Stylized line drawing of mark playing the flute

My first nightmare

My first nightmare

Or at least the first one I remember.

I was 4 or 5 and living in Eureka, CA at the time.

In the dream, my dad and I had gone shopping at the Arcata co-op. I’d lost track of him and was wandering around looking.

There was a homeless guy in a trench coat in the store and he was behaving so strangely. Everyone was eyeing him to see what he was up to.

He kept tottering around and then, out of nowhere, fell over and stopped moving. That’s when I saw the giant wind-up key sticking out of his back.

Then the woman next to him fell over and she had a wind-up key in her back too. Soon, people were dropping right and left, all of them with keys sticking out of there backs.

I went running through the store yelling for my dad.

I rounded the corner of an aisle and there he was. The last thing I saw before I woke up was my dad, falling to the ground, wind-up key and all.