Doll Collector dream story back up

   I tried forgetting,
   I tried pretending to myself it had all been a dream,
  I even tried to proclaiming ownership over the idea of her.
 I tried to take my fears, that nightmarish memory that clings to my very soul like its own shadow, and butcher them into unrecognizable shapes. I tried to describe her, simply, writing stories in which her likeness played a part. Inserting her into romances, erotica, silly ghost stories, and even fantasy. Trying to diminish her in the realm of the imagination; in a world of super heroes and magic princesses, of space ships and planet destroying alien warriors. Drown her out in a sea of imaginary fallacies, hyperboles, and ridicilousness. All things shrunk down so small the human mind can just write them off as words.

   Then I tried to draw her, I looked at my crude drawing, as I had drawn a single thing in almost twenty years of my adult life. The drawing was crude at best, even basic for a basic character sketch. But as I looked at the face I drew I knew I had made a mistake. Anyone else looking at the paper would have just seen an over simplified design of a very basic drawing of a long armed woman in a dress, shaded pencil lines to indicate alot of hair and a mask like face indicated as just floating there with two blue color penciled in circles for eyes inside the blacked out eye sockets of the white mask. Nothing creepy, no grotesque features, no fangs or twisted shapes beyond the arms being long and head and neck blacked out, but otherwise generic depending on what one was familiar with. But I could feel those eyes staring back at me, up from the paper, knowing every instance I had written some pornograhic scene about her for strangersto masturbate to on the internet; every childish personality trait I had given her in comedies, every weakness in stories about heroes and villains. I knew, because she knew, this had all been me running away. I knew her words, "your dreams bring you to me", trying so hard to change how I percieved her so my dreams would be so unlike her that this connection would be lost; yet I couldn't forget her; it was my gamble to try and change my own mental image of her so much that I might as well have forgotten her. But...they said imagination and memory are connected, one able to change the other; yet...she was stronger than both.

  I could not forget her, and I could not really change the part of her that stuck with me. Even as I twisted her image, a core part of her was always there; her warmth, her embrace, I ran away from it because her promise; was not something I'd curse my family with. I have even tried following the rules of the legend...but after so many years, I don't remember...did I make up the legend too? Was anything I wrote against her will? Was it all just her game, playing inside my head this whole time.

  Perhaps instead I should try remembering, writing to remember, writing past my twisted thoughts of stories and lies. I do not remember if it was in a dream or if it actually happened, that is my earliest memory of her. I was little, how old exactly I don't remember, all I remember was there were lights, bad smells, it was very colorful and so many people. I don't know if it is from me filling in gaps and details later on based on these or not; but I get the distinct feeling this was a carnival or fair, I doubt it was an actual circus though; and I never pressed my mother for details; although I know in we have gone to many different carnivals and fairs as I grew up and we moved thanks to my father being in the military; so to be honest as I can't tell how old I was, even if not a dream I couldn't even really say where it was as I know when I was that little we had moved between three different bases between the ages of 2 and 8 at least, Arizona, New York state, and even Nuremburg Germany. Not to say any one of those three if it was not a dream were any of those places either as my mother was given to traveling around with my older brother and I and visiting all sorts of place during summer breaks from school. Of course when I was 2-5 my brother was only a year older so a few years there I guess of it not mattering. All that said I am procrastinating as there isn't much else to say, I don't remember clearly, and can't even remember if it was in a dream or not. But either way it seems I was seperated from my mother, looking for her, or just wandering around like an oblivious little kid.

   The most vivid part of this memory however was where I found myself having tumbled into a ditch being found by a woman in a white fancy dress. That she looked tall to me as a toddler should be no surprise, and if a dream even less so a surprise; especially as she was wearing a white mask, a very fancy white mask like those in Venetician carnivals, a full female mask painted with red lips and blue stripes around the eyes which contained only two small circles of blue light. In this memory I know just as now I never saw any indication of a human face or even head under that mask mixed in with pure darkness that plumed out behind her in a trailing cloud resembling a massive plume of hair looking more like thunderclouds at night. She scooped me up with one hand, her hand alone was about as big as I was. I don't remember crying or being afraid, although if a dream that is easily explained, or else I had a concussion from falling into the ditch as I seem to remember rocks being there and a stream; but I cannot be certain for decades of imagination have polluted this faint distant memory from my extreme youth. I do remember in this blurred vision of the past that she held me up to her chest, her breasts larger than I was, and falling asleep with my head against them; not sexually of course; my young mind was far too immature to even consider the faintest notion of the idea; rather like pillows. I have been given that i don't recall what happened after to regard this entirely as a dream, a great white figure not unlike sheets, two large pillows against a black headboard, and a face invented by a child's mind perhaps based upon seeing Halloween masks or some program on the Discovery channel about Venetian celebrations.

  Of course that is part of my years of bargaining with myself, for as I said, that was the oldest memory of her; and had that been the only one, likely forgotten or proclaimed and left alone as the memory of a dream I had as a child. Through much of my childhood I don't remember seeing her very often, a faint glimpse of something behind me in a darkened mirror, a strange tall shadow in the corner of the room when I'd open my eyes while sleeping, or something in a dream that may have been her. Sometimes like a woman in a white dress, wearing a mask or a pale human face in the dreams; but always a mask if I saw her in a reflection or a shadowy glimpse. Her eyes though always gave her away, where there should be white there was black; and the blue light; even though it would change between a dot, a circle, a sphere, a few times filling the eyes completly with blue light in dreams where my head was in her lap and telling her how bad my day was being as though this was her only facial expression; and a few times concentric circles as if trying to immitate the human iris.

   I feel I should mention it as it likely comes across as contradictory; yes I had dreams when there was trouble in my life of sitting on a couch or bench, my head in this giant lap with a thick white dress, my head being petted by slender milk white fingers with nails polished white, looking up at a pair of large pillowy breasts and above that, a pale face looking down at me with long black hair, black eyes, with glowing blue lights in them. As I got a little older this dream became...less comforting as I'd see her hair drastically shift into a bellowing cloud, her face become a mask floating in darkness, and her fingers sharper in apperance. I was paralyzed eventually in such dreams like a dog to scared to move for fear of being struck, even though I will admit she never did strike me, just...something about how she changed, and how she was always so big. Although the location didn't help. I remember if it was a bench, even when I was very little how I'd have to fix my eyes in these dreams on her dress or up at her because to look outward...what started as a duck pond with a jogging path faded at the edges. Out the corner of the eyes or scene or however it works in dreams it would be darker, off, faded in the distance like pixelated mist. A darkness that crept closer as I got older till the woods across the pond were terrible shadowy places with long thin twisted things crawling through them; and once I remember a woman jogging past suddenly changed into some thin as a rail blade fingered monsters with an oversized bald white head with big black eyes wearing some weird glistening like slate rocks dress; or a man who was fishing would suddenly be this thing like a wolf with a skull for a head and glowing eyes and antlers; just things like that. Eventually as I can recall when the darkness crept onto the pond and I started to see unnatural things appearing in the water, crabs mixed with fish, centipedes crossed with snake skeletons, and god knows what else I pushed away from remembering; that was when the pond setting stopped and it was always on a couch after that.

  Even the couch one though, those dreams felt..wrong, like the bench they were comforting at first, but aside from her apperance and the things around me, as I got older the couch one started to feel; manipulative. In such dreams I'd be lost in a backwards version of my house, being terrorized by so many random horrors only to find a living room with her sitting on the couch, sometimes with a TV there, and I'd go to her for comfort; hiding my face in the folds of her dress as the world around was still scary and the TV so often had these random horrific images on it.

  But these are just dreams, I told myself that too, in time they faded away, in my later teenage years they faded away; but I didn't say I ONLY saw her in dreams. I'd see her from the corner of my eye, shifting behind me in a dark reflection, a movement in the shadows of a darkened room matching her size and shape, although overlapping things like the wall, ceiling, and floor. Although those became fewer and far between, or she got better at hiding. I had told myself it was all dreams, my imagination; and had even begun to use these experiences as the basis for scary stories I wrote. That was until I started to get confirmation from others. People at work saying they'd sometimes see odd shadows behind me when I was in the booth, a rippling in the air, or movement behind me. But it was always so big and so close to me they couldn't make out any details before it was completly gone. I knew what it was, because i'd often feel when stressed at work that warmth surround me, that comforting feeling like in my dreams.

  All of it sounds so comforting, like a guardian angel doesn't it. A few bad dreams because she looked so surreal, some mildly spooky examples. I was laughed at in the past for thinking these were spooky sounding...but I said THAT nightmarish memory, after it happened I proclaimed it a dream too, I ran, I...wrote again, I swore I was hallucinating, but...I guess I should get to it...the invitation.