Old dreams

Dreams are an important part of the Slender Man Mythos and thus the Fear Mythos. Probably because dreams reveal secrets that we never knew about or the fact that most dreams are really freaky.

However, I always like to avoid Psychic Dreams for Everyone. I mean, having one or two prophetic dreams is fine, but most dreams have little to no meaning at all. They are just random assortments of images from our lives that our subconscious minds presents to us when we go to REM sleep. I think the best dreams in fiction are the ones that are suitably surreal and still leaves things unexplained. (Like the Buffy episode "Restless" - there was always one element to their dreams, the Cheese Man, that had no meaning whatsoever.)

Anyway, I don't really remember my dreams, but I do remember my nightmares. I had an old recurring nightmare from a while ago that I still remember: I would always be walking on the blacktop of my old elementary school, except instead of a field of grass, it was tall rows of wheat. And I would see my mother out there in the wheat field and she would try walking towards me, but there was a hole in the ground next to her and a hand (white and gnarled) would emerge and grab her foot...

That's the nightmare that's stuck with me, though there are some others I can remember. Just certain visuals, like the image of a classmate with a snake slithering through a hole in their head. Or one nightmare where I was chasing a skeleton, but I was the skeleton, as well (see, dream logic - makes no sense). Or the one where my family lived in an apartment building and to get to our apartment, I had to push a whale out of the hallway (okay, this one is less scary).

This is probably why I always try to keep any dream sequences I write weird and symbolic, rather than going "Ooooh, this is a dream, oooooh!" (That was my textual equivalent of the Wayne's World waving arms thing.)