Martin Claus
German, 1892–1975
Crime fiction reader
Fliegende Blätter magazine
March, 1933

One of the nifty things I learned about and experienced while I was suffering from severe depression and my sleep cycle was all over the map was Hyper Realistic Dreams or Vivid Dreaming.

Some of my dreams at that time were so vivid and detailed that I remember some of them to the finest detail to this day. If that sounds cool, it isn’t. It felt like my brain spent the day trying to find a home to store these images because they kept popping up hours after I was awake. It wore me out.

My Doctor told me that there were several things that caused Hyper Realistic Dreams, but nobody really understood WHY they happened.

During the Covid-19 shutdown I remember reading that people were going on line to talk about Vivid dreams and the idea was that people were anxious, depressed and their sleep schedules were probably off so their they were having these vivid dreams.  If you’re stuck at home all day, clocks don’t matter. It’s not a good idea to do walk down that road when your normal day to day life does follow a schedule.

So I’m mentioning hyper realistic dreams because one of those dreams that I had during the dark ages of my depression was about a library.

There were shelves and shelves of books. In this poorly lit library with smooth metallic walls and warped wooden floors. The reading tables were all wooden and  had lion’s feet.T he edges of the tables were trimmed with were rows and rows of gargoyle’s with cat’s faces. Their eyes were all closed.

All of the books had locks on them.   The locks were small and golden- they looked like coins.

I pulled one of the books off of the shelf and I was surprised because the combination for the lock was on the cover and as a rule, I can’t read numbers in my dreams- but this time I could.

I worked the combination on the lock  and before the book opened I could see the title:

Strange Tales From Duwamish Bay

by

A.M. Moscoso

So here is the weird part. I read the story word for word in my dream and when I woke up I remembered all of it. I used it  that week for an on-line writer’s group project that I was in back in 2005

There’s something buried in the Gardener’s Shed and why would someone bury something that wasn’t dead yet?

The thing in the shed isn’t buried very deep, so if you were to crawl over the dead fall in front of the door and were able to push your way through he matted cobwebs and you didn’t mind the smell of rotting leaves and small unburied creatures you’d find  there under the window a slightly raised mound of earth.

Were you to look at the raised mound long enough and the light somehow managed to find it’s way through the little panes of glass covered with dust and dirt you’d think someone was lying there on their side with one arm cradling their cheek and the other laying comfortably on their side.

Wouldn’t you?

If you brought a flashlight and the beam was bright you might think you could see something wrong with the entire left side of the sleeping figure’s face. You might think that maybe that the face was gone, smashed in by something like that shovel in the corner.

Isn’t that right?

They might wonder what you were doing back there in a rotting shed behind the Manor House in the dead of Night, they might see you take the shovel and try to smooth and pound that little raised mound of Earth flat.

That’s what they’d see wouldn’t they?

So I must ask you again, why would you bury something that is not dead yet?

Go ahead you can tell me.

Just keep your hands were I can see them.