Last night, I was tagged in one of those “five fun facts about me” things that’s been going around Instagram. Now, I like to think outside the box when it comes to those things. I feel boring when I say “I love birthday cake flavored anything”, or “I have a rare phobia of eyes” (both of which are true by the way), so I try to think of more interesting things to share.
Last night I remembered how, for most of my childhood, I believed I had somehow brought a demon dog from a nightmare I had into existence, and that it was living in my basement.
It’s actually a pretty interesting story.
I was either seven or eight when I had the dream. My biggest fear at the time was a character I’d seen on TV while my cousin was visiting. (The same cousin whose viewing of Reading Rainbow made me believe you had to go through a mummification process to become an adult, actually.) His name was Gooey Gus, the Slime Monster, and, at the time, I’d never been more scared of anything in my life.
He’s a real charmer, right? (Anyone else out there remember the show Ghostwriter? It was actually quite interesting for a kid who liked to write. I came to like it very much as I got older.) I have no idea what it was about this character that got to me so much, but he’s one of the first things I remember ever making it hard for me to sleep at night.
So, it’s only natural that my fear of this character would spawn a nightmare.
It’s obviously been many years since I had this dream, so some of it is quite fuzzy, but I can clearly picture quite a bit of it.
It started out in a school, but a school that had some sort of outdoor walkway. (Years later I would realize it actually looked quite a bit like my middle school, which I’d have had no way visualizing at the time.) I can’t recall what role the walkway played in my dream but I can see it clearly in my mind. Somehow it comes out while I’m in art class that actual slime monsters are on the loose, and are turning people into slime monsters as well, like some sort of sticky zombie apocalypse. I’m not sure if we saw them walking around outside the school or what, but I have a clear memory of an orange monster with a big green nose, wearing a tuxedo. He likely resembled a Sesame Street muppet more than a relative of Gooey Gus, but because I knew what he was, he terrified me. Some other things happen in the dream that I don’t recall, and the next thing I know, I’m in bed, and somehow I know that the orange slime monster is in the house, walking up the hallway outside my room. I hide under the covers to try and escape him, but when I look out from under the blankets, I see something even more terrifying.
There is a white dog, probably more of a wolf but in my childhood he was always referred to as The Husky. But this is no ordinary dog. He is thrashing about, head protruding from under my pillow, snapping at me with teeth that look like they could slice through bone.
The shock immediately wakes me and I call for my mother. For many years she would go on to tell the story of how I was so terrified when she found me, that my shaking was vibrating the bed and the room smelled like sweat. We talked about the dream, and when it was clear I wouldn’t be going back to sleep anytime soon, she let me get up. My father was just about getting ready to leave for work and I remember telling him about the dream as well. But as I sat on the couch, waiting for my mother to come back to me after making sure my father was set for the day, that’s when things started to get really weird.
I was sitting facing the hallway. The very hallway where I’d heard the now almost forgotten orange slime man lurking in my dream. On the wall in that hallway were a light switch, the thermostat, and some little decoration of my mother’s. As I sat there, scared and sleep-deprived, I still swear to this day that I saw the three items on the wall merge to form the face of The Husky. I know now it was really just some sort of hallucination brought on by the extreme stress I was under in that moment, but from that moment on, until I became a teenager, The Husky became very real to me.
I think all kids go through some sort of a “monster under the bed” phase, and this was definitely mine, but amplified. I spent a lot of time in the basement of my childhood home, as there was a video game console, more room for toys, and more room to play when friends or cousins came to visit. One day I finally started to notice all the strange noises a boiler room makes, and I interpreted them as the feral growls of The Husky. To make matters worse, what did I find when I finally mustered up the courage to open the boiler room door?
Blood and white fur!
This was most likely due to the fact that we had a mostly-white cat with a health condition that caused his gums to bleed a lot, but to an eight-year-old with a very vivid, arguably over-active imagination, this was enough tangible evidence to make the monster from my nightmare incredibly, terrifyingly real.
My childhood best friend was also incredibly imaginative and into spooky and magical things as I was, so she only helped fuel the fire when she came over to play in my basement one afternoon and I filled her in on everything. For several years we would dedicate most of the time spent in my home to “hunting” The Husky and trying to prove his existence to people like my mother, who claimed the growls were nothing more than the hot water heater. Anything strange that happened, or anything that went wrong, we blamed on him. If a favorite toy went missing, The Husky had taken it. If we felt a breeze, that was The Husky making his presence known. He truly was the horror icon of my entire childhood. I wish I still had some of the cassette tapes we recorded on an old Fisher Price tape player of mine, as we desperately hunted the basement for proof of The Husky’s existence.
The Husky was finally laid to rest at a sleepover in my basement when I was thirteen. It was actually the first time we’d ever slept down there, and despite being older, we were still quite imaginative and wondered what The Husky might do in the middle of the night, if he really was down there. We did have a strange experience that night in which we heard what sounded like a dog collar shaking, a person yelling, and a strange beam of light coming from the side of the room that had no windows whatsoever (near the boiler room, too!), but for some reason, we got onto the subject of The Husky late into the evening, and decided we felt sorry for him because he just needed love. I don’t remember how, exactly, we came to that conclusion, but in that moment we believed we “freed” The Husky and that was really the last time he ever came up in conversation, at least as if he were real. In reality, we were getting older, and growing apart, but it gave me some kind of weird closure to the horror story that haunted me for so long.
It’s just very interesting to me now, to think that if someone asked me, “What scared you the most when you were a kid?”, the answer wouldn’t be some movie monster or anything I saw in the media. There were plenty of things that scared me, but nothing that made even half the impact that The Husky did, a strange monster that spawned from my own mind, through no conscious thought of my own, and became a terrifying part of my reality for about six years.
To this day I continue to be fascinated by dreams, but no dream I’ve had since, even the most disturbing ones I’ve had since delving into horror and true crime and the like, has ever had the effect on me that this childhood nightmare of a seemingly demonic dog did.
Stay spooky, my friends.
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