KIds in the Hall guy stealing my electricity, birds on the roof and those damned voices again

 

I heard the voices again last night, but first let me scribble down the dream bits, so I can recall them before they fade. My neighbors, the Ecks somehow had the Kids in the Hall guy, Bruce McCulloch, as part of their family unit and our properties shared some common electrical wiring. 

My fusebox was actually on their property. To access it one had to have a key to a locked gate, which no one seemed to have. No matter, Bruce McCulloch had a trick to pry open the lock using three keys, which he somehow used as a wedge. 

My lights were out and I saw Bruce casually eating one of my apples, so I got on him about that. He'd been taking them liberally and promising me an apple pie in return, which I'd never gotten. 

Somehow I equated that bit of a raw deal with my guinea hens, who would annoy me by scratching around on my roof and being a general nuisance, while I had to feed them chicken scratch every morning. Weren't they supposed to be eating bugs? That was the deal, and yet it was all me putting up with their nonsense and very little bug patrolling was going on. 

Oh, oh, oh...Sharon was in this dream, too. She was disabled, kinda. But there was something happening at night, like robbers or Bruce McCulloch doing his electrical prowling, which necessitated her getting up out of bed. It was a big deal because, you know, she was bedridden and all. 

She'd somehow gotten to her feet and was all the way out in the front road, when she collapsed and I had to help her get back up. I was quite ecstatic that she'd even made it that far, though concerned because we were in the midst of some kind of robbery. 

I found a gun that one of the robbers had dropped on the ground. I picked it up as he pulled another one. He fired first, and I shot him square in the chest. His bullet only grazed my wrist, and I barely felt it, but he was down for the count. 

That's when I spoke to the other robber and realized it was Bruce McCulloch, or one of the Eck kids, I'm not sure which. He reminded me of my nephew Morgan, for some reason. I became friendly with him because of that, and because, despite the apples and the electrical theft, he was willing to show me the lock trick and was going to help me by labeling the breakers which needed to be flipped on our shared electrical box. 

I guess that's all I remember, although it seems there was more to the story about Sharon and her mobility issues. It's just hard to pull it out now, since it was in the earlier part of the dream.

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And now to those damned voices. This time I was sound asleep when they woke me up. I could hear them as loud as a loudspeaker, penetrating into my dreams, and suddenly I was wide awake and listening to them. 

It sounded like a man and a woman arguing this time. Or discussing something loudly, the man taking a pedantic, Johnny Rose tone and the woman protesting in a Moira Rose sounding voice. I don't think it was them exactly, but the dynamic was such. 

I still couldn't pull out exact words, but this time it sounded like English. Only it was still muffled, like it was was being run through a Charlie Brown adult translating device. It definitely sounded scripted and TV-like, rather than like two people actually in my house. 

This time I got up and went to investigate. Of course the voices stopped before I made it out of the guest room. But I had time to really analyze the sound quality as I was getting up and I made the determination that it was definitely coming through my home stereo speakers. The directionality, voice quality and volume just seemed to fit. 

I do leave the receiver on all the time and it is tuned to the 88.1 FM, an open frequency, which I transmit on and use to broadcast my music or TV from downstairs. The feeds are all turned off at night, so this leaves the channel open, but with a nice heavy FM signal squashing out anything, with the silence of dead air. 

The mixing board that feeds the transmitter is also on all the time, but the sliders for the TV were off. So was the TV. The computer sliders were on, but there was nothing open with a player that could account for the sudden, brief dialogue that had come through the speakers. Before I went downstairs to confirm all this, I approached the receiver in the living room. 

"What the fuck is going on out here?" I said in a grumpy voice. "I'm trying to get some sleep. This isn't cool, so knock it off." 

I then walked over to the receiver and turned it off. That would shut down their little open mic night. The cats were awake by now and looking at me for answers. I'm sure they weren't appreciating being awakened by booming voices at 3 AM either. 

I went downstairs and shut off the main volume output on the mixer, doubly assuring that this little karaoke party wouldn't start back up. 

Now I'm not so sure I did the right thing. Perhaps the communications were coming from the other side, like the aliens in that one space movie where the kids meet up with some ETs who speak to them in familiar TV soundbites. Clearly someone or something is using the open channel and flipping a switch somewhere to feed it the audio from which these voices originate. 

My TV is a "smart" TV. I don't actually use the smart features, which are actually annoying and don't work very well, because its internet connection is through my distant, slow ass wi-fi. But it is hooked up to the internet at all times and could presumably be listening to everything I say, awaiting my command to ask Alexa to buy something from Amazon. It also gets its own automatic updates, which it never informs me about. It just does it. 

So, there we have it. Perhaps there is some kind of government or extraterrestrial or spooky ghost phenomenon going on, but I can't figure out the exact mechanism that they are using. But I think by shutting down their open channel at the stereo receiver, I will be preventing them from just blasting me in the middle of the night with loud voices from God knows where. 

We'll see. I may just leave it on again and try to get up sooner and catch the audio a little closer to the source.