Post #121125 by Humuhumu on Fri, Oct 22, 2004 12:19 PM

My grandfather died when I was only two. Even though he hasn't been around to see me grow up, I've always felt very close to him. My little brother Bob was born shortly after Grandpa Hans passed away, so he sadly never got to meet him.

When I was about to turn 19, I had a small one-bedroom apartment in the University District in Seattle. (Side note unrelated to the story, but interesting for Halloween: my apartment was immediately next to the one Ted Bundy lived in when he was committing his Seattle-area murders!) My brother was 16, and was living with me for a few months that summer, sleeping on my rickety old Victorian-reproduction couch in the living room.

One night, Bob told me he was going to spend the night at his best friend Josh's place, so I was alone for the night. That night, I had the most unusual dream I have had in my entire life. This was not a dream that jumped from place to place or from theme to theme, this was not a dream where the strage was possible. This dream was entirely plausible, and occured in real time.

In my dream, I woke up in the morning, a bright summer day. I got dressed, and as was my routine, I picked up my mail from the mailbox downstairs, and proceeded to walk to the house my friends lived in a few blocks away. While I was walking, I went through my mail, opening bills, tossing junk in garbage cans I passed--exactly what I would have done in real life. Just as I was nearing the front porch of my friends' house, I came to a letter that was handlettered, and came from a local address I did not recognize.

When I opened the envelope, inside I found a letter that was obviously on rather old paper. When I unfolded the letter, I saw that it was written in my code.

This requires a moment of elaboration: in real life, I have a code that I write notes to myself in when I don't want others to see what I'm writing. Nothing major, just when I'm sitting in a business meeting and I want to remember to buy tampons later, I write my note on my paper in code. I created the code when I was twelve. Since it's for notes to myself, no one else knows the code. I can write in it very quickly, but I can't read it very quickly, as usually I just have to glance at the note and I remember what it was about without having to decode it. I found out after I created the code (but before this dream) that my grandfather was a cryptography enthusiast.

Okay, back to the dream: so I've openned this mysterious letter and seen the code, which is not written in my hand, and I freak out a bit. One of my friends is in the living room and sees that I'm upset and have a letter in my shaking hands. He takes the letter from me to see what's going on, but obviously cannot read it. After a few moments, I calm down enough to start slowly reading the letter.

The letter is from my grandfather. He explains that he wrote the letter when he knew he was dying (lung cancer), and gave it to a friend, asking him to track down my address and mail it just before my 19th birthday. In the letter, he tells me how proud he is of me, that he watches over me and loves me. He closes by thanking me for letting him sleep on my couch for the past few months.

So, in my dream, I'm pretty much a puddle of tears reading this letter. My friends hold me to calm me down a bit, and that's where the dream ends.

When I awoke from this dream, I can hear my couch creaking. That old couch had a flimsy wooden frame, and make very loud creaking noises whenever anyone was on it, so I knew that Bob must have not spent the night at Josh's after all. As a matter of fact, as I got up out of bed and was walking to the living room, I called out to him "Bob, why didn't you stay at Josh's last..." and before I could get out the word "...night," I turned the corner to where I could see the couch and the creaking immediately stopped, and I found that I was alone, Bob was at Josh's.

Now, the dream--that's all things that I knew--I knew I felt close to my grandfather, I knew he was a code enthusiast, I knew Bob was born not long after after he passed away and that Bob was staying on my couch. But the bizarre, well-beyond-lucid nature of the dream and the creaking of the couch are a wee bit out of place.

And that's my favorite ghost story.