The dream I had tonight has been a recurring sort that I didn’t recognize as such until it took a bit of a turn toward horror. This was maybe the second or third time I found myself an idle witness on this boat.
It seemed a time of oil lamps lighting the dark. The ship was either steam or coal powered, something of the sort. Nothing electric, as it barreled along some iteration of the Mississippi. The ship ran its course as usual. The days were calm, but as night fell this time around, I recognized that there was something cyclical about this dream as well as the ship’s journey. I get the impression that I was a musician of some sort. Perhaps that is where my feeling of ‘witness’ came from. And I only got the sense of being addressed once in this dream.
When night had fallen, a family was talking amongst themselves, maybe with a few other passengers, as another ship was coming into view in the distance. The ship was a degree of visibly distressed, orange and fogged auras clouding it from view. The mother in the family mentioned someone. Lindsay Welles. It was at that moment that I and the daughter realized something. The daughter accused her mother of being the only one who remembered who Lindsay Welles was before she rushed to the helm of the ship. Maybe I was the daughter. Or maybe I just knew what foreboding the name entailed before the daughter had a mind to rush to steer the ship’s course from disaster.
The ship I occupied picked up speed and veered away from the ship that was now very apparently on fire. People were falling and jumping overboard to escape the flames and some other hidden danger. The ship wasn’t yet sinking when we went past it, but the flames didn’t seem to be the only thing filling its ghostly passengers will terror.
The other ship didn’t seem to notice us until we were nearly past, when Lindsey Welles was either uttered or thought about again. And when it was, the damned snapped their attention to us in an instant and tried to jump aboard our ship. None made it, and I fear that if any had that, we would have been encased within whatever sad loop I surmise they were reliving. Though, I am convinced that we were also living in some less fatal loop, but that remains to be seen.
The ship docked that same night, and I woke with a start, wary of rolling over and potentially seeing some drenched and decayed spirit I’d dredged from the river bottoms of my dreams into my current present. We’ll see.