Horror Dream Diary: My Gran's Remains.

My grandmother died in 2000, which is obviously plenty of time for me to come to terms with her passing, but strangely I have had two nightmares recently that featured her. Both were within 3 months of each other, and both featured people desecrating her remains. This is not exactly a pleasant thing to dream about, and originally I decided that there was no way I would write down something so disturbing, but after a while I recognised that the dreams had a slightly comic element to them that takes the sting out of them …so here we are with my macabre (but slightly silly) tale of “My Gran’s Remains”.

In the first dream I stood in the aisle of a church facing the altar. In front of me was my grandmother’s coffin. It was on a long, high table that raised it up to shoulder height. A man stood at the side of the coffin. He was dressed in a black suit and was leering at me. His eyes gleamed with wickedness. He rubbed his hands together in an extravagant way like a magician would before performing a trick. He then lifted the coffin lid slightly and reached inside with his whole arm.

He heaved on something large that was inside the coffin, and in one motion pulled out my grandmother, but minus her insides. The man had basically pulled out a Gran “body-suit” somehow leaving her bones and internal organs inside the coffin. The nearest thing I can think of that resembled this is that trick where someone yanks a tablecloth from a table leaving the crockery intact on the tabletop. This was a grotesque parody of that stunt, with my Gran’s bones being the crockery and her outer “body-suit” being the tablecloth.

I don’t know how the man did this but I found this scene utterly vile. He stood there laughing at me while my boneless grandmother flopped limply around his feet. When I woke up I felt quite sickened at what I dreamed about.

I had a second, similar dream around one month ago. Once again I was in the church from the previous dream, but this time I stood facing a wall. It had been crudely smashed open to reveal an urn that stood within the wall cavity. Somehow I knew that it contained the cremated remains of my grandmother (this is strange because I was fully aware in the dream she had actually been buried in real life).

My mother breezed into the church and tipped the urn upside down, pouring out some of the ashes into the wall cavity. She scooped some up using a small gardening spade and shovelled it into a small plastic bag. I asked her what the hell she was doing, and she explained that some of my Gran’s ashes were needed over at the hospital. Apparently “the hospital” had a collection of ornaments and semi-precious stones that they liked to display, and they favoured displaying them on a bed of somebody’s cremated ashes (apparently the colour of the ash complimented the display items perfectly). For some reason the hospital occasionally needed to renew the ashes, and this time it was my mother’s turn to get hold of some. Interestingly, when my mother explained all this to me, her tone was one of nonchalance, as if what she was doing was simply just a normal everyday occurrence. She did not seem to understand why I found her actions strange, and she found it odd that I thought she was doing something unusual.

My mother breezed back out of the church with a plastic bag containing some of my Gran’s ashes, and I turned back to look at the urn feeling very confused.

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