Gracen's Nightmares and Dreams

Now it’s time for the Nightmares and Dreams segment…Gracen style. =) My husband says I have nightmares, not dreams. This is coming from a man that claims he doesn’t dream. When he does dream, they are very vague and nondescript. Not worth effort if you ask me. (Shhh…don’t tell him, but it’s because he has no imagination. ;-)) When I dream, I know all the intricate details and while it may not make perfect sense while I’m awake, it makes 150% sense in the dream. I mentioned last week that dead people come to me in my dreams. Demons come too. I’ve even had dead family members come chitchat in my dreams, some of those family members are people I have never met because they either died before I was born or while I was too young to remember. I described my grandmother to my mother and I thought she was going to stroke on me. Mind you, I’ve never seen a picture of her either because my mother didn’t have one until she snagged it from my Aunt this past summer. I didn't tell my mother that I've been dreaming about my grandmother since I was a child. While sleeping, I guess I’m an open portal, sending out a welcoming beacon. That said, I guess I’ll tell you about my more memorable dreams or nightmares…you decide which they are. I’ll try to keep it to a minimum.

First off, I guess I should mention that my current book, The Devil’s Den, started out as a dream. There is one major difference between story and dream though. In my dream, the hero, Six, was none other than the evil of all evil, Satan, Beelzebub, the Devil, the instigator of Armageddon and the war in heaven. In my book, Six is a vampire instead. I made this change because I honestly felt people might have a hard time sympathizing with Six if he were Satan. There’s a scene in my book where Six and Serena (the heroine) meet and they are dancing, or rather she is dancing against her will. That is the scene in my book, with all the elements from my dream written into the book from the lighting to the rankness of the bar. While in my dream Six was frightening, he also had a seductive lure to him. He was dark and scary, but he lured me in just the same. The moment I awoke to a darkened bedroom at 3:23 a.m. and realized it had only been a dream, I knew Six deserved a book, that he wanted a book, but even given the mixture of emotions rotating through me at that time, I have never once considered this a nightmare.

Another dream I have regularly is about tornados. And growing up in my neck of the woods, tornado sirens going off is a regular occurrence during the spring and summer. I’ve come to believe that the word “thunderstorms” is code for “tornados”. The weatherman just hasn’t let the general population in on that secret yet. Let me start by saying I have NEVER been in a tornado. I’ve had a few close calls where the tornado thankfully fizzled out before it got to us or it missed us all together when it should have been a direct hit. My oldest son (he was 8 months old at the time) and I spent the better part of four hours in a closet with my great-grandparents from Las Vegas and my parents. The entire time my great-grandmother kept saying either “This is not good, is it?” or “I’m not coming back out here every again”. This dream has plagued me my entire life. Each time I have the dream, it is as if it is actually happening. I can hear the tornado, that loud train noise (not the blowing of the whistle), and I can feel the atmosphere pressure changing around me as the tornado approaches. Many times I have awoke from this dream in a sweat barely able to breathe I am so terrified. I have had this dream so many times that I have learned to wake myself up at the beginning of the dream, before the tornado hits, because the tornado always hits in my dream…er…nightmare! This is one dream that freaks me out each and every time. Laughable maybe since I did not consider Six a nightmare, but rather a good story line.

I’ve had prophetic dreams. When I was trying to get pregnant with my second child, I was having a difficult time and was starting to believe that I would not have another child. But then I dreamed I had two sons and when I awoke, I knew that meant I’d have another child. Within two months, I was pregnant with my son. Since I was a teenager, I have never dreamed I would have a daughter. I have always dreamed I had two sons, even to the point that I’ve had dreams where I would comment to someone that my boys were four years apart. Well, guess what…my boys are four years apart.

I’ve had a dream before I was married to my husband where I am kidnapped when my boys are older, early teen timeframe, and my kidnapper shoots me in the back. The strange thing about this dream…I can still tell you exactly what that man looks like. I can tell you he did not want to shoot me, but his leader made him do it as proof they were in control to the police. He took about five women into a room, looked more like a cleaning closet actually. He shot the first four women in the head and I remember telling him he was going to have to shoot me in the back if he was going to do it and then I turned my back on him. He was crying, I was crying, as if we knew each other and had feelings for one another. He shot me and I remember the pain of betrayal was worse than the pain of the gunshot wound. Is it prophetic? I hope the hell not. I did survive the shooting in the dream and went home to my husband and sons. To this day, even while writing this blog, this story makes me jittery and deeply sad. I swear if I run into this man, I’ll know him the instant I see him.

Well, I hope you haven’t been bored too much. Like everyone, my dreams run the gamut, they make perfect sense in the dream and sometimes absolutely no sense out of it, but even in the hellish dreams, I embrace them. I love to dream and I love to ponder them the next day. What did they mean? To me anyway? Were they messages I should be listening too? Were they a figment of my imagination? Were they simply designed to give my creativity an outlet?

I’d love to hear your comments. And we’d love for you to come by the The Deadly Vixens Yahoo Group and tell us about your own dreams and nightmares! =)

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend! Bye! == Gracen Miller