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Let's go back almost eight years, before I knew what i was. When i was a 17 year old Puritanical virgin, with a huge self-righteous streak... When i hated myself with such a furious passion.



Take that girl, fresh out of high school, and throw her into a semester of community college... With no real relationship experience and maybe one or two friends on campus, if that. Now, give her the attention of someone genuinely handsome and older... what a naive little girl i was then. I knew nothing of being as i am now and was about to find out the hard way...

It's kinda unusual to see ghosts, you really have to want to see them. Most are a product of imagination and urban legend. So the skeptic in me says...but then I've seen a few things that would turn your hair gray so maybe I'm wrong. Actually I know I'm wrong, there's far too much stuff out there to discount alot of things. (this does not mean i believe in bigfoot, that's been proven a hoax, the loch ness monster? eh, i'll plead the fifth.) I will state that belief is a powerful thing, it gives power to the unseen, both sides draw from it. But i'm not going to go into that. I was going to talk about my ghost, or at least the one that seems to like me anyway.



When I'm not in front of this infernal box, doing something actually important to my survival, or hanging with my homies, I can often be found around the Korean Bell or walking the part of Paseo del Mar between Gaffey and Western. I'm surpried more people don't hang out at the Bell, it's very peaceful up there. Often as not I'll take a notebook and a few pens up there and write or watch the clouds and seagulls fly by. I usually don't see him until after dark, though i've seen him twice during daylight hours, once in the early morning and once just before sunset.



I'd describe him as about 21-25, dark hair and light skin. His face is maddeningly familiar, but I can't quite place it. He's usually wearing a hooded sweatshirt, dark jeans, and gray sneakers, though once, i thought I saw him in a heavier jacket during a particularly cold run. When I'm at the Bell, he sits on a bench a little ways away from my perch on the steps and appears to be drawing. Walking, he's standing on a curve overlooking a cliff watching the ocean. Most of the time he'll just fade away, but sometimes he'll start to walk towards me with a smile on his face, arms outstretched as if he expects me to run into them. Sometimes I start to and almost reach him before he vanishes...like smoke on the breeze.



In fact I saw him a few times while I was out in Arizonia. There he might just have been a mirage because he seemed transparent, almost like he was stretching to reach me. On those occasions he looked decdedly sad as well, almost as if he was trying to ask me to come home.



This same figure haunts my dreams, i can't tell you how many times I've woken up choking back from screaming a name I suddenly can't remember. I know him, I just don't know how or why. When I remember the dream, it seems I've talked to him for hours, that I've been in his arms for days. I'm beginning to wonder if my mind has just produced the whole image of him, that I'm slowly going mad and this is the manifestation of my own Drop Dead Fred. I hope not.



Ghost, for lack of a better name, is far too real for me to have come up with. I wonder who he really is...a product of my overactive imagination or someting that's really haunting me. I guess I'll never know. I've been seeing him for years, and have started to thinkof him as a guardian of sorts. Even with all that goes on out there, I have never been harmed on the cliffs or at the Bell.

I have an uneasy peace with my subconscious about my dreams. Well, actually it's more like Cold War Europe. Between the nightmares and the other dreams it's getting a little difficult to cope with.



I could almost say I prefer nightmares. Why? Because fear can be fought. Sometimes it's really tooth and nail, but it can be fought. I have some deep-seated fear in certain areas...which causes my subconscious to run me ragged whilst I sleep. I fear the dark, being locked in, rejection, loss of family. I stopped fearing death. I fear being alone the most. It's a baseless fear, but a very real one. I have some very good friends who's presence has helped here, but there's always my fear that they're going to just disappear. I fear losing more family. It doesn't look like anyone's going to drop dead on me but after the last few years it wouldn't surprise me. Rejection. I know this foe well. It rears it's ugly head alot. The dark and being locked in are part of the same fear, the fear that I'll never get out...that no one's coming to rescue me. That I'll die forgotten and shut away from everyone I care about. I often wake up fighting back a sceam from a nameless fear as well, one I can never remember awake.



The dreams are almost worse in a way. I can't shake some of them. Said dreams are extremely pleasant but well, uncomfortable, to think about while awake. There's nothing wrong with the dreams themselves, it's the person in them. There's nothing wrong with him either, it's just...I don't know. The dreams are a little too plastic, as all dreams are, but I want the life depicted in them. It's not something I think I'll ever find, that life.



Dreams are castles in the air. Pleasant bits of fact and fiction all intertwined. Everyone dreams when they sleep, though it may be tough to remember the next morning. Nightmares are more of the same, without the pleasantness. It's all in the mind really. A dream can be born from a wish, a simple thought, a complement, something wondeful that has happened or is about to. A Nightmare is created when we fail, or are presented with somethign we fear or can't handle. It's basically the same process with two different outcomes.