Grandpa’s Ghost

Sleep Paralysis. Horrific Dream. Sleep Paralysis. Horrific Dream. Ghost. Ghost. Ghost. Wake Up. Where am I? Dead.

It’s been another day where I wake up to an intense dream, more recently they’ve all been about my late grandpa and they’ve been getting more and more… well for the lack of a better word intense.

This is the first task I’m putting myself through today, so I can retell it while it’s fresh.

This morning I woke up about 3-times in a row. I fell asleep extremely early (between 7:30-8PM) and woke up about 12 hours later. The first time I woke up, I had sleep paralysis, I was aware of it and knew that everything I was dreaming about was fake. My partner rolled over while I was experiencing it and put his arm on my chest causing me to feel unable to breathe even though I knew I was still breathing or I wouldn’t be feeling the extreme pains of suffocation. I guess this is what put me back to sleep, even though the next time I felt conscious I truly thought I was awake.

I woke up to what I thought was my phone ringing in real time. My mother calling me to tell me that we need to visit my grandpas grave as it’s been a while. When we get to the graveyard my mother has difficulty finding his grave. She says she thinks it’s been removed and begins pointing to my other grandparents grave saying that it should be close by. This, in reality, is not true and should have been my first clue that I wasn’t experiencing things in real-time, but that my brain was conjuring up a fictitious event.

The dream continues with me leading my mom to the proper site where my grandfather is buried, telling her he’s buried near the road so he could watch the cars zip by since driving was one of his favourite things to do. (Which is a true statement which I made to her the day he was put into the ground.)

The dream became more and more vivid. As we were passing through gravestones there were names I recognized of actual departed friends from church, school and potentially last names I recognized from visiting that graveyard multiple times over the years. Each time I saw a name I recognized it felt like a shock was going through my body until we finally reached my late grandfather’s resting place.

I’ll be honest. I haven’t returned to that graveyard since he’s passed. It’s quite a ways away from me and recollecting the events that took place that day make me feel fairly sick. That being the case, I have no idea what it looks like now with a gravestone. However, I can tell you that whatever gravestone my extended family chose is not the gravestone that I witnessed in my dream. It was fairly monstrous, something my family would never “waste money” on, especially for someone they abandoned years before he passed. Etched on the stone were moments of his life that each family member held close to them (again, something that my family would never do), but the feeling of the crisp autumn air and the statements my mother was making felt all too real.

That’s when tears started to flow. Messages from my immediate family were missing. This being awfully realistic to real life as my family was not part of a lot the planning or conversations that took place in regards to what we thought would be nice for my grandfather’s resting place. I turned to my mom and asked her if we could go because I didn’t want to be there anymore.

You see when my grandfather died tensions were extremely high in my whole family and since, I haven’t really spoken to most of them. Certain people took charge of planning and aggravated my immediate family by cutting them out of preparations. However, it wasn’t only that that aggravated the immediate family, but the decisions that were made prior about his long-term care that could have potentially eased his pain for years.

My mother started to cry, something fairly rare for her unless put under a lot of stress or in cases where she feels ignored or shafted. Otherwise, her go-to reaction tends to be anger or frustration as is with a number of native Middle Eastern folks. My mom held my hand and said, okay let’s go home.

We drove to my childhood home, which doesn’t usually happen in my dreams. Commonly in my dreams as soon as a new location is mentioned I either wake up or we “teleport” there with a cliché film fade, but this wasn’t the case today. Today we had a full conversation in the car as we drove. Rain drenching the car, and I guess what helped was the fact that it’s currently raining and you can hear the rain splatter across our windows adding to the soundscape.

Upon arriving at my childhood home, which we actually don’t own anymore, I greeted my cat who came running to the door immediately when we got there. My mother and I continued to converse until I noticed a church bulletin in his mouth. This being a fairly odd trait, I tried to get him to drop the bulletin only to see that it was being pulled out of his mouth by an unknown presence. I yell for my mother to look, to which she states, “maybe he’s just asking weird.” Although the next thing that happened suggested otherwise.

My cat was lifted by the mouth dangling about an inch above the ground, still holding onto the bulletin. It is then ripped from his mouth and thrown onto the ground. My cat runs in fear hiding under the table. My glance shifts to the bedroom I grew up in, which is easily seen from the living room (where we were) and I see my curtains being tampered with. I yell again, “mom look, there’s something going on.” And almost instantaneously the curtains get torn off the rod and the apparition places it all over its body allowing us to know that it exists. It wears the curtain like a stereotypical blanket ghost costume and begins darting for us yelling, “you’re next.” My mom yells “Dad, No!” To which my heart begins racing and I wake up experiencing sleep paralysis once more, feeling like I’m dead.

After the fact, not really the scariest. Obviously fairly comical, however, while being asleep stakes felt fairly high. I’m finding it weird that I’m having so many night terrors still, especially at this age, but I’m glad today’s is over. It is, however, making me interested in doing a dream diagnostic or learning more about “how to translate dreams,” even though I have no idea whether or not there is any truth to those books.

Dreams are weird and while I enjoy the fact that my brain can imagine such vivid images, it’s been working against me too often as of late. Glad I got those 12-hours in though.