Naughty Naughty Son

Last night I had a dream that I was a kid again, and I went out to my family’s shed in the backyard to look for something, I can’t remember what. When I opened the door, there were two children’s jackets on the dirt floor of the shed, half-covered with leaves and debris. I recognized them immediately as belonging to the two boys I’d seen on the news. The boys were missing and hundreds of people had been searching for them for weeks. I felt my stomach drop into my shoes as I realized that my brother had killed them.

In the dream, my brother was McCully Culkin, circa The Good Son. I knew that he had seen me go to the shed, which we hardly ever used, and I knew I had to act as if I hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. Maybe he would think he had hidden the jackets well enough that I hadn’t seen them. So I rooted around in the shed, pretending to look for whatever it was that I had gone out there to find, and then I turned to leave.

As I shut the door, I saw my brother across the yard. He stared me down for a moment before he turned and ran into the house. He knew I had seen the jackets. He knew that I knew he had killed those boys and had kept their jackets as some kind of sick trophy. And he was planning to do something to keep me from talking.

I raced after him into the house and he was waiting – he leveled a pistol at my chest. Before I could think, I grabbed his hand that held the gun and we began to struggle.

That’s when I woke up and decided that I wanted to have a different dream now please. It was a weird combo of Rob Zombie’s Halloween and The Good Son, with a creepy blond kid going around causing trouble and killing people. And of course, there was McCully Culkin, who appears in most of the movies that unsettled me as a child.

What the hell do you suppose that dream meant?