Hi,
I have been suffering from problems to sleep for a while. Last night I fell asleep but woke up only one hour later from a terrible nightmare.

I dreamt I was guarding my parents house (which is the house where I grew up) when they went away. The first thing I did after they left was that I started to walk around the house to see if any doors or windows were open. For some reason I was afraid. When I came to the living room where we have glass patio doors and floor to ceiling windows I noted it was raining outside. The windows and glass doors where a bit blurry from the humid and I had to squint to see anything out there. Then I noticed a person standing in the garden, wearing a mac with the hood up.

Instead of just ignoring the person I knocked on the window and the person came up close. I noticed that it was a teenage girl. I opened the patio door and asked what she was doing in our fenced in garden. She came inside and acted very aggressively. I asked her what was the problem and she said with a teary voice that her cat was missing and she was looking for it. I started to explain that I knew everything there is to know about lost cats and cat-finding because of experience with my own cats going missing, but every time I tried to talk she just screamed "Shut up! I don't want to hear! My cat is gone!" She seemed hysterical.

After that I continued walking around the house, bolting windows and doors. They were often shut but not locked. I was terrified. I remember shaking and trying to lock all kinds of weird window locks. Finally I walked into what used to be my own room as a child which is now my mothers study. In there a small airing window was wide open and a chubby teenage asian boy was trying to climb in. I screamed at him; "What the fuck do you think you are doing?". He said that he lived next door with the Nystedts' (my parents neighbors) and that he had lost his key and he was going into our house to get their key from us. I did not believe him and said; "So you loose your key and decide to climb through the window where a woman is staying all alone? Not bloody likely". I realized as I said it that it was not very smart to explain that I was all alone. Shortly after that he was grabbed by the neck by another neighbor who had seem him trying to climb into our window. The neighbor dragged him away from the window sill.

For some, stupid reason, I climbed out the window and saw that the asian boy was not alone; he had three friends with him. The helpful neighbor had disappeared and I was standing outside, talking back to the three men and arguing. They were riding bicycles. When I went inside again one of the took his mountain bike, cycled to catch speed and then ran straight into our front door in order to ram through it. The door held. Once again, I behaved really stupidly; I hung out the window and told him that; "Oh, that was smart. Now I have got you on video since there is a camera watching the front door. So I can give it to the police and they will know who you are." There was no camera by the door in the dream, I was just making it up and instantly I saw that it was a mistake to piss him off. He got very angry. When I closed the window and got back into the house I noticed that I had missed one window. All three men had already climbed into the house and were surrounding me. They were aggressive, bordering on hysterical. The bicycle guy had a wall-paper knife and grabbed hold of my arm.

I woke up just as he was carving into my wrist with the knife, calling me a bitch.

I was terrified for 20 minutes when I woke up; certain that there must be some one in my house for real. There wasn't.

Yeah, that certainly is a frightening dream!

I wonder if the teen-age girl could be a representation of yourself at that age. You said you were used to cats going missing and the girl had lost her cat. It's like the now you was trying to comfort the then you and the then you didn't want to hear it.

The fact that you're in your childhood home could mean you heard or read something that brought you back to that time in your mind. It brought you back to a time when you felt your privacy had been violated or you needed more space, in the emotional sense, and didn't get it.

Does any of this seem familiar?

Frightening nigthmare

Hi,
Yes, it is quite likely that I would feel a need for more space at this time, although I am not certain why the setting would be my childhood house or room? My current inner conflict has nothing to do with the past - at least not as I see it. I suppose the manic closing, bolting and locking of windows and doors could be some old self-protective mechanism in times of trouble? It does seem like the theme is also that my own behavior of talking back or acting out makes matter worse somehow. I cannot really draw such a parallel from awake life; I don't really behave like the ME in the dream does, ever. She climbs out the window and challenges the aggressors, lets the psycho girl in the mac into the house etc - actions that I - even in the dream - consider stupid and careless. In awake life I would not act at all: I would always wait and south rather then instigate trouble. Of course, the nightmare could only be a reaction of lack of sleep and a bouts of migraine that I have suffered from lately. //K