The haunting of Green Street

I flinched awake to the buzzing darkness not yet knowing why I had woken up.  In what seemed like a lifetime my brain made furious calculations as to what was going on, in reality it was only seconds.  My consciousness was telling me a hundred things, but one thing was constant, I had just had a nightmare.  My brain, with no sense of reason at all, told me that my arm hanging out of the bed would be better off under the covers, so it was rushed back in.  A feeling of dread overcame me, something wasn’t right, I pulled the covers over my head and waited for a minute or so before emerging to see if the room was OK.  Of course everything was fine, the dim orange light from outside permeated the curtains and the familiar sound of Somerfield’s air-con unit hummed away.  I lay on my back and tried to remember what I had dreamt, it was bitty but I could remember some parts.

In my dream I was at my parents’ house, which is the tidiest house you’ll ever find, but it was in a state of disarray.  Items littered the normally tidy rooms and everything was tilted at obscure angles.  I was trying to find my daughter but she was nowhere to be seen.  As I progressed through the various rooms I was stopped by rows and rows of regimented toy soldiers filling all the floor space, there was a girl moving about but it wasn’t my daughter.  Once she was sitting on the floor, head bowed, then she was moving around in freakish movements.  The last I remember was being in my parents’ very long hall as all hell broke loose, then I woke up, phew!

Okay, I can hear you all asking about the game connection here, well let me illustrate how all of this came about.  Really it was all a series of events and occurrences that form a dream but at the time are completely unrelated.  During the morning I had been downloading games related ring-tones to my phone and the one that had impressed me with its freak out-ability was the witch crying from Left 4 Dead, that was part one.

Later that day I had been playing the F.E.A.R. 2 demo and I suppose the appearances of Alma must have stuck in my mind, but at the time I didn’t think twice about it.  The next events were, at the time funny, but also quite freaky.  My daughter, Shannon, was having a shower and I said to her to wait for a few minutes until I got a towel.  When I went back into the bathroom she was sitting at the bottom of the shower cubicle, legs crossed, head bowed under the cascading water and looked just like the witch from Left 4 Dead, I laughed nervously.  She came out the shower and got dried, I told her that she needed to brush her hair but she insisted that I do it.  Her hair was still damp and after a few minutes of brushing I told her to turn around so I could brush her fringe, she turned round and her damp straight hair made her look just like Alma from F.E.A.R. 2.  I suppose I was now officially a bit freaked.

Of course, at the time nothing that had happened during the day was connected in my mind, they were all just a series of happenings.  The bigger picture now has to rear its head though, how are games within a horror genre affecting people maybe younger or more susceptible to the imagery on show?  I am of a strong will and not easily frightened but I still hate the feeling of a nightmare, this nightmare in particular was so obviously games induced, I could shrug it off after rationalising it, but what if you can’t shrug it off?  Of course all the games have age ratings and I’m not really saying that ten year olds are playing these games, maybe they are, but us older folk get freaked out too sometimes.  I would never dream of letting Shannon see or play any of these games until she is old enough to understand them better.  That said though, when I told her of my dreams and the things that had happened she was happy to recreate the hairstyles etc.  I told her that she reminded me of a girl on the cover of a game,

“What game?” she asked me.

I tried to explain about Alma and the cover of the game,

“Oh yeah I know that one,” she said ” I saw that on a poster in Game.”

It just shows that as much as we try to protect our kids from things we deem inappropriate, the imagery is still out there in the bigger world for them to see.  I hope she handles it better than her dad!

[audio:http://ready-up.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/witch_crying.mp3]