dream journal

february 7, 2021, 9:18am

I was at some sort of freak show in New Orleans where there were people in cages and all sorts of urban legends and ghost stories. One of them was about a man who was left to die, and when his body was found his skin was rotting and papery, and now he was a vengeful spirit. After walking through the freak show for a while we entered an old, dusty, grey parlour where a guy started talking about the history of this place. In the middle of him talking, a ghost appeared behind him and started taunting him, saying, "I never disappeared, I just need a body." And then his gross wet paper skin wrapped around the guy and suffocated and killed him, and the spirit took over his body. Now he looked really different. The original guy was a little round man with a long red beard, but now that his body was possessed he was really tall and lanky and he wore a tattered purple suit with a top hat, and he had no eyes.

Out of nowhere, all hell broke loose. He started killing everybody and I ran away but he kept finding me and at one point we did that really annoying thing where each of us was on one side of a pool table, and every time he tried to go around to catch me I'd move. I managed to get out of the room and the next room I entered looked the exact same except everybody was there and they were all dead. The ghost was standing in the middle of the room and he told me he liked the way I ended my story (whatever that means) and then his skin started to flake away so I took my opportunity and knocked his head off, and it was gross, like skeletal with the gross decaying skin, and the top hat stayed on his head when it came off.

I put his head on the mantle as a trophy and suddenly a few people were alive again and they came up to talk to me. They did a toast about the annual killing of the skin ghost, and there was one guy there who was just a little talking head who bounced around with no body. Whenever he wanted to talk, somebody put him on the end of a sword and lifted him up in the air. And then he turned into a certificate on the wall which said something about the town's history but I can't remember exactly what.

Then everything changed. Now it was really quiet and everyone was gone. I looked around and saw poorly made stuffed versions of all the people, including two of myself. All the people who died were there, on the floor with stuffing everywhere and one in the wall where he was thrown into it. I had the sudden realisation that the cops were going to think I killed all these people, so I killed both stuffed versions of myself and then woke up.