Dream Journal Ultimate
Date: 10/13/2025
By amandalyle
I was standing on the landing, hand on the doorknob of my son Alex’s bedroom. After a lifetime of box rooms, he finally had his little attic hideaway. King of the house — and rightly so. I pushed open the door and hollered, “Monkey!” Not my son. Monkey was our ginger-and-white tomcat — technically Maxi’s cat. He named him. I can’t take responsibility for that. Still, it was a step up from his first choice, “Tyrone.” Imagine yelling that down the street at dinnertime. No offence to any Tyrones. Two steps at a time — always rushing — I called for Monkey again. I knew he was up here somewhere, snoozing in some nook or cranny. Then I saw him — frozen. Back arched, ears pinned, tail puffed like a striped feather duster. That’s when I realised: my arms. They’d become ridiculously long. Comically so. Like Mr. Tickle’s longer-armed cousin. Every move I made swept half of Alex’s room with it — lamps, Lego, laundry. Monkey darted around the room in absolute terror. Eyes wild, quaking in fear. I tried to shrink back, to calm him, but my giant limbs only made things worse — a hurricane of destruction. And just as Monkey took refuge under the bed, everything faded to black and a new scene shot into action. I was in my mother-in-law’s kitchen. I’d offered to make tea — as good houseguests do — when two enormous dogs came bounding towards me. Before I could even register the danger, I was under siege. Hot breath. Tangled fur. Slobber. And then one of them licked my mouth. Its tongue actually went in. I gagged, dry-heaved, tried to scream, but it was one of those silent screams — the kind that evaporates in your throat. My mother-in-law finally pulled them off, tutting. “Get off, you silly scoundrels.” I lunged for the sink, rinsing my mouth under cold water, desperate to erase that foul, meaty breath. My efforts went in vain. My mouth tasted like a rotten corpse. To my relief, the scene collapsed in on itself although the taste of something toxic still lingered. Now I was walking through a park with Mum. A warm autumn day — golden light filtering through the trees, that perfect crispness in the air. Peaceful, until I walked face-first into a spider web. And cue the panic. Full ninja mode. Arms flailing, spinning like a windmill on caffeine. Mum didn’t help as she pointed out that the spider that was now crawling over my body was, in fact, the biggest she had ever seen. “Get it off, get it off!” I screamed. Mum backed away, her hands raised like she was surrendering to the situation. I dropped and rolled — straight off the side of a hill. A barrel that had lost control. Tumbling, spinning, I crash-landed into a bush. My bracelet was gone — a tragedy, apparently — but I dusted myself off and carried on. There was a marquee nearby. Inside: a beautiful white cat with dabs of black, lapping up attention. Not like scaredy-puss Monkey, who doles out affection on a strictly rationed schedule. Then Maxi appeared out of nowhere, as sons tend to do in dreams, scrolling through his phone. I called him over, eager to show him my feline friend, but he wasn’t remotely interested. He just muttered something unintelligible and went back to his scrolling. Typical. That’s when I spotted it — my lost bracelet, hanging from a branch. It was nothing special. A simple black lace threaded with dice. I picked it up, turning it over in my palm, chuffed to bits. I clenched my palm and the scene shifted. I was half awake, half dreaming, lying next to my husband. A phone vibrated between us. “Who would be calling at this hour?” I thought, dread prickling at my chest — until it hit me. I must be dreaming. And just like that, I rose — literally. Rising from my body, floating upward like a slow-motion resurrection. Through the ceiling, into darkness. When the dark cloak finally dropped, I found myself floating above a street I didn’t quite recognise. It was dusk. The sky had taken on a purple hue. The world was wrapping up for the day. Down below, I could see a limp figure lying in the middle of the road. Intuition told me it was my friend, Liz. Alarmed, I swooped down and scooped her up like an eagle, clutching her limp weightless body in my arms. Weightless? I pulled back to discover the body I had been clutching wasn’t Liz at all. It was a sodding china doll. Cold. Haunting. Its black beady eyes fixed on me. I dropped it, horrified. As soon as it crashed to the ground, Liz miraculously emerged from the splayed fragments of porcelain — alive, running. Only now her dainty size 5’s were gone — replaced by great galumphing paddles, twice the size and half the grace. Flat-footed and furious, she thundered off, drumming the earth like a marching band gone rogue. The slap and thud of her feet ricocheted through the night, echoing off lampposts and moonlight alike. I tore after her — through streets and cobbled lanes that grew older with every turn — Victorian, Georgian, Tudor — until we burst into a tavern, its doorway far too small for modern humans. Inside, warmth. Laughter. Firelight dancing on flushed faces. I ached to stay, pull up a pew, drink ale from a goblet. But Liz was a woman on a mission. She burst through the back, nearly taking the door with her. I followed in her gigantic footsteps and we ended up at a waterpark — flumes twisting like candy-coloured serpents. She was gone. A needle in a haystack situation. Too many places to hide, not enough eyes. I shrugged and picked a chute from the spaghetti maze. But, I hadn't read the manual. I slid down a chute that promptly inverted itself, sending me through the underside of the tube. Funny how dream logic works. Then my eyes homed in on some hoops dangling from the rafters — and why not? I flew up, swinging and somersaulting like an Olympic gymnast with no regard for gravity. Linkin Park’s ‘Bleed It Out’ blasted through unseen speakers, and I felt it — the rush, the rhythm, the pure ridiculous joy of it all. I was performing for an audience who was flat out uninterested. Then I heard something no mother ever wants to hear. A baby screaming. An ear-splitting shriek. My primal mother instincts kicked in like a soccer punch to the guts and I plummeted straight back down to Earth. Suddenly, I was awake again — or close enough — heart hammering, feet on the floor, sprinting to Alex’s door. I threw it open. Silence. No baby. No shrieking. Just my thirteen-year-old son, king of his attic hideaway, fast asleep in his bed. I stood there for a long time, arms hanging at their normal, human length, the house still around me. The echo of that scream — or maybe of motherhood itself — slowly fading into quiet. And then it struck me — how every scene had been its own small disaster. Arms that couldn’t stop breaking things. Dogs I couldn’t push away. A spider I couldn’t escape. A friend I couldn’t catch. A son I could no longer cradle. Every version of me, flailing to hold on to something that didn’t want to be held. Maybe that’s what dreams are — rehearsals for letting go. Monkey under the bed. Liz out the door. Alex growing older in his attic hideaway while I hover on the landing, hand on the doorknob, always the same thought on repeat: He’s safe. He’s safe. I took one last look at him, then closed the door softly behind me. The house exhaled. And somewhere, deep in the walls, the faint hum of a lullaby that sounded suspiciously like Bleed It Out.