top of page

Nightmares?

USA
February 2004

I actually don't know how old I was when the events I am about to write about took place. I do know that I had not yet started school and I started kindergarten when I was five years old.

My mother and I lived in a small one bedroom apartment on 135th street and Amsterdam Avenue, in Manhattan, New York. I loved this building because it was a three floor brownstone. In this building I had an aunt or an uncle on every floor and a bunch of cousins to play with. I however was the baby and everyone spoilt me. My father was away fighting the Korean War, so mom and I were alone in our apartment at night. I slept with my mother in a double bed. I believe the reason for this was because I had Asthma and my mother was afraid I would suffocate in my sleep.

I remember my early childhood as very happy. In fact even this very scary part did not actually affect me negatively. You see very young children do not have the capacity to judge if something is paranormal. As I often say when I tell this story I trusted my mother completely, so I was not afraid of her. If she would have gotten on a broomstick at night and flown out the window I would have thought it was just something she did, like cooking my food every day. That is why the original version of Peter Pan was so dangerous, you tell a child under the age of five that if he believes he can fly, he is very likely to try it.

When I was old enough to realize the events were paranormal, I also knew it had happened a long time ago and neither my mother nor I had suffered any real harm. I did wonder how my mother was able to handle it so well under the circumstances. However, she didn't like to talk about it much, after the fact. She thought it best forgotten.

Usually, I would fall asleep first while my mom read, watched T.V or listened to the "novela" on the radio. Than one day for some unknown reason my mom started having a sequence of nightmares. They didn't happen every night but as the situation got worse they began to increase in frequency. Anyway I remember two of them very clearly. Notice that I said I remembered two of them very clearly. Here is the reason, my mother and I had a kind of psychic connection. My mother would have her nightmare and I would hear, smell and feel everything that was going on in her dream, even after I was awake. I called them my mother's noisy dreams. Here is the first one I remember.

I was sleeping when suddenly I was awakened by the sound of a man running in our bedroom. I slept on the side of the bed that was across from the window and we lived on the third floor. I heard the man run across our bedroom. I heard the sound of breaking glass. I felt the pieces of glass fall on me. I felt a cold blast of moist air from the window, it was winter. I heard a scream getting more and more distant, which suddenly stopped with a loud tude. Than a commotion outside and sirens. I knew it was a man by the sound of his shoes and the male voice that screamed. I somehow knew or thought this was being done by my mother, because I heard the man but I saw nothing. So I started shaking my mother awake. I was cold and I wanted her to fix the window, and stop making so much noise. "Mom, mom wake up your having one of your noisy dreams again wake up." When my mother woke up things got worse. The bed would levitate off the floor and start rocking like a ship on a stormy sea. My mom would put her arms around me and hold me tight. Because sometimes the rocking was so violent it felt as if we were going to be pitched forward off the bed. The lights in the whole apartment would begin to turn on and off, like strobe lights. Furthermore, it sounded like someone was destroying everything in the kitchen. You could hear sounds as if cabinet doors and drawers were being opened and slammed shut. It seemed as if every dish, glass, piece of silverware, pot and pan was being thrown on the floor and against the walls of the kitchen. It was a terrible racket. I use to wonder why all my relatives weren't knocking down our door to find out what was going on? My mother wouldn't say a word, just hold me tight. I on the other hand was very angry at my mother. I would alternately plead and scold. "Mom, will you please stop you know I can't sleep with all this noise, and the bed is making me sick. You know how crabby I am in the morning if I don't get enough sleep." Anyway eventually everything would slow down and stop. Than my mom would snuggle against my back spoon fashion, and I would ask her what her noisy dream was about and she would tell me as I fell asleep. In this dream she said that my grandfather, who lived with my aunt in another apartment, had come running into the apartment and jumped out the window and was hurt. Later a realized that what my mother didn't say was that she dreamed my grandfather committed suicide.

The next morning it would be as if nothing had happened at all during the night, as all was where it should be, not a thing was out of place. My mother asked our relatives if they heard anything during the night and they said no. She didn't elaborate with them, but she couldn't figure out why I knew everything if it was just a dream. All was not well during the day either. My mom would see on the hall wall just outside the kitchen door, multi colored lights dancing on the wall when she was going to have one of her nightmares. She would ask me if I saw the lights but I never did. Until one day I saw her looking at the wall with a very frightened look on her face and I turned around and looked and sure enough there were the lights. I thought they were beautiful, and I didn't understand why my mother looked so frightened. They looked like someone was dancing about a hundred small pastel colored flashlights on the wall. I jumped up and down with excitement and said, "I can see them mommy, I can see them!!" She came to me and hugged me to her. I said, "Mommy, why are you scared of them they are so beautiful?" She didn't answer my question.

That night she had another "noisy dream". This time I woke to the sound of skidding wheels, like when you slam on the breaks. Than a loud crash, crunching metal, and I felt myself being thrown forward and hitting something padded and than being thrown back and hitting something else padded. The motion than stopped and I heard sirens again. I started smelling smoke and there was a crackling, popping noise, and it was beginning to get uncomfortably hot. I again woke my mom who was moaning in her sleep. And it was a repeat of the noisy dream nights. Rocking bed, blinking lights, racket in the kitchen etc. As I was falling asleep I asked, "Mom, what was your noisy dream about this time?" She said, "Honey, I was so scared, I dreamed we were in a car accident, you were in the back seat and I didn't know if you were hurt and I couldn't get to you." I said, "Oh, mommy don't worry nothing happened to me I'm fine." And than I was asleep again. It wasn't till I got older that a realized there was something my mother didn't tell me. That the car was apparently on fire. I wonder if I didn't wake her if I would have begun to feel like I was burning.

I know there were more dreams because I remember the lights, rocking bed, and noise in the kitchen, but I don't remember what happened in them, or what I felt. Anyway shortly after I saw the lights on the hall wall, my mother decided to go talk to a priest at our church, at first he didn't believe her, but she asked me to go in and tell him about her "noisy dreams" and I did. He believed her and came to the house and did an exorcism. That was the end of my mother's "noisy dreams".

USA
00:00 / 01:04
bottom of page