scary dreams and churches

i awoke from a nightmare at 3am last night and i'm going to try to write about it from sketchy memory.

someone had died... a little girl i believe. i was one of the palbearers who was carrying the coffin (or was i just walking along side it?) to the church for the funeral. the odd thing though was that the group i was with dressed rather... old. all the girls had long, pretty brown dresses and white bonnets like they were in little house on a prairie. at the time, i believe i assumed they were all mennonite.

anyway, the procession took us to an old church with tall, winding stairs, at each break in the climb of which there were people on their knees, eyes closed and praying. the walls and stairs were all very old, musty and wooden, the floor creaking with each step.

when we reached the top, the coffin had somehow already found its way to the altar as i stepped into what i can only refer to as "the gauntlet". ahead and too my right, walking as slowly as everyone else was a priest whom i then asked to recite the lord's prayer because i couldn't remember it, his version though, didn't seem right to me.

but then the scary part happened: up ahead of us in this narrow hallway, people in prayer on either side of me, there were two podiums cropped out from the wall on either side, and on the top of each one sat a large, golden cross. they stood as a sort of gateway, standing out from your left and right as you came through the end of the gauntlet into the sanctuary and i started to panic and slow down... i didn't want to go through there.

even with no one behind me, and everyone already seated in the sanctuary, i felt pressured to pass through the barrier into the room, so i continued and then i happend:

STATIC.

static so loud it was as if someone turned on a tv to channel 74 with the speakers on full blast. everyone turned and looked at me, their eyes glazed over a thick opaque white, hair long sticky strands of snow, their wide open mouths a hollow black. they looked like walking corpses, demons or ghosts.

they know i thought and suddenly i changed into a similar white-haired ghost and flew back the way i came, straight down that little space you see between the stairs in a stairwell, static raging behind me.

scared the hell out of me it did. not the crossing of the gauntlet, i do that every time i go to a church, but the reaction i got this time. it took me a while to get back to sleep and make all that unpleasantness fade away.