I was driving in the middle of nowhere, and had to stop. (For gas? Pee break? I’m not sure why.) It was the middle of nowhere, but it was right outside of Los Angeles – so it wasn’t really far. No clue if that matters.

I stop in a junk store, a white elephant, filled with weird, colorful, cheap crap. The walls are white, but they’re hard to see through all the precariously balanced tchotchkes. While I’m walking through the store, I see my father. Not corporeally; he’s a ghost. He doesn’t say anything to me, but I see him clearly as he drifts through the shop.

I leave because I have to go home, and on my way out, I start seeing people from my past that I had conflict with. Some are specific, some are amalgamations of people I knew. When I talk to them, they seem… brighter? Unburdened. Kinder. They radiate light, but not in a literal way.

I leave, but keep coming back to this town because I want to see my dad, even if I can’t communicate with him. (The in-between times are fuzzy.) Whenever I go into the junk shop, I see him, and the more I go into the shop, the more I see other spirits of people I love that have passed away.

The rest of the town is filling up with more people from my past, and they’re all – how do I explain this? – they’re becoming their perfected selves. Something about the town burns away the hardness around their souls, the cynicism, selfishness, bitterness, and all the residue of hurt, and they’re their best selves as long as they’re there. I wonder if I am, too.

In the dream, there was one person in particular that I reconnected with. He registered in the dream as someone I was friends with in high school, or at least during my teenage years, but is someone I’ve never actually met. Eventually, he became very forthcoming about the nature of this weird town. Something about the town burns away the hardness around their souls, the cynicism, selfishness, bitterness, and all the residue of hurt, and they’re their best selves as long as they’re there. On this plot of land, nothing has ever died, and no act of violence has ever been committed.

And then I woke up.

– – –

Related and unrelated:

There’s a street very close to my house whose houses butt right up against a cemetery. The houses there are… different. Almost all of them have a quirky quality to them: some are painted bright, sherbet colors, the retaining walls and fences are wavy and whimsical, and most of the properties are covered – COVERED! – in… stuff. There are houses whose yards are overflowing with potted plants, and others that are piled ground to roof with ceramic figurines and holiday lights all year round. There’s an almost offertory quality to the gardens filled with Stuff that has fascinated me since the day we moved in, and I’ve spent a lot of time daydreaming about what compels an entire community of people living with a cemetery in their backyard to ornament their homes like this. Is it a subconscious drive to pay tribute to the spirits? Is it an impulse to keep the spirits at bay? Do the bright colors and whimsical statues bring comfort to the dead?

It occurred to me upon waking that the store in my dream – the white-walled junk store where the ghost drift – was filled with things I’d seen on this street.

[ mirror ]

I’m counting on you to be a good one, 38.

Guinevere Van Seenus by Tim Walker. Dreaming of Another World, Vogue Italia, March 2011.

The closet door to the right of the fireplace now opened, and from the aperture there came the form of an aged woman. In her hand she held letters,—the very letters over which I had seen the Hand close; and behind her I heard a footstep. She turned round as if to listen, and then she opened the letters and seemed to read; and over her shoulder I saw a livid face, the face as of a man long drowned,—bloated, bleached, seaweed tangled in its dripping hair; and at her feet lay a form as of a corpse; and beside the corpse there cowered a child, a miserable, squalid child, with famine in its cheeks and fear in its eyes. And as I looked in the old woman’s face, the wrinkles and lines vanished, and it became a face of youth,—hard-eyed, stony, but still youth; and the Shadow darted forth, and darkened over these phantoms as it had darkened over the last.

Nothing now was left but the Shadow, and on that my eyes were intently fixed, till again eyes grew out of the Shadow,—malignant, serpent eyes. And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disordered, irregular, turbulent maze, mingled with the wan moonlight. And now from these globules themselves, as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things burst out; the air grew filled with them: larvae so bloodless and so hideous that I can in no way describe them except to remind the reader of the swarming life which the solar microscope brings before his eyes in a drop of water,—things transparent, supple, agile, chasing each other, devouring each, other; forms like nought ever beheld by the naked eye. As the shapes were without symmetry, so their movements were without order. In their very vagrancies there was no sport; they came round me and round, thicker and faster and swifter, swarming over my head, crawling over my right arm, which was outstretched in involuntary command against all evil beings. Sometimes I felt myself touched, but not by them; invisible hands touched me. Once I felt the clutch as of cold, soft fingers at my throat. I was still equally conscious that if I gave way to fear I should be in bodily peril; and I concentred all my faculties in the single focus of resisting stubborn will. And I turned my sight from the Shadow; above all, from those strange serpent eyes,—eyes that had now become distinctly visible. For there, though in nought else around me, I was aware that there was a WILL, and a will of intense, creative, working evil, which might crush down my own.

The pale atmosphere in the room began now to redden as if in the air of some near conflagration. The larvæ grew lurid as things that live in fire. Again the room vibrated; again were heard the three measured knocks; and again all things were swallowed up in the darkness of the dark Shadow, as if out of that darkness all had come, into that darkness all returned…

Haunted and the Haunters by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.