Dreams

By Christina Rapley

When I was a girl, my mum told me that when she was younger she put a spell on a boyfriend that had been mean to her. She said she called to spirits and tied a piece of rope around her wrist and he got sick. When he was sick she took care of him and he was grateful, and he began to be kind to her again so she took off the piece of rope and he got better. She told me that after this happened, the spirits that had helped her would try and climb into her bed at night because they wanted their reward for helping her.

I think it's fair to say that my upbringing and some of the things that I was taught as a child have haunted a lot of my adult life. I worry a lot, I'm very imaginative, I suffer from sleep paralysis and vivid dreams. If you have never had sleep paralysis it goes a little bit like this.

At some point you become aware that you are sleeping and you can't wake up, you can't move, sometimes you can't breathe and there is something in the room with you. Its form will change from time to time, sometimes for me, it has been a shadow that I can't quite focus on that reaches all the way to the ceiling. Sometimes it is a leathery cat-like creature with red eyes that jumps on the bed and pins me down. Sometimes it looks like someone I know, usually one of my brothers but I know it's not them when it stands and looks at me with those dead, cold eyes. There aren't really words to explain the fear you feel, it feels like pure malevolence, pure evil is in the room with you.

As I said, I think that my upbringing really fucked me up.

Some people dream about normal things like going to work, or kissing someone. My dreams are fantastical, abstract, apocalyptic and often very scary. They are a jumble of places and ideas, like Alice in Wonderland falling through the rabbit hole, I walk behind the scenes of the world.

I have a few recurring dreams, and one of them is about a house I once lived in. This wasn't a normal house, it was an old, run-down boarding school that had been turned into a community house for the church I grew up in. It's fair to say this wasn't a normal church. This church has been described as a cult, and now I am grown I struggle to see it as anything else.

This church was self-professed as being radical, wild and free. It was like a 90's rave minus the booze and drugs. I was only 8 or 9 when we joined this church, but you could tell these people were different with their the mohawks and the army camo jackets with the bright red cross on the back. With the singing in tounges and the exorcisms, it was easy to believe you were part of something magical. These were 'real' Christians, they would take in the needy, the homeless, the drug addicts, the unloved and love them as Jesus would. They despised those squeaky clean Christians that didn't want to get their hands dirty. Fundamentally what they were doing was a good thing and they really believed in what they were doing.

All of the Jesus Army Houses were community houses, we would eat, sing and pray together. The sisters would sleep in one area of the house, the brothers in another. Every house had a leader and his wife. There were no tv's, there were no radios, there were no external influences at all. There were instruments to play and books to read, although the only fiction I could find in any of the houses were the Chronicles of Narnia (because they are based around Christianity), I read those books over and over again. I spent my days climbing trees, exploring the old buildings and playing the piano. From the outside, this looks like an idyllic upbringing, and maybe it would have been if it wasn't for the fear.

When you are an imaginative child, if you are taught that the monsters in your imagination are real by the adults you trust, obviously this affects you. To be told that they aren't monsters, but something much worse, that they are demons, that want to torture you for all eternity in the fiery depths of hell.

I remember being really afraid as a child. Combine that fear, imagination and belief with the fact that I was often living in big creepy old houses that wouldn't be out of place in the Haunting of Hill House and it's no surprise that I thought I saw a lot of strange (or paranormal) things when I was a child.

The house I dream about the most is Abundant Grace, all of the houses had weird names like that. Abundant Grace was an old boarding school, it was big and full of empty rooms. There were classrooms with the wooden desks and chairs still sitting there like they were waiting for the children to come back and sit in them.

There were cubicle toilets with flickering florescent lighting, if I wanted to go to the toilet in the night I would have to creep down those dark hallways, past the empty classrooms and turn on that light. It would flash on and off a few times before it stayed on with that familiar hum. I would go to the end closest to the wall and pull my feet up in case something grabbed me from under the cubicle. Like I said, I was an imaginative child.

When I dream it's always about one particular staircase, or it starts on that one staircase. That staircase always scared me the most. At the top on one side were the cubicle toilets, at the bottom of the stairs, to the right there was a sports hall with a stage and a heavy navy curtain. The laundry room was underneath the stairs and it had those big industrial washing machines, big enough to put a person inside. To me, they always looked like they wanted to gobble you up.

In my dream, I stand, frozen at the top of the stairs. Standing still in that eerie quiet in the middle of the night, where every footstep creaks and the house moans as only an old building can. I imagine someone behind me and start to run and as I run I feel hands closing on empty air just behind me. I run down the stairs and to my left, I don't back. Past the open door to the moonlit gym. I push through double doors and into the hallway that is always cold. Past a room to my left and then a room to my right. I don't stop to see if the doors are open or closed, I just run. Then I push through more double doors into the dining hall. Through one more door and finally I am there. I can hear the adults in the room, they are having a meeting and praying in tongues. I know I'm not welcome but I know if I don't go into the room and get my mum then I'm going to have to make the long journey back towards those empty rooms where the shadows thicken and where something lurks, watching and waiting for me to walk past. I wake up.

Abundant Grace was full of stairs, and you could get from one end of the building to the other through a jumble of oddly built rooms without going to the ground floor. Stairs seem to haunt a lot of my dreams, and even if I'm not there, the house is always kind of there.

When I look back to how I grew up I'm not sure if I'm better or worse off for it. Yes, I was afraid, but I got to see another side of life that people don't usually see. The community in the houses meant you didn't feel lonely, there was nothing 'worldly', nothing was wasted, everything was shared. But there was a huge emphasis on demonic activity and exorcisms.

The community households across the UK would meet for three-day meetings in Northampton a few times a year, it was kind of like a festival. The Jesus Army kids would love it because we would see our friends that lived miles away for a few days. The fleet of camouflage minibuses with the bright red crosses on the side would be lined up side by side and we would meet to worship in the main tent.

The morning meetings would be quite sedate, songs, ministry and prayers. Everyone would go to one of the community houses in the afternoon to eat lunch and then we would go back for the evening meetings. This is when shit would really kick-off. There would be another meeting, much more urgent in its tone, about the battle we were fighting, about what needed to be done. And then there would be music, dancing and people on stage. When the crowd had worked itself into a kind of frenzy people would go forward for prayer. There would be people wailing, people laughing uncontrollably, people screaming as a demon was supposedly coming out of them. It was an orgy of wild emotions from every side of the spectrum.

Now I look back on it, it is strange to think of that kind of behaviour without drink or drugs.

I'm not religious in any sense. I suppose that maybe I believe in a kind of energy, but not in any kind of organised religion. I got to a point in my teens where I asked too many questions they just couldn't answer.

The leaders in that church told me I had a deliverance ministry. That I would be targetted by demons because I was their direct enemy, that I could see them in people and that my job was to free people from them.

That's a lot to tell a child and I have always been angry that they made me so afraid. Even though I choose not to believe that now, the fear still comes to me in my dreams.

I looked up Abundant Grace recently, it's only a few hours on the motorbike to ride over to Seaford. I have always wanted to go back there and walk around that house. I wanted to see all of those old rooms, to see if they are as scary as they are in my memories. Places look so different through the eyes of a child. I was planning to ride there when I found out that the house has been torn down, I will never get to confront the place that appears so often in my dreams.

When I was writing out this story, I wondered why I was telling you all of this. Or if there even was a point to it. It's not something I ever really talk about in-depth, but it is a part of my story. And I guess I'm telling you because you never really know what a person has grown up with, what they were taught or what they believed, what was normal to them. It's important to remember to wonder about a person's history because if you take the time to listen, you can find out things you never would have expected.