stalker dream

I had the creepiest, most chilling dream last night. It started out as a sort of skewed work dream: the office was a huge, open space in a dark, wooden room (not at all like my actual work place). It was almost like a re-imagined loft in a barn, with old, wooden school desks, very low lighting, a dark space above us. It wasn't scary at all; it was just dark.

But then I started to receive these menacing emails from a masked email address: they were just pictures of a shadowed male figure standing in landscapes from my childhood, mostly the wooded hill across from the farmhouse where I grew up. But the pictures were dark and vaguely sinister. If I clicked on the figure, a threatening message would pop up. My dream-boss, a pushy dude who doesn't exist in my office in real life, also started to receive these emails about me. He sort of got into an unhelpful alpha-male protective mode, but he was also weirdly dismissive about it, which didn't make me feel better at all.

And I can't even explain why it was so scary. Usually my nightmares are about running from horror movie icons (Jason Voorhees is a regular) or fighting hordes of zombies and monsters. I never saw this shadowy figure, except in the emails that he kept sending me. But this dream was so full of foreboding, so full of dread. This guy never got close enough to touch me, but it was obvious that he had evil intentions.

I woke up terrified at 4 AM. And when I finally got up for good, I was so happy to be awake and stalker-free (as far as I know).