door.
Noone is at the door, they told me. But I insisted someone rang the doorbell.
Ivan got up and walked to the door.
"Who is at the door?" I persisted.
"Ivan's at the door." They said.
"...No. Ivan answered the door."
I think they got scared that I seemed to know what was going on around me.
After a pause, I said "Where is my book?"
They handed me a random book. I took a look at it for a while, then threw it across the room.
"That is not my book." I insisted, firmly.

I did some other things that I can't remember now. I believe I took a jar of jam out of the refrigerator and presented it importantly to someone. I think I tried to go outside, but they dissuaded me from that idea somehow.

What I do remember vaguely is going into the hallway, and taking everything off of Alex's sink, and arranging it into a small structure. Apparently I said, "Where is Laura? This is for her."
They went to get Laura, who was still in the livingroom. I asked her "Where is my book."
She groaned and said once again. "I don't have your book!"
I proceeded to knock down the structure I had made. It was probably a peace offering in return for the book.

Alex also had a large container full of loose change. I spilled these out on the carpet, and sorted them. With Ivan as my fascinated helper, handing me certain coins when I demanded them, I placed the coins in a pattern on the carpet.
This picture is the only record of that active sleepwalking night:



Alex said it looks like a spaceship. That's a flask on top there, and a pin with a picture of David Bowie in Labyrinth sitting on top of it.

Eventually I woke up while walking around, got a little freaked out and demanded to know what the hell happened. They relived the night for me, which is why I know the details.

Dream: Big Screen Tree

I had nothing but category 1 dreams last night. But one funny thing is worth mentioning.

In the dream, I walked into the livingroom where my friend Anjin was watching television on the largest TV I have ever seen. It wasn't wide -maybe 3 feet wide, but it was over 12 feet tall. I was impressed and tried to change the channel. As soon as I touched it, it shut off with the ominous sound a computer makes when it improperly shuts down. Smoke came out of the top.
Anjin looked at me with horror and fury and screamed "You killed the Great Deku Tree!"

I woke up horrified. Then I chuckled before falling back asleep.

Dream: The Fifth Restricting Stone

I dreamed that my fiancee died. I couldn't bear it, I was dangerously overcome with grief. I followed rumors and half-remembered myths until I found a witchdoctor, who I heard could bring people back to life.

She gave me the means to bring my fiancee back. It involved a complex ceremony to be performed over his grave. I had to say opening prayers/acknowledgments to certain spirits while facing specific directions, and then wash something that represented my fiancee in a copper bowl of my own blood. (gross. Why does my subconscious choose these kind of images?)
The witch doctor told me that once my fiancee was raised, his new life would be connected to mine. If one of us died, the other would die as well. This seemed more than reasonable to me, in order to get my fiancee back.

One step in the ceremony that I MUST NOT FORGET involved what the witchdoctor called the restricting stones. She gave me a beautifully embroidered satchel with them inside. I must put the restricting stones around the grave. If I did not do this, the power of the ceremony would not be restricted to that one grave, but spread through the cemetery.

I went to the cemetery, full of desperation and strained hope. I placed the four restricting stones beside the grave in each cardinal direction. I performed the ceremony, washing a crown in my blood. (I don't remember why it was a crown. There was a good reason for it, but I can't recall.)
When I was done, I sat down and waited.

I waited for hours upon hours. I began to rock back and forth slightly, too weary to cry, stretched to the limits of my emotional endurance. Dawn was breaking when I thought I heard something. I held still, and listened hard. The sound was coming from the ground in front of me, a kind of scuffling. I began to dig with my bare hands into the grave. When I was three feet into the earth, my hand hit something warm. It was another hand. It flailed until I grabbed hold and pulled as hard as I could. Slowly, a body emerged from the grave. It was my fiancee. He was alive. He seemed to know what had happened, because he didn't' act confused. We held each other, gasping and weeping at the base of his grave until the sun was well into the sky. Finally we gathered ourselves up, and I led him out of the cemetery.

What I didn't know was that there was a fifth restricting stone.

The next few weeks passed in a blissful kind of dream. My fiancee was back. We had our apartment again -I hadn't changed anything. He told me about what it was like to die. I told him about my grieving. We cried for each other's stories.

I was still going to CIM -my music school. I hadn't confided much about my fiancee's death to the people that I knew. They knew he was horribly ill, but I made it seem like he had a miraculous recovery. People couldn't be happier for me.

There had been a story at CIM that I had been told about 3 students (two vocalists and a pianist) who had died in a car accident a few years before I arrived at the school. I knew their names, but I had never met them. One day, one of these people showed up at school. They were walking around the halls, going to a few classes as if they had never left. At first, I think, people didn't recognize them. But as they started to talk to other people, everyone realized they were the students who had died in the accident.
"What? The car accident? You thought I died in it! Oh how horrible! No, no I didn't die. Obviously. I was badly injured and dropped out of school for a while. I've been abroad for part of the time. I'm back now!"

I met one of these students, the pianist, and shook his hand. I told him I had heard the stories of how he had died in the car accident, and was glad they weren't true. He was very nice to talk to, but as he walked away, for a split second I thought his face changed. Just as he was turning away from me, I thought I saw that his face was covered in blood, part of his skull crushed in. The expression in his eyes was hateful, evil. I blinked, startled, but his face was normal again.
As I was walking up the stairs, wondering what it was that I saw, I looked down at my right hand -with which I shook his hand. It was covered in blood. I flinched, and it was normal again.

More and more, people who were known to be dead started appearing all over town. I heard stories from many different people about long dead relatives, or friends appearing with excuses of having been out of town, or in a coma this whole time.
I tried to talk to my fiance about this strange phenomenon, but he was oddly touchy about the subject. In fact, he was becoming more and more distant. Once or twice I caught him looking at me across the table with a look of pure hatred.

It turned out that the fifth restricting stone had fallen out of my satchel on my desperate journey to the cemetery. This restricting stone was supposed to sit in the exact middle of the grave. The ceremony's power had extended throughout the cemetery, bringing almost every corpse back to life. Their lives were all connected to mine, just as was my fiancee's. If any one of us died, all the others would die as well.
When the dead are brought back to life, they can never be quite whole. There is something off, something sinister about them beneath the surface. The longer they remain living in their second life, the more prominent this dark side becomes. They were turning evil, all of them.

Dream: Demon No Longer

I remember last nights dream being very interesting. But I can hardly remember it. That doesn't happen to me! That happens to other people! D:
I still blame it on the comfortable guest bed.

What I do remember is that I thought I was a demon. I had been raised with demons for as long as I could remember. There were demons, angels and human beings all living together on earth. Demons weren't particularly evil, angels weren't particularly good, and humans were pretty oblivious. We were all just people. But demons and angels did tend to stay away from each other. It was almost like a class system, with the angels being higher class and not wanting to associate with the demons. Wealth wasn't an issue though.

I had always believed I was a demon. But as I got older, things began to look different -my vision began to change. After a while, demons looked fuzzy around the edges. Sometimes I could hardly see them at all. It was very upsetting.

I found out that I was actually only 1/4 demon. I was 3/4ths angel! And I also discovered that angels usually can't see demons. They know of them, but unless they concentrate really hard, they don't see them. I hadn't known this, but it explained a lot. Why angels always ignored me and my demon friends at school. Why angel adults used to be startled when I was suddenly in front of them, and hadn't seemed to notice me before.

As demons began to disappear from my vision, angels started paying more attention to me. They started trying to be my friend, inviting me to things. I was insulted, even disgusted by them, as I had been all my life. I desperately wanted to get back to living with the other demons, but they were shunning me.

I found that the only way I could see them clearly, was if I let my eyes relax and cross slightly. It was just like when you're trying to see an image in a magic eye picture. But when I did this, they looked different than they had when I could see them normally. The tips of their fingers were dark red, the area around their mouths was dark, as if in shadow. Their eyes were golden.

I woke up to my mom gently shaking me awake. I was muttering something like, "I'm really a demon... I can't see them anymore..." My mom was less surprised than you'd expect.



This isn't the first dream in which I've been part angel. It also happened in an old post called The Devil's Favorite.
Seems to be a reoccuring theme. No idea why.

Dreams: The New Teacher

I think my mom's comfy guest bed, coupled with my cat sleeping next to my face is making me sleep more deeply than usual, and therefore dreaming less. I haven't sleepwalked or sleeptexted since I got here. My dreams are more normal, with less detail than usual.

For example, last night I dreamed the tires on my car were stolen. By beavers. The end.

The night before I dreamed that Roberto Alagna, a famous opera singer, came to teach at the music conservatory I go to.
Here's a picture of Roberto Alagna.


Everyone was very excited -it was the buzz of most of the gossip between students. He was going to teach an opera history/opera workshop class. I was also very excited, I had just seen Alagna in Carmen in a live broadcast from the Met, and looked forward to what I could learn from him.

We had a welcoming ceremony for him in the lobby of the school. All the voice students were there, and there were balloons and banners. He was very gracious, and smiled and shook hands with everyone. When he saw me, his smile dropped for a moment. He smiled again, but his eyes were piercing when he looked at me. Throughout the ceremony he glanced at me every once in a while. I began to feel a little uneasy, and I told my friend Anjin about it. She said I was being a stupid 4**, thinking everything was about me. I laughed it off with her, but I still felt strange about the vibes he was sending me.

I took his classes, with all the other voice students, and they were fascinating. He had a lot to say about the history of opera, and about his own experiences. His opera workshop classes were useful and challenging. When he posed a question to the class, I raised my hand. His eyes always fell on me first, but he purposefully called on other people.

One day noone else raised their hand but me. He stared at me for a full thirty seconds before calling on me. My answer was correct. He stared at me again, and a grin spread slowly across his face. It was a wolfish grin, and I felt uneasy once more. At the end of class I was slow moving because I had a lot to pack up into my backpack. I was the last person out the door. Just as I was walking out the door. I thought I heard a faint "Lizzy!" from right behind me. I turned around, and suddenly he was there. He slapped me sharply across the face with the back of his hand. I wasn't that hurt, but I was so shocked I hardly had time to recover before he was saying "Good work today, Lizzy. I'll see you tomorrow." He showed me out the door with a smile, and shut it again after I left. I stood there in front of the closed classroom door for a few minutes, utterly stunned. Did he really slap me? Had I just imagined that?

A few days passed without incident. I stayed quiet in his classroom, no longer raising my hand. I even ditched class once. I felt sure by now that I had just imagined the backhanded slap, but that did not worry me any less.

A few nights later, I was walking towards the school building from my car. It was dark already, but I wanted to practice before I went home for the night. It was snowing, and I was alone in the parking lot. I heard something in front of me, and looked up. At the end of the parking lot, standing under a holly tree was Professor Alagna. He wasn't wearing a coat. He was staring at me with a fierce grin that made me take a step backward. I took off the hood of my coat to get a better look, but he was gone. I'm imagining things again, I thought. What's wrong with me? I started walking again. I was in the middle of the field on the side of the building when I felt something grab me by the back of the neck. It felt like a very large hand. I felt myself being lifted off the ground.

Then I woke up, dammit. It was very frightening while I was dreaming it, so I probably forced myself to wake up -nightmare wake-up style. But I want to know what happens!
This dream is different for two reasons: 1. There's not quite as much detail as other dreams. I blame that on the comfy guest bed. 2. I'm not often myself in my dreams. I'm usually playing a character of some sort. This was me for-sure. School even looked exactly as it looks in real life. My friends acted as they probably would. The new teacher was the only variable, which made it extra freaky.



**4 is on the Enneagram scale. It's a personality scale that I've read about. According to the scale, I really am a 4,. 4's are supposed to be creative artists, rather moody, and they think they're special. They're also reluctant to be categorized by numbers. :p


Update: 1-19-11
Last night, in real waking life, I parked in that parking lot that was in this dream. It was after dark, and I wanted to practice, and it was snowing -exactly like in this dream.
Halfway across the empty parking lot I suddenly got a feeling of uneasiness, and a chill raised the hairs on the back of my neck. I stopped in my tracks and looked up. There was the holly tree that Professor Alagna had been standing under in the dream. Noone was there.
I looked down, and found $20 bucks on the ground, half buried in the snow! yay! I wouldn't' have found it if I hadn't have had a creepy flashback to this dream.

Childhood Dreams

I am home for the holidays, at my mom's house. I was going through some old papers, and files on my mom's old computer, and I came across a few dreams I had written down years and years ago. Some were written down in brief summary by my mom because she thought they were interesting. Here is one I found written when I was very young:


"People are picking flowers and holding them up to their faces looking at them. The flowers are closed and then they open up and mimic the expression of the person's face that is holding them. They have little flower faces. One looks very happy and another looks grumpy and then surprised. Flowers from somewhere else?"

I don't remember that dream. I wonder how old I was when I wrote it. I'm assuming young enough to be ignorant of the use of commas.
Its too bad I didn't write down my dreams when I was a teenager. I used to have at least 3 long, vivid dreams every night. I was too lazy and angsty to write them down.

Here is one my mom wrote down. She just wanted to write a brief summary, so I'd remember more of the dream later. I was very young when I dreamed this too:

"Lizzy walks into a completely deserted town. She hears a crackly voice from somewhere say to her, 'Now that you are here, you can never leave.' She turns towards the voice and see that it is a crow talking to her. In her dream, Lizzy has walked into a town that has been quarantined with some horrible disease. Law officials show up and try to shoot her because she has been in contact with it."

That dream I do vaguely remember. I remember the talking crow anyway. I must have been 7 or 8 years old when I dreamed that.

Sleep Text: Falsehoods

I texted three people last night in my sleep, and none of them responded.
To all three of them I said:

"I cannot be held responsible for the consequences of your falsehoods."

It was at 2:30am, so I'm not surprised no one responded.
I've never posted the ensuing morning conversations I have with the people I sleeptext, but some of them can be just as amusing as the sleep texts themselves.

One of the recipients of this text was my sister, Jesse.
This morning I had a short text conversation with her about it.
Jesse: "Hahaha!! Hey -you finally texted me in your sleep!"
Awake Me: "Sorry about that! I'm glad you knew it was in my sleep, and that I wasn't just strangely angry at you."
Jesse: She's an angry elf!
Me: Shut up you. At least I'm not the one telling falsehoods.