Dream, 23 September 1991

Very surreal and horrifying, yet somehow not a nightmare. I dreamt that a family across the street from mine were good friends with us. It was no neighborhood I recognized, nor the house. I used to babysit for their two sons, even though they had an older sister about my age, whom I didn't know. Two things happened to them in the space of about two weeks.

The first week they were visited and befriended by someone famous (maybe two people), I don't recall who. It made news of all sorts, local and national, and I kept reading about it in a Time or a Newsweek . Then, about a week later, I found out while reading that same magazine that the mother and daughter had been savagely murdered. I got the feeling that their newfound "friends" had done it, but it was all very shady-feeling. I didn't, couldn't believe it until my mom told me, her face streamed with tears. I was somehow strangely unemotional about it, I don't know why.

This, too, made all the news, even more than before. But it was weird: The surviving husband and sons didn't act like a bereaved family. The sons still went out bike riding after twilight, but they turned nasty and destructive, and the father didn't seem to care.

One night my family and I were biking around in front of our house, and the boys came out and were verbally abusive, so my brother and I started being nasty to them, too. After 5-10 minutes or so of loud arguing, the father came outside and called them in. As they went in I gave them the finger, and their father flipped me off. When I shouted that it was meant for them and not him, he said, "Fuck you anyway!" and did it again, so I flipped him off again. He slammed the door shut.

Moving vans arrived that night, and they were packing. Then I saw it through the daughter's ghost's eyes! She was upset, couldn't believe she was dead, and didn't want them to move. I know there was more about her, but I can't recall. Then they moved away in the morning. It was all too quick, too awful, too strange for things to be the way they seemed at first glance. There it ended.