Stinky Ghost (Part 1 of 3)
Last year, Mike and I moved into our current residence during the hottest summer in a long time. It was July and we had weeks of over 100 degree weather. We were running the evaporative cooler nonstop and it did little to ease the heat.
The house also stunk. Before we moved in any furniture, I cleaned the carpets. It still stunk. I cleaned them again. It still stunk. We had to move our furniture into the home because we had sold the house in West Jordan and there was no where for it to go except the new place. We had to live with the stink.
That first night in the house, I dreamt that a man was watching me sleep. It was one of those rare times when Mike slept at night beside me in the bed (he was exhausted from the move). The man was young. I immediately thought he was 24 years old. He was blond and fairly thin. He wasn’t scrawny, but he wasn’t bulked up either. He was comfortably thin. He was inconvenienced. “Where am I supposed to sleep?” I heard him say. At that moment, I woke up. I told Mike about the dream and said that the smell was that guy watching me sleep. I named him Stinky Ghost.
Stinky Ghost made sense to me much more than damaged carpets. I had cleaned those carpets thoroughly twice. It couldn’t be dog smell from the carpets from the previous residents. Plus, it didn’t smell like wet dog. Stinky Ghost smelled like dirty sweat socks. Additionally, sometimes I could smell Stinky Ghost in the living room. There was no carpeting in the living room. How could dog smell get caught in the hard wood floor?
A couple weeks after we moved in, Stinky Ghost was particularly pungent. I had been frustrated with the stench and just called out to it, “Stinky Ghost go away.” The smell went away almost immediately.
I kept dreaming about the man watching me sleep. After we finished moving, Mike went back to his Day Sleeper Schedule, so I was alone in the bed. Once I dreamt that Stinky Ghost was sleeping in the bed with me. I remember feeling ashamed in the dream that a man was sleeping in my bed, but I didn’t know how to get him out. Even later, I dreamt that Stinky Ghost was spooning me from behind. He was so heavy on me that I couldn’t breathe. I woke up trying to catch my breath, surprised that Maggie wasn’t on my chest.