Ghost of a Dream

I woke up the other night with a ghost in my bedroom. At least that is what it felt like when it was happening. I knew that I was still dreaming because I had been trying to wake myself up in my dream and there are no such things as ghosts, right? So if I wasn’t going to wake up I decided I was going to go with the dream just to see where it went.


This ghost in my room was named Henry, and he was looking for a person that used to live here in my place. A woman named Deidra.

I couldn’t help him much, but I tried. It was the middle of the night, and nothing was open in town after two in the morning.

In this dream of mine I went to the library and looked up the old records for him. The library doors just unlocked and opened up, you know how dreams can be. I told Henry what I found in the records there, that this Deidra had gotten married after he had died. She had three children and was buried in the church cemetery some fifty years after that. And that her death was a good fifty years after the marriage.


What you need to know about me is I’m not the helpful type. I don’t open doors for people, or pick things up that others have dropped, or give to the poor. So I’m feeling quite silly in the library of all places looking up information for a ghost in the dead of night. I hadn’t once stepped into a library since my school years.


Henry had never learned to read and he asked me to read him her headstone, so we walked over to church yard cemetery. And this was where the dream started to get creepy. We were standing, or I should say I was standing with my small pocket flashlight and he was floating in the middle of the cemetery, we were reading headstones, and some of the other occupants came up out of their graves and they came over to see what we are doing.


As dreams often are surreal it didn’t bother me in the least that I was now surrounded by ghosts and they were all chatting and catching up on history while I was reading headstones out loud for this Henry.

I won’t pretend that I wasn’t surprised when some of the specters rose soon after I read their names. If I was standing too close they would go right through me with a cold shivery feeling. Apparently saying their name out loud over their resting place causes them to rise. If only I had know that before I read the stones out loud to Henry I wouldn‘t have done it.


I was ready to give up when I finally spotted her grave. I mean how many Deidra’s do you know? I read it out to him and he sighed waiting for her to rise. We waited for her to come to him and when she didn’t he started to weep, so I called to her on his behalf.

After a while I said to him, “Maybe she isn’t buried here. It doesn’t say how she died.”

The others insisted, “No, she’s there!”

Deidra finally rose up after the whole group started in calling her name.

She admonished all of us for disturbing her, and with the fun over the other ghosts headed for their own graves.

Deidra said to Henry, “I never have been in love with you. You just have to move on, and Please! stop coming to my grave each year on your death day night trying to talk to me. I am not going to talk to you ever again. So Henry, stop bothering the living and the dead with all this hubbub."

As she sank back into the earth Henry tried to pull her back up to be with him. I told him, “Now cut that out, or I will make it my mission to haunt you when I die if you don’t leave her be!”


This Henry ghost was now so distraught I would have worried about him killing himself if he was alive. So I walked him back to his own grave in the public cemetery a few blocks away. I wanted to make sure he was down under the earth again and not about to follow me around. But I didn’t tell him that.


The next day was Saturday and I was at my local coffee place reading my emails when the police came up to me and asked me to come to the police station with them.

They had an odd tale to tell me. It was about me walking around town in my pajamas with a ghost and my breaking into the library, then going into the church yards in the middle of the night. They had me on various cameras around town with a non descript glowy thing floating along side of me, and it appeared that I was talking to it.

Since I didn’t harm or take anything, the caretakers of these places weren’t going to press charges, this police interview was just a warning.

If they hadn’t shown me the tapes I wouldn’t have believed it myself.


I move right out of that old place. Didn’t stay there another night in fact. I moved to the other side of town into a new apartment building. But to this day I am helpful and whistle past the graveyard. I even give to the poor. I’m not taking any chances ever again of bumping into a ghost in the night.

Edit for typo on 11-14-11