Forgotten Spaces

There’s this room in my head, filling the dark shadow of my subconscious, only taking shape in my dreams and nightmares. It’s forgotten despite me knowing it’s there, hidden by a wall, blocked by a door, material without entrance, and still a place that exudes a mysterious aura that begs me to step inside. 

My earliest memory of this place is that it looms at the top of a set of back steps, as if to a detached suite. I want to see what's in the room but the door has a bike in front of it and I am too small to move this hindrance. So while in that dream I never glimpsed the room's secrets I felt its presence, dark, unknowable, and somehow a little dangerous. As if by the simple fact that no one had been in there in a while that meant something ominous had crept in. For years that pressure would continue around the spontaneously emerging portals to these spaces - cold primal-brained fear at stepping just shy of the realms threshold - yet the calling to stand and wonder at the edge of safety. Mainly the terrain before me would take the shape of an attic, a huge tall ceiling lined with boxes like stalagmites and from whose rigid darkness anything could be watching me. In the dreams where I dared enter, there would be a sweat coating my dream self - genuine unease that if whatever lurked in the shadows caught me I would be in real trouble. 

Sometimes there would be motion, just out of sight, barely discernible yet with the clear intent that I was being not only observed but followed. In these dreams I would ponder what hid from me - could it be the proverbial monster under the bed - or - since this is taking place all within my subconscious could it be some truly dark memory? What if this space was home to something I’d buried deep, hidden in a box, and wished for myself never to recall? Or, that this dusty land might be home to all the unease, dread, and paranoia that my waking brain had to place somewhere. 

Back in the real world, there are/were a few places that mirrored the dream portals, real brick and plaster spaces that teased at my youthful imagination. First is the attic of my Passaic home, where I spent my earliest years climbing on every surface like a little wobbly-legged spider monkey. In my bedroom closet, accessible only by climbing up an old radiator cover I could peek my eyes into the odd attic space above my mother's bedroom. This attic floor was my mother's bedroom ceiling. I recall it being a room all into itself, if finished with drywall and a floor it could have been a bedroom. And yet, it spread out empty for a good 30 feet. I could see the unfinished ceiling had a small hole in the roof that let in just a single glint of sunlight and from that my small eyes could make out boxes on the other side of the attic, they were hidden away half placed into what I assume is where the floor would begin to turn into the lower bedroom wall. The attic didn’t make sense in that way, why would it look like there were lower tinnier rooms where the bedroom walls should be - though maybe it was a trick of the vantage point I had, and those ‘little rooms’ were the ceiling space of the bathroom and kitchen. It took all my wary restraint not to crawl over the splintering wood and fiberglass to see what lay beyond. Child me did not want to risk falling through the ceiling of my mother's bedroom even at the slight possibility of finally finding out what was hidden.

The second space is at my Nana’s house, in the attic-turned-bedroom I spent much of my childhood assembling toys in and then later lived in during college. This odd slanted ceiling room was home to many odd closets, only accessible through doors that nearly blended into the wood paneling that covered my room. Some of these closet spaces led to each other via poorly carved out pathways my father and his siblings had fashioned back when they’d play hide and seek as kids. Filled with the treasures of toys and books from my father's childhood, they felt like mysterious burrows. 

In all of my dreams these alluring expanses portray the attributes of disregard and disrepair, once of use to someone but now only home to the spiders, mice, and what waits. There is something especially frightening about a locked-away room, walled off, hidden. To a child, that element of buried space embodied a forbidden place to play but as an adult, I am left wondering - why is no one here?

Now in the modern day, of late, I’ve been able to map out and explore these forgotten foreboding places and feel mainly at ease walking whatever weird configuration they take. I realized that no matter how slowly I traversed the rows of boxes - nothing ever jumped out at me and sent me away. So, if nothing was here to hurt me, why not make use of the new real-estate? The attic, basement, and sealed-off bedrooms - all became a cozy place of solitude to nest in. 

But sometimes…. Rarely, as if to make it seem so unlikely it’s okay to forget - there is something waiting for me. Harmless at first, until I turn my back. We’ve all seen the horror movie trope of the old Ventriloquist dummy being found, it funnily falling over until the main character looks back and finds only dusty footprints where it once lazily sat. Transitioning from tranquility - to the knowledge I’m being hunted. Or, that I’ve let something escape out of the portal I opened. 

Last night was one such dream and it began with the comfort I’ve grown to radiate when finding these secret doors in my dreams. One moment the dream was going on as normal, until by chance I lifted away a box and found a gap in the wall. The portal was only an inch wide, a gap in some lath and plaster, but through it I could see an entirely new side of the home I was in. Excellent, I thought to myself and began digging my fingers into the dry rotted wall and pulling back pieces of wood so I could enter. Passage cleared, I stepped in. To my joy, there was indeed a whole bonus room, bathroom included! Gadzukes the possibilities I could have with 600 more square feet! Sure there was some old furnishing to clear out, and lots of dust and webs to clean but dang what a find. Stepping out of the new realm to grab some cleaning supplies I felt a swift wind at my back, and mid-turn - five large shades zipped past me as if on wheels. Rolling giants whose bodies looked like stuffed suits. In a flash they were past me and gone, disappearing into the home to do…. whatever it is they were bent on doing. Instantly I felt the gut impact, I’d let something out. I’d let them out. And whatever they planned on doing, had been waiting to do - would not be good for whoever stumbled into their path next. 

Being the creator of this dream, and in reality, this world all together I stopped time and rewound myself before the path was cleared. In my mind's eye this felt like reloading a save file before realizing a dungeon was too dangerous in a game. Alright, the path is still blocked, we’re all safe, for now. Despite resetting the world it still felt like I’d set something in motion. Whatever creatures were locked away would soon get out, it was an eventuality now. Resetting time didn’t negate that I’d broken some rule. 

But maybe I’d have enough time to find out some information. If I couldn’t learn about the room by entering it, maybe another perspective would shed some light. Peeking through the small slit didn’t show me anything besides the floating dust particles, slowly parsing through the faint light. But wait, the light wasn’t coming from me - at the far end of the space looked to be a boarded-up window. Perhaps if I could peer through those cracks or blast the entire horrid realm in sunlight these ominous anomalies would be vaporized. Quickly I set to work getting outside and pressing a ladder to that side of the home, the weird thing being that there didn’t appear to be any windows on that side of the house. Someone held the ladder for me, an ally though a fellow denizen of this dreamscape. Climbing I realized there was in fact a window, it was simply blocked by a sort of large wooden grate that connected to the roof and stuck out maybe a foot from the glass. I’d have to peer under the grate to get any glimpse of the window. From there what already had the beginnings of a bad dream became a full nightmare. The bare-chested woman nailed to the trim of the window had no legs, simply a mummified wound where its lower half had been torn away. Its arms were spread like the crucifixion nailed palm up into the home's exterior. Her ancient face lay motionless and sunken, skin like chalky paper mache. Across its chest were scrawled words I could barely discern, I began to read them aloud to the denizen below me. “Alma” is the only word I can remember getting past my lips before the corpse’s eyes shot open and its body began to writhe. Swept away from the ladder with guttural fear my eyes shot open as my dream self impacted the ground. 

“Alma” - A word that can come from the Latin root almus, which means "nourishing". It can also come from the Latin word alma mater, which means "nourishing mother". Alma mater is used as an honorific title for mother goddesses, such as Ceres or Cybele, and in Catholicism, it is also a title for Mary, the mother of Jesus.

It is clear that the shape this forgotten space took was one not meant to be entered into. So the mystery remains, why do these forgotten spaces persist in so many of my dreams? And why, after years of safely exploring do these spots sometimes manifest their mystery in true horror? By crossing into these realms am I opening Pandora’s box?