User blog comment:ShawnCognitionCP/Dreams/@comment-25226524-20161115195631

The woman from my story The Woman in Red is from the only childhood dream that I have any recollection of. I can barely remember the scene, but I do remember it was so terrifying to me at the time that it instantly scared me awake. Gothic ghost stories were some of the first things I learned to read, so I assume that's why this scene was set in a city during the 19th century. I remember that I kept looking back at a woman walking behind me on the street, I believe I was with my family, and I started getting unnerved by her presence. I sat down on a bench and there she was, standing there looking at me. She was wearing a black dress and black hat, if I remember correctly, one of those wide, puffy dresses from that time, and she started gliding towards me. At this moment I knew something wasn't right, so I leaned down and looked in the narrow space between her dress and the street only to realize her feet weren't touching the ground. That was when the terror struck and I woke up. It seems like a very simple thing to me now, but it must have had a profound impact for me to still remember it. The scene where the narrator comes face to face with the woman at the edge of the woods is based on this tiny yet terrifying memory.

As for the craziest, I've had some truly bizarre ones, but I can almost never remember them for more than a few seconds after I wake up. All I can really remember about them is thinking, "Well damn, that was complete madness." In my younger days, I apparently was quite the sleepwalker and was also quite claustrophobic. I've been told that I would often wake everyone up by screaming and beating on my door or a wall because I was dreaming that I was trapped in something.