So last night I had an epic Stephen King-esque kind of dream. I can't say it was entirely a nightmare since the first portion of it was more dramatic than horrific. I was living out in the country on this old semi-abandoned farm, and after realizing that my friends had been missing for a while, I saw that the door to the cellar was open--you know--one of those outside cellar doors that sits on top of the grass. So I decided to go in.
Almost immediately up walking down there, I fell deeper into the underground through a hole in the ground and soon got lost in the this underground, earthy labyrinth. I wasn't panicing though... not yet anyway. After a few hours of waundering around, I stumbled across my friends who had basically set up a camp in one of the unusually large and open caverns. They were just sitting around down there as if not much was wrong, so I decided to join them. In my first day down there, I managed to read a whole novel--a really long one that upon reflection, turned out to be a narrated account of my entire dream. In my dream I spent what seemed like hours reading the thing, and upon waking up, I wondered if I had really composed something resembling a novel or at least a short story or if I had just been remembering portions of something I had read or watched in the past.
Then we ate some food from their stash and went to bed. This is where the nightmare begins. We awake to three strangers running into our cavern, screaming. For a second, we all celebrate because we think we have been rescued, but those screams were not of the joyful variety. They quickly tell us they had been running from another member of their party who had gone crazy since they had gotten last in the passage and begun to run after people with the intent to kill them. So we take off, blindly running through the tunnels. We run into the crazy man and his devilish grin and unblinking, distant stare a few times, but we keep running and evade his attempts to make us his new victims, always wondering if we would not soon join him ourselves after losing our own minds.
Though I would like to say I just woke up now, the dream was actually not open-ended, and the old farmer, having seen the cellar door open, found us and was in the process of rescuing us when I woke up...
ok. I guess I should warn you... this dream is kind of intense. or at least I found it to be pretty disturbing, but then again, I guess dreams and nightmares specifically are always scarier when they are ocurring than when you are looking back at them later.
Right, so I was working at a summer camp... I'm not sure if it was the same summer camp I worked at for four summers or not. The majority of the dream took place indoors, so it was hard to tell. Anyway, for some reason, it was my task to think of something really scary to present to kids for a haunted house sort of deal, and the scariest thing I could think of was the truth. So I was in a big room with just this one girl. She was maybe 9 years old. So I just started telling her all these grusome tales about ways that people could die, and she was so scared that she literally died of fright. She was standing up, and she just froze and turned stiff--like she had been frozen solid. She quickly turned pale and he hair stuck out at odd and wild angles. I couldn't believe I had killed her.
I have thought of a few different possible interpretations for this dream. It could show peoples' inability to live with the truth or it could be related to my religious struggles as of late. I used to work at a Christian summer camp, you see, and I'm afraid that if I were to work with kids today in that kind of setting that I might kill them in more of a metaphorical way--in the sense that I would hinder their faith and spiritually kill them. heavy stuff. ... or perhaps I killed off a part of myself.
The image of the little girl is still implanted in my head.
I was sleeping just now, and I suddenly woke up, thinking someone had knocked on my door, so I got up to check, but no one was there. Now I'm not sure if someone did in fact just knock on my door in real life or if a similar noise in my dream was so loud and convincing that it woke me up.
Lately if I've dreamt at all, I've dreamt only in fragments. Little flashes here and there. A quick peek at a scene from a bigger story.
In life and in my dreams, however, I've noticed that certain motifs keep appearing. The latest one is an attic. An attic has been in a few of my dreams lately. Sometimes I'm exploring it, sometimes I'm just getting lost in the dimly lit, labyrinthine corridors.In this particular dream, I found myself walking through a hedge maze. Sure, I was trying to get out, but I was rather passive about it, just calmly and slowly walking around the twists and turns.
Eventually, the hedge maze opened up into an attic. I kept walking, still trying to find my way out (this time there was a bit more desperation). After walking around for a while, I decided that I should go back to the hedge maze to get out since it seemed like the attic wasn't opening any doors for me, but I couldn't find where the hedge maze started, so I began to wish myself in a different location since I was sick of traipsing around the attic. It worked in that I was no longer in the attic, but in manipulating space, I also manipulated time and found that I was suddenly quite younger than I had been before.
I've had a few dreams since I've been back, but mostly they have not been complex or interesting enough to note. In general, many of them seem to follow the motif of being lost or not knowing where things are going, which of course makes sense.
The other night, I had kind of a curious dream. I was on a class field trip of sorts, so I was surrounded by other students. We took the bus to this old abandoned house, and we all piled out. It was of course night, so it was dark, but it was not stormy. I guess I at least avoided that cliché.
We started to enter the old, delapidated house only it wasn't house-like on the interior. It instead resembled a mine of sorts... a gold mine or something... or maybe it was just a cave. finally, after walking through long winding underground passages, we came to a door. Behind the door was a room that resembled what I picture to be the stereotypical "formal parlor" that you see in posh Victorian-style houses. It was old-fashioned, and there was a really neat gramophone in the corner on a table. Anyway, a few of us sit down, though we are a bit freaked out and uneasy.
Then, in strolls a butler... only instead of opening the door and walking in, he glides effortlessly through the door. At this point, my classmates are really starting to get worried. The butler sits down, and all of the sudden, I realize that as long as we do not treat him as a ghost, he will not act out as a ghost, so I start to converse with him as usual, thus averting that crisis. From then on, I become the intermediary between the students and the ghosts, and that, unfortunately, is all I can remember.
