What Dream Interpretation Taught Me About My Fear of Ghosts

“The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” – Sigmund Freud

I was always scared of ghosts. I was afraid of what I could not see from the moment I found out what fear was. Fear and ghosts were peas in a pod: they were best friends and hung out together at every party I hosted—they showed up uninvited and took pleasure in crashing them.

If someone asked me what the ghosts looked like, I wouldn’t have been able to describe them. Ghosts, as they appear archetypally—opaque and transparent, menacing, mysterious and tormented—do not frighten me; it is the concept of a ghost that does. To me, ghosts represent an idea that I still struggle with today: the idea being that there are greater forces at play; forces—and perhaps energies—that are autonomous and that I cannot see nor comprehend. Reality isn’t merely objective. Reality twists and turns in ways we cannot understand (I recognise now, as an adult, that what we humans cannot see or understand usually sparks an emotional trigger of sorts, be that anger—recognisable on the political battlefield—or fear). So, if ghosts were real, what else was real? And what does such an implication mean for me? What happens when I die given that ghosts are real, and how should I live my life to avoid such a fate?

I’d tremble in fear throughout the long, hot summer months of my childhood—blanket wrapped three times around my body to protect me from the illusions that plagued my mind. I suffered from the heat, sweating profusely, but the fear was too great and so the suffering continued. Not suffering meant exposing my naked, frail and fearful body to a force I could not contain because I had no idea what such a force was capable of. The long nights of my childhood took a toll on me and it was until I was twenty-three before I was able to comfortably sleep with the light off. The dreams didn’t hold back either. Many times, I’d dream of being trapped (perhaps akin to how I trapped myself under the blankets as a child) with a dark energy pressing down on my chest or hovering over me. I was awake but I wasn’t. I was aware that I was having an experience and yet the experience felt dream-like. I couldn’t wake up, because how could someone wake up from reality? And then . . . I awoke, and it really was all a dream! I hated this re-occurring dream. Stress from the days, weeks and months had some influence and I recognise that “Sleep Paralysis” is the name commonly given to such dreams whereby the victim cannot wake up from such nightmares. Still, there is a subjectivity to these paralysing dreams. They know something about each of us. They’re not “just” dreams. That’s why I wanted to pay attention to them. There was something down there, in the deep, dark trenches of my mind; something I’d later come to reckon with; something that would fundamentally change the way I saw myself, my friends, my family and life itself. Although I didn’t know it at the time, interpreting my dreams—following the trail of breadcrumbs—would completely shatter my worldview.

It Was As If Bali Was Telling Me Something

My dreams changed forever when my partner and I moved to Bali. I was moving through a process of deep, existential change and I found it to be very unsettling. Too much chaos and not enough order as one famous clinical psychologist might say. The ghosts came back. This time, however, they plagued my dreams much more frequently. I did not experience them as a fearful thought as my eyes began to rest after my head hit the pillow. I did not experience them as paralysing, smothering martial artists, daring me to wake up from a dream that felt real. I experienced them in the following ways:

28th October 2018

Rough sleep. I had three nightmares. I dreamt about three different ghosts, one for each dream and each time I awoke in a fright. Clearly, unreconciled PTSD looms below. Anxiety is a spectrum and although this fear of the afterlife is by no means debilitating (as it once was), I’ve suppressed it far too long. Now, given I am living in a quieter place, away from the societal ‘hum’, it may be worth listening to what my subconscious is trying to tell me; and my free-thinking mind tells me that if I do not do something about this long-neglected fear of ghosts, it will get worse.

In one of the dreams, I was hanging out with Russell Brand. He felt like a mentor, a father-figure perhaps. Then a ghost pursued me. I was unable to gain Brand’s wisdom. What wisdom is being withheld from me by fear? What wisdom do I withhold from myself?

I awoke in a fright and was highly tuned-in to the creeks of the house. I heard the cats running around outside, playing and fornicating. I rolled over and attempted to sleep but failed miserably. I always knew I was afraid of the supernatural but didn’t know why.

By writing this, I cannot seem to forget a childhood experience: I had ‘sleep paralysis’, whereby, according to Dr. Google, “during waking up or falling asleep, a person is aware but unable to move or speak. During an episode, one may hallucinate (hear, feel, or see things that are not there), which often results in fear.” That was the case for me. I woke up unable to move, noting a hooded dark, demonic figure, hovering above me, simultaneously crushing my ribcage and staring into my soul. This shadow manifesting itself as my interpretation of the devil was one of the scariest experiences from my youth. It influenced my behaviour significantly throughout my teenage years. Suppressing that fear—that experience—became an external projection (the same with any suppressed experience) and my supernatural cowardice grew. I did my best to deny it happened altogether, convincing myself that the experience wasn’t real. “Tell yourself it’s not real. Tell yourself it’s not real.” It never worked. Whether or not the shadow (the devil) was ‘real’, in an objective sense is irrelevant. The point is something frightened me that night and I need to, as an adult, accept that.

Clara S. Humpston, a researcher in the psychology faculties, describes hallucination as “Sensory perception in the absence of corresponding sensory stimuli”. According to her definition as well as Dr. Google’s, my sleep paralysis experience was a hallucination. Nevertheless, it’s time to put it to rest. It’s time to reconcile the conscious with the unconscious.

And again, the following night:

29th October 2018

I dreamt that I am walking along a dirt road, back to my villa in Bali when, looking to my left, I notice an abandoned mansion. I can feel I am, yet again, about to encounter a spirit from the underworld. The mansion is worn down. I do not look away despite what my fear is telling me to do. For many years (in real life and in dreams) I have turned away from the fear, in fear! No wonder these nightmares haven’t stopped! In the righthand window on the bottom floor I notice an evil spirit sitting at the kitchen table. It is staring directly at me. As I write this, I feel my fear rising. “What are you afraid of?” She (the spirit is a ‘she’) is staring into my soul. She sees me . . . all of me, yet I cannot see her for she is a shadow, dressed in a dark robe. She is darkness itself! She is darker than black. She is looking at me, testing me, testing my will. I walk into my villa then turn around again. The spirit is standing at the gate of the mansion. She is still looking at me. She wants me and is feeding off the fear I hold in my heart—the fear I cannot help but project. The fear is giving her power. I walk a little further down the hallway and into our kitchen area (the villa bears no resemblance to any villa in real-life, however I know we are in Bali).

She attacks me. I retaliate. Never have I fought back before. I’ve only ever run in dreams and in life. Before Bali, I was hunted by the ghosts in my dreams. In life, I chose not to watch scary movies, look in the mirror (what if I saw something else other than my reflection?) or walk down dark roads. Nevertheless, I attack the ghost and she falls to the ground. The spirit is no longer supernatural; she is mortal and weak. We talk. I then crush her face with my face. We merge into one. The ghost shrivels and then disappears. It feels like my childhood sleep-paralysing dream has been integrated into conscious awareness—no longer suppressed, no longer perceived through the eyes of a terrified boy.

Trauma can be like that. We, even as adults, continue to perceive experiences based upon who we were when they occurred. That is why the fear and shame remains. But we are not the same people we were as children. Who’s to say we’d act the same way? Only fear says that, and that is why it’s so important to update our memories. The painful ones present themselves when we close our eyes at night; when the walls are down, and the unconscious is free to roam and wander.   

This dream reminds me of Star Wars. When Luke Skywalker lifts Darth Vada’s mask off his face to see and reckon with the truth. Skywalker sees Vada for the first time as he really is: vulnerable, just like every other human. But Vada is a weak man because he chose to mask (literally) his fear as opposed to confronting it head on with truth and with courage. Vada is afraid and insecure just like the rest of us but he hid his vulnerability and projected it externally, causing harm to others. I wonder: Do I do the same?

And for the third night in a row:

30th October 2018

That demon of sleep paralysis came to me again. This time, however, he (it was a “he” this time) was not supernatural, but a friend. He was human. He was lovely, like a friendly spirit you see in the movies. I couldn’t stop hugging him. Then, shortly after, I saw big walls falling down, like sheets of ice breaking off into the cold ocean off an Antarctic coastline. It was lovely. The walls of my scared and traumatic childhood, guarding my development and maturation, were falling apart. “A new Tom Ahern dawns”—I thought. I’m over being scared all the time. Come at me adulthood!

Bali opened me up to a world I did not know existed, the world of the subconscious mind: an inner landscape. What is the mind? What is my mind? I can’t seem to find anything more interesting than the psyche. I have my trauma and past experiences with mental health disorders to thank for that. All that suppression of fear led to an aggressive unravelling in my early twenties (a series of experiences I did not think I’d recover from), but I have those experiences to thank, for I would not be the man I am today without them. Fear can be a burden if you look at it like that, or it can be a blessing. It can be a messenger.

So, I was a jumpy kid—that was me. So, I had a few scares as I got older—that was me too! Ultimately, it was (is, and always will be) my responsibility to turn burdens into blessings, for there is no happy “Tom Ahern” without a sad “Tom Ahern”. Disregarding the fear and sadness (as well as traumatic childhood experiences) only leads us further down the rabbit hole. There is much wisdom to be gained by observing our fears. Fear is not a separate entity: it is us. It is a part of who we are, like a big toe or an ingrown hair. If we choose not to listen to our fears and distresses, we will lose sight of who we are and eventually descend into suffering.

Piercing Through Snow To Seek The Truth

Bali taught me a lot about myself. However, there was still much to learn, and I would have many more dreams about ghosts before I truly understood their symbolism and meaning. I dreamt about places from my childhood: friend’s houses; the street I grew up on and people I used to hang out with. In one of the dreams, I was trying to find ghosts with my friend’s sister. Why would I be trying to find the very thing I feared most—and with my friend’s sister? In that same dream, I found myself in a bed with Alan Watts, the late twentieth century spiritual philosopher and writer (widely regarded as the most practical—and fun—philosophers) who told me that night that he once faced his deepest fear. It was the night he faced the devil, which was the night before he died. A spiritual master—a guru—died the day after having faced the challenge of his life. Did that mean that his soul’s mission had been achieved and actualised? Had he done what he was put on this earth to do? In the dream, he was with his wife (and I can’t recall if he actually had a wife in real life, remembering of course that, for a dream, what is “real” is irrelevant compared with what is subjectively true) and had written a poem about it. And then it turned out that I had to face the devil. I screamed at the thought of it and woke up. I wrote the following:

Every time this happens—every time I must face the devil or the ghost or the spirit, I wake up. I am more courageous now than ever, and yet the dream continues to appear. What am I missing? I just can’t, for the life of me, figure out why this trauma is consistently showing up in my dreams. What does the dream mean? Could it be something that happened back in the house I grew up in? Does it even point to a trauma, or is it, in fact, an idea I’m subconsciously attached to?

I thought I was through the worst of it, or at least, I thought I knew what the ghosts meant, so that if I were to dream about them again, I’d be well acquainted with the tools necessary to calm down from the latent fear—or perhaps even enjoy their company whilst my eyes were closed, and I walked about in the dreaming world. But I was wrong.

The dream symbols changed slightly over the next few years. For example, I’d often run from the ghosts prior to Bali but now I was running toward them. In fact, I was angered deeply by their presence, manifesting as energies or feelings pointing to a dark energy. In one dream, for example, I was at my friend’s house. He was my best friend as a kid. Although I tried to wake him up many times by making lots of noise, he wouldn’t. I held a screwdriver and a pocket knife, brandishing them both for protection. I looked outside his window then into his TV room, and then out into the hallway, waiting for ghosts to appear. I wanted ghosts to appear, but they never did despite me avidly looking for them; despite me feeling their presence and staring directly into such corners of a dark house I’d once cower from. I looked at the window marks—the hand marks and the water outside from the rain—waiting for anything to appear down the hallway but it never did. I woke up in a massive fright. I was changing though. Gone were the days of suppression. Now the time of confrontation was at hand.

Sometimes the dreams included family members. I once dreamt there was a ghost outside the entrance of my house. There wasn’t though: just my mind—in the dream—making things up. But I was scared enough to wake my dad up. I feared the ghost had moved to the bottom of the stairs, shackled and bound, with chains grating against the wood. But no ghost was present. Then another dream, another ghost, only this time, a realisation occurs:

I am aware of a ghost down the hall, and I run to it. I feel as though the ghost is always one step ahead of me but this time I look in the mirror just near the kitchen and the mirror shatters completely. The ghost is me. This is clear to me now. The ghost is me.

This dream proved that my subconscious was trying to correct something from my childhood. There was no doubt about it. How many dreams must one have of his old house—his childhood home—with a ghost present without being able to see it clearly? I was no longer the child I once was, and my parents were no longer around to console me and rid me of the fear. But what was the subconscious trying to process? When did I first fear ghosts?

The dream showed me that the ghosts represented an aspect of myself, an expression of myself. The “ghost” was simply a symbol and its representations and behaviour—always just out of sight, always never really there—meant something. What, in my waking life, behaved in this way? What couldn’t I really grasp? What did I want so badly? What was just out of reach? What was transient? What was intangible? What is the meaning of a ghost? What is the first thing I think of when I think of a ghost. For me, it was fear, and that is why I was astounded to dream about being a ghost on the 30^th, December 2018:

I was on the dark side. Have I integrated my shadow, my dark side? I was on a beach, rounding up good ghosts so that they could be gassed by walking into the beaches. Some of them were animals and others were human ghosts. I was chasing after Harry Potter, yet I was also the boy who lived. But then the dream changed. Then I became one of Voldemort’s crew. He showed himself to me and yelled at me to tell me where Harry was. He looked scary and I got a fright. He had half a body, and his face was warped but I wasn’t scared of him. I knew how to face ghosts now, and that’s because I was a ghost. I won’t forget how I condemned the good ghosts to death by swimming out into the burning ocean. Shame ripples through the seas . . .

From running away, to morphing into ghosts and fighting them, to being on their side, the symbol of the ghost was changing. The memories of my childhood still plagued me. I began to think about them. I began to think about how I stayed up all night worrying. I remembered how I used to think that a ghost might take me somewhere I did not want to go if it was able to catch me.

And then I began to dance with the ghosts, metaphorically speaking. I knew it was time to integrate the fear; integrating, meaning that I needed to recognise the fear as a part of who I am. I needed to befriend them like I had with all of my other emotions. I would tell myself to dance with the ghosts in my meditations. Sometimes I was the ghost, scaring my partner (a very significant symbol as I’d later come to realise) and other times I was confronting them myself. Nevertheless, my plan was to dance with them passionately in my meditations and silent retreats; make them enjoyable company even if it killed me. It wasn’t until I closed my eyes, however, that I could really face what was going on inside. My right hemisphere came up with the possible answers for the bumps in the night and, now, my left hemisphere had come up with a logical answer for how to deal with them whilst awake. No more blankets over bodies in the summer.

At the same time, I was studying psychology profusely. I was obsessed with Carl Jung’s ideas as well as narrative therapy (I wanted to understand the stories I told myself unconsciously—the behaviours and routines I played out without thinking—as well as where and when those stories began). I’d come to realise something very interesting about dreams. Dreams have their own way of informing themselves just like we inform ourselves from the dream. The subconscious and the conscious minds walk as friends. They influence each other. I realised that my dream interpretations influenced my actions, day to day, which then influenced the symbols and meanings of similar dreams the following night. In a funny kind of way, I was chasing my own tail.

If we listen to our emotions, we can sometimes gain insights to what might be in store for us when we dream. The dream interprets the emotions, offering different perspectives as to why the emotion may be apparent. With its symbols, offered on a platter—a plethora of ideas upon ideas— dreams show us the many different occasions where that emotion arose. Dreams offer interpretations from a buffet of memories, experiences and perspectives. This is why no dream symbol is the same for any of us (and why you should throw your “101 Dream Symbols” book in the rubbish right now!). From the dream, we conscious individuals analyse and reflect upon the many reasons why such emotions are present. Emotions are our guides. Greater emotional intelligence leads to greater harmony between the conscious and unconscious minds, portraying well-rounded psychological health. Emotions are something to work with, not against. They are happening for us, not to us.

The Haunting 2.0

In late 2021, my partner and I moved to Warragul. The ghosts returned, but there was something very different about them. From fearing them, to being them and fighting them—now I was communicating with them. In one such dream, a dark energy began to consume the light in my hallway. I stood with my chest up and my shoulders back. I faced it, although I couldn’t quite see what, where or even who it was. I called out to it in anger: “Snowpiercer!” I woke up in a fright (obviously!) yet couldn’t help but notice the budding sensation of curiosity piercing my stomach. The “ghost dream” had changed again. Now the ghost had a name.

I watched the movie Snowpiercer a few years after it came out and thoroughly enjoyed it. The director’s take on social systems and corrupt capitalism, in a metaphorical sense, was portrayed brilliantly. Viewers are exposed to all classes and statuses. In particular, and as one movie analyst described, “The middle class is educated enough to think for itself yet comfortable enough to be highly susceptible to propaganda.” Oh Apathy . . . like a burglar in the night, you catch us unaware! The class system in the movie showed me that the rich, stereotypically, are constantly worried about money and status—and will fight ‘til the death to maintain themselves; the poor have nothing and will do whatever it takes to have something (anything), and the middle class are disillusioned by their comforts.

In a dystopian future where the world freezes over in a subsequent ice age, the rich are granted access to an unfair share of resources, having paid their way to the highest classes on an impenetrable train “one thousand cars long”. The train is set up in a class-based system where the rich have everything (mostly) and the poor—those who managed to fight their way onto the cars that made up the rear; the cars used for carrying cargo—have nothing. The poor, unbeknownst to them, eat mashed-up insects whilst the rich enjoy caviar and dine day in, day out with the finest wines and gourmet foods the old world could offer. Because of the money the rich had accumulated in a long-forgotten world, they had it all. What I found interesting about the movie was that money—by then, an arbitrary an obsolete ‘idea’ (if anything)—remained a fair exchange for access to resources. Money was, by all accounts, relevant—oddly enough—given that the rich retained their position at the top of the train’s hierarchy.

What I truly loved about the ending (spoiler alert) was that two main characters who fought tirelessly for their survival on the train realised, astonishingly, that they could live on Earth; they could walk outside. The Ice Age was no more. They could have stepped off the train, so to speak, as opposed to fighting tooth and nail for something that wasn’t real. I believed that this was symbolic of the economic and political ideologies the West has been indoctrinated into. The systems that maintain us are, after all, maya (Sanskrit: “illusion”) just like all other social constructs. I’m not saying that all social constructs are bad, but I am saying that movies like Snowpiercer are helpful reminders of their true nature. As Bong Joon-ho (the director of the movie) stated: “The only thing that truly is eternal is nature.” Human inventions will come and go as newer, better inventions take their place.

There is no question that human beings organise themselves into hierarchies, not only because we do not all possess the same skills and are therefore not all capable of the same outcomes; but also because there are a limited amount of resources. Free market capitalism ensures that the market—the people—get to decide what and who our societies should value. Of course, capitalism can go wrong, and that was the case in the movie Snowpiercer.

I didn’t pay too much attention to the symbolism and meaning of the movie when I first watched it . . . I just thought it was a great movie; but upon the realisation that the ghost I was chasing in my dreams was apparently named after the movie—because the name “Snowpiercer”, to me, could not have possibly meant anything else—I felt compelled to excavate its ideas imbued in the story. And wasn’t the movie ripe with meaning!

It is interesting to consider the ideologies we have, as a society, been indoctrinated into. It is interesting to consider the ideas we hold to be “self-evident” and “true”. Not all ideas are wrong: Moses got it right when he said to the liberated Jews, “Thou Shalt Not Kill”. But what about cultural truths like University will set you up for life and investing in a house is investing in yourself? These aren’t wrong, of course, and ideas that have faced the tests of time, having been smothered, beaten and dismembered by many, many people should not be criticised so candidly. Ideas reign superior the longer they have been around because they have proven themselves worthwhile, practical and right—because many people have benefited from living their lives in accordance with them. That said, we are all individuals and there are those of us who slip through the cracks, unable to play into the system we have fought for so long to understand and—dare I say it—come to appreciate. What of the people who are so cripplingly open-minded; so unable to stick to one thing, despite their deepest desires and wishes? What of those who would much rather float out to sea without a life jacket, unencumbered by the necessary life-saving virtues of responsibility, routine and habit grounding them into a clear path? What about those who can only seem to find meaning in their lives when their very lives are at risk? All of these questions I would come to contend with as my dreams changed and fluctuated almost in direct proportion to my analysis of a movie that shared the same name of a dark energy that had haunted my dreams since I was a young boy.

The ghost’s name was definitely Snowpiercer. The landscapes of the dreams changed but his name did not; nor his gender (apparently). Snowpiercer was (now) a masculine figure. He was an old, outdated form—a tyrannical ideology, an aspect of myself. He found my passions for sex “disgusting” when, in a dream, I found myself enjoying the pleasures of life; he had a contempt for my “non-spiritual” side and animal-like proclivities; he believed that traditional Christianity was the one true way, a virtue like no other:

I dreamt that I was standing upon the steps of a fantastic Church. I saw a Pope sitting beneath the over-arching spiral, head in his hands, saddened by something. He wore beautiful white robes without a speck of dust. He had a soft energy. He seemed kind; but I wasn’t there to console him. My adventure lay waiting at the top of the Church that surpassed the highest clouds in the sky. My mission, scary as it was, was a process of getting to the top to find out what exactly awaited me there.

I passed slimy eels swimming in water that permeated the hallways and rooms as I climbed the floors. My anxiety was rising and, although I continued on, I could not help but reflect upon the seriousness of what I might have encountered when my adventure reached its harrowing end. And then, at the very top of the incredible Church (which resembled the balcony of an apartment building my partner and I used to live in), I saw him. Snowpiercer was there—without form: a dark energy; evil, spirited, malevolent—an extremist. He didn’t say anything. I woke up . . . or so I thought.

I woke up into another dream, in a room at a Catholic house my family used to stay at over Christmas and New Year in Adelaide, South Australia. One my loveliest uncles is a Brother, a follower of Christ. He is a warm, humble, interesting human being and I cherish the moments I have spent with him as well as the many I can safely look forward to. But this house—this big, religious house—frightened me as a child. Within every room, Jesus was pinned to a wall, nailed to a cross, suffering from unimaginable pain. Every room contained the archetypal figure of a good and righteous person who was true to himself, honest and there for others in the face of a system that was designed to keep the poor poorer and the rich richer. But I was a child and, of course, hadn’t ever studied Christianity from a secular, psychological sense. All I knew then was that sinners went to hell . . . and I was a sinner.

In the dream my dad held me tightly and ensured Snowpiercer wasn’t real. He ensured I was safe in this house because Jesus protected us on each and every wall. Good, defeated Evil in every corner. And then, a dark energy manifested itself behind his shoulder. I could see Snowpiercer, but dad couldn’t. It rose and rose and became bigger and more powerful. I tried to project words, but no sounds came from my mouth. And that was when I really woke up.

I must reiterate, before I bash a lovely member of my family and best friend, that the symbols of a dream are not the external objects themselves; but rather, what those symbols either consciously or unconsciously mean to the person dreaming about them. Dad, to me, consciously, is an invaluable friend. I love him dearly. It was a real shock, therefore, to note that a dream (I dreamt!) would portray my father as someone unconscious to a system—Snowpiercer—that followed me everywhere I went and, for all intents and purposes, surrounded and oppressed him; but that’s how economic systems work don’t they, for better or for worse? Isn’t that how truth and ideologies work? Women do not possess the emotional intelligence fit for the corporate environment, yeah? Only weak men cry, don’t they? Witches are real, aren’t they? Our world is the centre of the solar system, isn’t it? If we take something to be self-evident and true—implicitly, based upon the way we act—our critique and analysis of it is rendered obsolete (unless of course we are meticulous, forthright and communicative).

         So, it was “truth”, after all, that haunted me; it was “ideology” and the matrix of my life that I had become oblivious to. These indoctrinated truths about sex, religion and economic systems were a shadow, lurking in the dark recesses of my mind. Although I thought I was aware of my own individuality, as well as the soul’s need for it to be continually cultivated, there was much I had left behind, having neglected it some time ago. It all made sense! Back in Bali, I was prohibited, by a ghost in a dream, from “gaining Russell Brand’s wisdom”. What was my unconscious projection of Russell Brand symbolising? Well now I knew: It was “truth”. Soon after I would dream about being a ghost and scaring my partner. Did I really think that my truth was greater or truer than hers? Had I become so unconscious?

What I thought to be “true” was, in fact, not true, or at least not entirely. Some truths I had forgotten. Some truths were repressed. But now I realised the truth: That which I’d held to be self-evident required immediate attention. I asked myself the following questions: Who am I? What am I doing? What do I want to do and where do I want to do it? How do I want to live my life, and who with? Where do I want to live and how can I fit into a society that supports others? These were the questions that came about after I journaled and interpreted my most recent ghostly dreams. And you know what? It’s been months and I haven’t dreamt about a ghost since . . .

UPDATE: The Ghost Has Returned!

3^rd November 2023

I am in my second childhood house back in Melbourne. I am in the lounge room area. This ghost that I have come to know is a gender-fluid ghost and it is haunting me mischievously; it won’t leave me alone. I am afraid if it, though more frustrated by it. It flies around like an orb. Eventually, I can catch it. I eat it, crunch down on the orb and gobble it up. Problem solved. I then realise I am late for work. I head upstairs, turn my laptop on and begin counselling a high school acquaintance via zoom. I am still worried about the ghost but am consciously attempting to suppress my fear by focusing on work. I have arrived ten minutes late to the appointment. When we are connected over zoom, I apologise for my lateness.

My client wants some help with his anxiety and confusion stemming from his lack of desire to have sex with his girlfriend. His girlfriend is also with us just next to him. She wants to make it a couple’s session to support him. They live in an immaculate house. She reminds me very much of another high school acquaintance, a girl I once had feelings for; but it never worked out. Her mother comes to the house. She sees me on their laptop and mentions that I am an attractive provider: “Who’s this attractive provider?” She’s an older, traditional woman who has brought around a cake. Her husband soon follows. The couple are trying to find a place to conduct the zoom session and in doing so, take me on an online tour of their house. The woman has many pets. She has dogs, cats, horses, and lots and lots of birds. I ask her, trying not to be sarcastic, how long it takes her to feed them all in the mornings. She says it takes forever, but she loves it! Eventually, we resort to conducting the counselling session outside in their backyard. It’s like the backyard of my house though bears resemblance to an old friend’s too.

The scene changes and I am at the my dad’s friend’s house. We are watching the cricket on TV. It’s quite dull. It presents old footage of a game in 2006 whereby Hugh Grant is there, watching with Julia Roberts. Hugh Grant says something provocative, and we all roll our heads. It’s just me and the dad’s friend’s family. My family isn’t there. The family also have two young boys as well. They real-life kids are all grown up. I help the youngest boy close the house for the night, shutting the curtains, locking the doors etc. 

I start to feel fear. I am acutely aware that I am avoiding something. The oldest of the two boys says there are people outside on the lawn in their backyard. I see only one shadow. He is a Chinese man—this much I know. We lock the door. It’s at this point that my dad’s friend says he has something to tell us. He says, “When I was younger, I would go places in my dreams that I shouldn’t have gone.” He thinks that the figures outside are related to this. He is referencing astral travel. I am afraid of this in real life. I don’t want to go so far away—if it really can occur—such that I can’t come back into my body. We sit down in the house. At that point, a young, childish version of another high school acquaintance points out that the back door has unlocked itself. When asked by who, he says, “A bad man!” At that moment, a light switches on and the ghost is sitting right behind him staring at me. His right arm is up high and crooked. I can’t see his face. I wake up with my heart pounding a million miles an hour.

4^th December 2023

I am walking up the stairs to check on Siobhan. I look back down and have an immediate sense that something supernatural is in the house. I call out—half leaning into the fear, half pulling away. I want to see it, but I am afraid of what I’ll see; not because I’m expecting it to be anything but that it could be anything! There is a ghost in this house, and it has followed me everywhere. It is always in the house, in my inner sanctuary, the place where I’m supposed to be safe. I don’t know what it is, I’ve never seen it—only fuzzy outlines at best. I know its name, or what it was once called: Snowpiercer. Who are you Snowpiercer and why do you stalk me so? 

Only time will tell what this all means . . .