Stories from the Past ~ 12/31/2015

I dreamed I was moving out of New Orleans to Schertz, but I kept losing my boxes, and the tape kept going missing, and it seemed like the house might be haunted. Then, I'm not sure if I dreamed going to bed, but it felt like I woke up, but I had sleep paralysis. I was lying in my bed in Mom's house here in Schertz, but I couldn't move, and it felt like someone kept sitting down on my bed, then getting up, then sitting down again. Then it felt like a little dog got put down on the bed, and was creeping around and circling and settling in. I couldn't move, but I could open my eyes, and I couldn't see anyone or anything, and it was really creepy. Then it stopped and I slipped back to sleep.

Once I was all packed up, I was hanging out with friends on Royal St. We walked down to help some historians get set up in a huge old antebellum house. They were giving a lecture in the front hall, and then giving tours of the rest. The house was abandoned and in ruin. And it was haunted. One of the girls in our group was Cordelia from Buffy, and she was being awfully mean to a quiet, awkward, nerdy girl in the group. The quiet girl did a good job of just ignoring her.

As we walked through the house, getting it ready for the tours, I kept getting vision flashes of an old, old story. The man who had built this house was a kind of colonial explorer, and he forged through deep forests and swamps, looking for a site to build New Orleans on. He had a rival he was trying to outdo, and the rival was traveling with his young daughter. And one night, he and the daughter discovered each other in a clearing of the woods.

All while I was getting these vision flashes, I was also walking through the house with the quiet girl. We got along really well, and talked about the things we found. I noticed something strange. There was a sort of light or energy that had started to follow her around. The lights the historians had set up glowed a little bit as she got near them. I realized a ghostly presence was following her closely, but she hadn't realized it yet.

The historians called us downstairs to meet a famous actor that had come to give a speech as part of their tour, dressed in period clothing. Cordelia was doing her best to flirt with the guy, but he seemed interested only in the quiet girl. He asked her to show him through the house, and we all saw how the lights came on as she entered a room, even though they hadn't been wired for power yet. This confirmed something he seemed to know about her.

I began to get flashes of the story of the house again, and I could see them in the story, not as it unfolded, but hinted at in the end. It turned out the quiet girl was descended from the explorer and his rival's daughter, and the story of the house was also the story of his search for the true owner of the house now. The actor was descended from the explorer's best friend, and new the house needed an owner, and was looking for the right person.

Night had fallen, and the rooms of the house were dark when the girl wasn't in them. Visions of the story began to play in front of my eyes in flashes, as though the walls were movie screens, and in the deep darkness between visions, I could feel hands on me, turning me in the the directions I needed to go. They led me to a hidden corner in the high attic, and there I found a huge, dusty old book, and in that book was written the story I had been shown. At the end of the book, the writing was pale and vague, like a shadow of things that hadn't happened yet. But I could see they hinted about the paternity of the quiet girl, who was an orphan and hadn't known her father. They hinted about a legacy he had left her, and a beautiful future, with the actor, in this house. I could see how it would all happen, but then I woke up.

Investigative Journalism ~ 12/15/2015

I dreamed I was working on a story for my high school paper about the abuse of young women. I had it all written out on hundreds of little post-it page marking flags, in pink, yellow, green, blue, and purple. They were stuck in order all over my body, and I carefully transferred them to a notebook before getting up to get my lunch tray.

When I got back to my desk, my notebook was gone, but in a few minutes, my fellow students were all coming up to congratulate me. One of the teachers had seen my story and admired it so much, she'd taken it and had it printed in a special edition of the school paper. Within days, a national news outlet had picked it up, and I was famous.

I started writing more stories, exposing individual cases of abuse. I discovered and wrote about a beautiful young pageant queen who had been caught in bed with her boyfriend. After that, her father confined her on a tiny island, and brought her supplies once a week, sailing his yacht. Her prison could only be reached through a cleverly concealed trap door among the rocks of a tiny outcrop, nearly lost in the waves.

Next, I discovered a farm where tiny baby giraffes were being smuggled in illegally to feed exotic predators. In one cage, a huge python dozed, and in another a hyena slunk out of its little cave, as a famous country singer picked up the little girrafes, about the size of grown cats, and dropped a couple in each cage. When I reported them to the authorities, the country star and his mother denied all knowledge, and I began following them around and yelling, "Liar!" at them every time they talked about it. Then I woke up.