archive: 24 february 2008: strange dream

I had a strange dream on Saturday morning and day... I slept most of the day, trying to recover from a nasty cold, but I was also being lazy. The dream was like a movie in length, it seemed. It was set in the outskirts of a large city, and for some reason the characters in it made me think English in 1950s or 1960s. There were three children, two boys and a girl. During the day they could play outside, going up and down the neighborhood streets. They could go exploring, but they were always without parents or any kind of guardian. They lived in an apartment building, and the flat they lived in I remember had only white walls, and the furniture very indistinct. When the sun was beginning to set the children would race back home and close the door behind them, locking it. Then night would come. This is when the dream would get spooky. Someone would come knocking on the door. Sometimes it was a man's voice, sometimes a woman's voice, but the children knew that the person was always the same and that it was someone who would harm them. What made it difficult was that the woman's voice was someone they had once loved, but was dead. I couldn't ever tell if she had been their mother, or an aunt, or a nice neighbor. The person who would use her voice was trying to trick them into opening the door. The girl would cry when she heard the woman's voice 'cause she missed her and wanted to believe that it really was the woman come back to take them away. I never really saw the man, but I did see the woman, from the viewpoint of maybe a bird sitting in a window down the hall... The lady was wearing a blue dress, very formal and dated further back than the 1940s, possibly Victorian age. Her hair was blonde, swept upward, and pinned under a small hat. She was young, somewhere in her late 20s, early 30s. This dream went on and on like this: the children playing outside by day, and by night sleepless from someone knocking on the door. I never reached any kind of conclusion from the dream and I wonder what it might mean, if anything at all.