Creepy Dream

A few nights ago, I had this following dream. It was very intense and vivid, so I wrote it down:

I was with Avril and our kids in a foreign country with Jared & Afton Aldridge and their kids. It was never mentioned what country it was, but Jared was the only one who had been there, and he was showing us around. It had a vaguely Mediterranean vibe to it. We were at a beach, and there were some cliffs nearby. Jared wanted to take us to someplace beyond the cliffs. To get there, we had to walk along a narrow ledge on the cliff face. Jared lead the way, and I brought up the rear.

When we started across the ledge, George started to climb down the cliff because he thought that was why we came over here. I stopped him and helped him back up before his parents saw and freaked out. As we made our way along the ledge, I realized that it was narrower than I had realized, and I wondered why we had brought our kids to such a dangerous place. If the water was deep, we'd probably survive the fall, but I doubted that the water was deep enough. As I had these worries, the ledge beneath my feet started to crumble away. If I jumped onto the ledge ahead, I risked pulling George over with me, so I pushed myself away from the cliff so that I would avoid landing right at the base of the cliff where it was more likely to be shallow. As I fell, I thought I spotted the dorsal fin of a shark.

Pushing off worked, and I landed in water deep enough to be unhurt. I saw scores of many different kinds of fish while underwater, but I didn't spot a shark. I swam to the surface and looked up the cliff. Everyone was relieved that I was okay, but there was no way I was climbing up. I would have to swim around to the beach we had started on.

The dorsal fin showed up again, but it turned out to be a dolphin instead of a shark. I was relieved at first, but the dolphin turned out to be fairly aggressive. It kept head-butting me and trying to push me farther out to sea when I tried to swim to shore. It even bit my hand, and I was worried that I might lose a finger.

The dream skipped forward a bit (this is a mental defense mechanism I've developed for when I can't think of a way out of a stressful dream and I can't wake myself up). I was back on land, and I was arriving at the Aldridge family vacation home with Hannah. We were both soaking wet. Hannah was younger, maybe four or five years old. No one else was at the house yet. I gave Hannah a bath and then put her to bed in a playpen in once of the second-floor bedrooms.

When I came downstairs, the others had arrived and were putting the rest of the kids to bed. After they were finished, Afton and Jared laid down in the living room to rest while Avril and I headed upstairs to the room we were staying in on the second floor.

The house was old, at least 100 years, and had several floors. When we had first arrived, Afton had told us we could stay on the second floor, but not to go any higher because it was haunted on the upper floors. I brushed that off as either superstition or an excuse to keep us from snooping in private areas, but I still never intended to go higher.

As we were going upstairs, Avril and I were chatting and enjoying a quiet moment alone together. Quite unintentionally, we missed the landing for the second floor and ended up on the third floor. We looked around at the dark, empty, dusty room, and it was then that I realized we had gone too far up the stairs. Before we went back down, I noticed that I could see part of the fourth floor up the stairs, and I got curious. I went up part way to get a better look.

The fourth floor was an old theater with rows of seats facing a worn movie screen. In front of the screen, a TV was set up. It was an older style, not a flat screen, but the big tube TVs of my youth. An old black-and-white movie was playing on it. I found that odd, since no one had been up here, and I thought that the house might be haunted after all. That was when I heard a young girl crying back on the third floor. I went back down with Avril to look around. The girl sounded older than Hannah, and she didn't sound like one of the Aldridge girls. She would speak sometimes while she cried, but I couldn't make out what she was saying. Avril and I would follow the voice, but we never found the crying girl, and I realized that it was a ghost. I pulled out my phone and started recording video in the hope to get a recording of the voice, but she went silent by that time.

The ghost girl had sounded agitated, not just sad, so Avril and I went back down to the ground floor so that we wouldn't bother her further. We laid down on some sofas in the same room that Afton and Jared were in.

After some time, I heard a woman's voice upstairs yelling something about trespassing. It was the ghost, but she sounded like an adult now, and she was angry instead of sad. I got my phone out and started recording again. Afton jumped up and said, "Did you guys go upstairs?" I told her that we had accidentally. It was then that Hannah started screaming, and I realized that the ghost had come down to the second floor and was with my kids.

All the adults sprinted up the stairs. The ghost woman was yelling incoherently, and I could faintly hear a dog barking. As I came into the room Hannah was in, I felt something tugging on me as if the ghost was trying to grab me, but, being a ghost, couldn't quite do it. We couldn't see the ghost. I held up my phone, still recording video, and tried to see if it was picking up an image. Avril and Afton said they saw a glimpse of a wrist and told me to point the camera back in that direction. I also switched the camera to night vision mode, and the ghost appeared on the screen. She was standing over Hannah reaching into the playpen in an attempt to grab her. Avril, Afton, and I tried to grab the ghost, but of course we couldn't, so we just wildly waved our arms around where she was. This drove her away from Hannah and turned the ghost's attention to us. She was screaming in rage and trying to attack us. We could feel her trying to tug at us, and it was a very disturbing feeling. I tried to keep the camera on her so we could see her, and Avril and Afton would wave her away whenever she got close to the kids. Eventually, I tried using the Priesthood to drive her away. I raised my right arm to the square and said, "In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to leave." I tried to yell it with authority, but I'm never able to yell in dreams, and it came out strained, shaky, and quiet, which is what it's always like when I raise my voice in anger in a dream. The ghost would obey and leave the house at my command, but then she would come back in. I tried a few more times with the same result.

At this point, I woke up just enough to realize I was dreaming, and went back to sleep almost immediately. The dream continued, but the ghost had settled down and we were safe. We sat on the bottom of the stairs on the ground floor calming down. I decided to watch the video I had recorded, and I noticed some new details. As we ran up the stairs, I ghost rottweiler was viciously barking at us. I had heard it at the time, but didn't see it until watching the video. The other new detail I noticed was Hannah screaming that she couldn't breathe when the ghost was trying to grab her.

After watching the video, Hannah started crying, and the dream ended with Avril and I comforting her.

I woke again, more fully this time, and it took me a while to fall back to sleep. When I did, I dreamed that I had posted the video on Facebook. Rachel Rasmussen had commented with "*smile*" and I found that odd. I wasn't sure what she meant, but I ended up deciding that she must be pleased with my use of the Priesthood.