Newsgroups: alt.folklore.ghost-stories
Subject: Strange Sounds & Dream
From: fuzzy.stone@kotc.com
Date: Tue, 21 Feb 95 23:51:00 PST
About a year and a half ago, my little brother stayed with me for about a month. He slept on my antique velvet couch in the living room. He often spent the night at friend’s houses, or stayed out very late. The couch has a wooden frame, and creaks quite a bit when someone is moving around on it.
I woke up one morning and heard the couch creaking, even though my brother said he was going to be spending the night at a friends. The creaking was obvious, so I knew that he must have come home. I went to my living room to say good morning to him, but when I turned the corner, the creaking stopped, and I saw that the room was empty, and that I was the only one in the apartment.
A few nights later, I had a very strange dream. We all have strange dreams, and we all have very vivid dreams from time to time. This dream was so lifelike and vivid that it does not compare to any other “vivid” dream I have ever had. I really, even after waking up, felt as if I had lived the dream, down to every small detail. The dream went like this:
When the dream took place, it was about a month before my 19th birthday. I dreamt that I was leaving my apartment to visit my friends who lived in a house a couple of blocks away, like I always did. On my way out, I took my mail out of my mailbox. On the walk over, I went through some of the mail, normal junk, bills; but there was one strange letter which I got to just as I was arriving at my friends’ house.
The envelope had a return address I did not recognize, and was old looking, and yellowed, although the date stamp was current. When I opened the letter, what I saw shocked me so much that I screamed and dropped the letter.
The letter was written in a code that I have written in since I was 11 or 12, in real life. No one else knows this code–I use it entirely for personal notes to myself. The shock of seeing something obviously very old, and not written in my own hand, terrified me so much I started crying. One of my friends picked up the letter and put it back in my hand, while trying to calm me down.
After a short bit, I read the letter. This was difficult, because since no one else writes in my code, I have never been able to fluently read it, just write it. I no longer remember what the letter said, but at the time, I remembered it all. I do remember the important points.
The letter was from my grandfather, who died when I was two. He had written the letter and given it to a friend, and asked him to put it in the mail when I was about to turn 19. The letter basically said that he loved me very much, and thanked me for letting him stay on my couch for the past few weeks.
My grandfather was fascinated by codes, and loved to crack code-type puzzles. He died while my mother was pregnant with my little brother.
Ordinarily, I would have written this off as a strange, but explainable experience. All of the information in my dream were available to my memory–that my brother was born shortly after my grandfather died, that my grandfather was a code enthusiast. But there are a few things that nag at me. The couch sounds were real, and not a dream, and could not be explained. I have had this same couch for years, and it has never spontaneously creaked. The detail of the dream, plus the fact that there was nothing absurd about it–no frogs jumping through the living room, no one turned into a pile of silverware–that it was entirely a normal day of my life.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Has anyone had a similar experience?