Creepy Classics & Monster Bash News

Growing up watching lots of monster movies and reading a lot of creepy fiction can induce strange dreams. I have a friend who has dreamed of things like vampire rabbits (perhaps inspired by Monty Python's MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL or the movie NIGHT OF THE LEPUS). He also has dreamed of dragons eating him....yikes!

 

Over the years I've had a lot of scary dreams that were probably inspired by the movies I watch. But there are only a couple things that are reoccurring dream themes. Situations or places that happen again and again in my sleep. One just surreal, the other frightening.

 

In junior high school and beyond I read a lot of Ray Bradbury and H.P. Lovecraft books. Bradbury books are wondrous, Lovecraft....well, unsettling and stories that reach into odd settings and ominous places. I feel those Lovecraft stories and their atmosphere of unreal, eldritch places inspired an ongoing series in my dreams. I dream of my material grandparents house that was near a thinly wooded area near a college campus. In my dreams those woods are thick and dark and hold a large iron gated, forgotten cemetery. I walk through the gates and the crooked big tombstones and markers are covered in vines and blackened with mold and dying lichen. Not really frightening, but ominous and wondrous as I walk through. That's it. I have dreamed that time and time again.

 

I've gone back to that place. My grandparents house, long gone. Those woods, still just thin woods. No dark, deep woods and no ancient graveyard.

 

On to the more frightful reoccurring dreams that fast become nightmares. I find myself in a house. I begin to realize that the house is, itself, alive and malignant. It wants to trap and send me into panic. The windows begin opening and closing on their own (this, no doubt, inspired by a scene from THE TINGLER). The lights go out and I'm in blackness. I reach and find the light switch but it won't turn the lights on. That panic and fear hit the top on my mind's meter. The house wins and I wake up with a start. It happens a lot. Unfortunately.

 

Another inspiration on this one would be an episode of the TV show WILD WILD WEST I saw as a young boy. It involved a house that had a mind of its own called "The Night of the Man-Eating House."

 

Luckily all my dreams aren't weird or scary. I frequently find myself hanging out with celebrities. Sometimes I'm writing songs with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, I'm helping produce a Beatles recording session, I'm at the MONSTER BASH CONFERENCE and surprising everyone with special guest Lon Chaney, Jr. Sometimes working at mission control with a space flight. But those dreams aren't reoccurring like those I recounted.

 

I bet you might have reoccurring weird dreams too if you also grew up watching the things I did. Our imagination boring deep into our subconscious.

 

-Ron Adams 
Ligonier, PA 
May 2025