Nightmare

I must be feeling pretty stressed. Last night was a night of mares. I don’t remember the 1st one at all, but woke up shaking and drenched in sweat. Then I fell back to sleep and dreamed:
Nightmare 2
Time: present
Place: Erie, PA
After corresponding with my friend, Mike, I go to visit him in Erie. He takes me to see his Aunt Karen who is dying. Mike has described in e-mail and over the phone that she’s opted for this really weird procedure/manner of death. He’s disturbed by it, but she and the family agree that it’s the right thing.
She is kept in a gas station on a low scooterboard and she’s draped with a sheet. Bits of her body are removed, put into customers’ cars and driven around until they have incinerated. Then they are returned to the station.
Karen is still very much alive, though missing her legs. Some of her torso has been taken. She is weak and very thin, but she is able to recognize Mike through her sheet drape and reaches out to him. She doesn’t notice me at all and I can’t see her except for a hand which comes out from under the sheet.
We leave but later return to find three men squatting on the garage floor, sorting through some of Karen’s incinerated bits that have been returned. The remains seem to be mainly bolts, screws, nuts and bits of forged and cast metal. The men arrange them in piles, then put them into grungy old cardboard boxes. They don’t say what happens to them.
I’m fascinated and stay to help them while Mike goes to look for Karen. She’s been moved to a small room off to one side of the garage. I can’t see what she and Mike are doing, but I can hear her talking.
She is telling Mike that she and the rest of the family know all about Mike’s college days and his indiscretions. She lists off a handful of incidents that make him sound perhaps gay (dying his hair, staying the night in a friend’s room and giggling the next day) and then a bunch of things he’d done with girlfriends. He is unbelieving that she and his parents could possibly know all this, but she’s giving him the details, so obviously she does. The conversation gets darker and weirder and she is starting to accuse Mike of being a force of evil for doing things like being a DJ and acting in plays. She ends by singing a section of a song with an 80s feel (which was familiar in the dream, but I cannot recall it now). The person in the lyrics sounds like it could be Mike, and the song somehow emphasizes Karen’s point about evil.
At that point, I run in to rescue Mike from this awful situation. Karen is lying on a cot and is no longer draped with a sheet. Her hair is long and graying blonde, but thin and falling out as if she’s malnourished. She skin is loose and translucent, hanging off her body in folds. Her face is sunken, her body is frail but she has a dull gleam in her eyes.
When I come into the room, she shrieks and reaches out forcefully with her one remaining arm to grab me. I pull back before she can touch me. She accuses me of being an evil influence who’s ruined Mike and scourged the planet. Her arm is flailing and she continues to reach for me. Somehow I move nearer without her grabbing me and I take hold of her head—palming the top of it like a basketball.
How I know to do this is unclear (it is a dream, after all) but while holding her head, I start to pull my hand away. My hand leaves her head slowly, with a force resisting it. I wrench a white, maggoty homunculus from her head. It looks vaguely like a stubby sock money, actually, but it’s really pissed.
Mike recognizes it and calls it The Decomposer. Without the homunculus, Aunt Karen is now dead. I drop the horrible thing.
We run out to the parking area toward Mike’s family’s dark green SUV. It’s not quite like any SUV I’ve ever seen—the bottom is dripping with black rubber loops and trailers, like the truck had been dipped in a swamp and congealed.
The remote beeps but it won’t unlock the car to let us in. This vehicle is on the side of good; I have been deemed evil and it won’t behave if I’m around. All the while we struggle to get into the truck and leave, The Decomposer is chasing us.
Somehow we trick the car into opening and we get in. There’s a third person with us–maybe Mike’s sister or his wife. It’s a woman, but I’m not sure who; perhaps she was waiting in the truck for us. The truck won’t start—it bucks and stutters trying to shake me out. Again, it is somehow fooled and it starts. We drive off with The Decomposer following us and howling.
-end of dream-