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.
[Blogger's note: I would just like to ask you this: Does the first word in the title for this post look odd to you? Up until yesterday, I had always thought the word was 're-occurring,' but then I saw 'recurring' in print somewhere and started to doubt. OK, I admit it, first I doubted the publisher of the book, but since it was a rather reputable-looking book, I then turned the doubt onto myself. Dictionary.com claims there is no such word as re-occurring.]
OK, so this dream was rather brief, but it touched on same of the same themes again that I mentioned in the previous dream and even on another topic I have been encountering lately, so I'd say it is pretty relevant.
I was at home again, and I had heard that our church diocese was holding a lock-in about an hour away. For those of you who don't know, a 'lock-in' is this event where a bunch of people get together at one location (a location that you would not normally associate with sleeping at), and they have 'fun' and can't leave. Typically, little sleep occurs during such events, and they are major headaches to the adult facilitators. Right, so I guess I should also point out to those who don't know me that I was über involved in church-related activities in middle school/high school.
ok, so I decided that I didn't have anything better to do, so I agreed to go, though I will say I was a bit hesitant. So my mother and I get in the car. Right before we're pulling up to the church where the lock-in is to take place, I look over at her and say, "That's funny. I guess I could have driven myself." My mom agrees. Then we pull into the actual parking lot, and all I can see are these 11-13 year old kids everywhere. They're eagerly carrying their pillows and bags, laughing, running around, etc. Then I have this sinking feeling in my stomach, and I'm on the verge of asking my mom to just turn around and take me home... when I wake up.
I think the implications here are quite obvious.
[Blogger's note #2: I hope the seriousness of these recent postings has not made you uncomfortable. I guess I'm sort of going through a strange time in my life right now--ie I'm leaving Denmark in 11 days and going back to my old life... and it sometimes seems like a regression to me. It will be interesting to see when my dreams revert back to their crazy/random/comical selves.]
Yeah, so I woke up on the morning of November 23rd in a bit of a panic considering... well I guess I won't tell you just yet. I almost just told you the startling climax of my dream. (Actually, one of the first things I say in the recording is: "I don't know if I should start at the end or start at the beginning or what.")
Yes, so my journal was not nearby when I awoke, and I didn't feel like getting out of my nice warm bed (you know how that is), so I decided to grab my camera off my nightstand and record my dream before I forgot it.
Here is more or less the result of this recording session (I wish I could just attach an audio file!):
I have it my head that I know how I'm going to die... or at least, like in the game Clue that I used to play as a kid, I knew what the murder weapon would be. The instrument of my death is going to be a Wizard of Oz pen. You know, it's one of those pens that you tilt one way, and something floats across the surface of the pen because there's water inside this tube thing. So yeah, the particular scene in this situation was munchkins or something skipping down the yellow brick road. Of course, this bit of information was something I had just always known and it seemed rather ridiculous, so I just sort of never thought about it. Really though, knowing what weapon will kill you won't exactly stop it from happening anyway, right? Yeah, so that is just some background information for you. It doesn't factor into the dream here... not yet anyway.
So yeah, it so happened that I was at home with my family in Moncks Corner. It was strange because I was at least a bit older than I am now, but my brother seemed to be younger. (I guess that's because I feel like I've 'changed' a lot since I've been here in Denmark... or something is different. I'm not sure if I have 'changed' or if I have just become more myself... but that's the subject of another post. perhaps something I will post on my other blog. Then of course, my brother was probably younger because that's how I rememer him best since I haven't lived at home for 4 years now.)
Yep, so my dad found this stray dog, so we took it in. A few days later, we learned that it belonged to this family, so they came to pick it up. So there's this happy little reunion going on in the front of the house, out in the yard. Everyone in the family is very excited about getting their dog back, etc, and I am just sort of standing off to the side and observing their happiness.
Then all of the sudden and without warning, we all hear this little clicking noise... it's the sound a gun makes before you shoot it. I'm not sure what it's called, but you know what I mean. It's one of those gun noises that you just don't want to hear, so we all look towards the house, and there's this huge man standing there to the side of our front door (which is ajar). The man is wearing camoflage and is just standing there calmly with a rifle sort of in the verticle resting position, but the funny thing is, the noise didn't come from this man. Then we see through a window to the house (actually the window to my old bedroom--the one I moved out of when I was 14), and there is another guy in there. This guy is going through my belongings in a hasty manner (because it was my bedroom in the dream even though it currently isn't in real life). This second guy was carrying a pistol, and it was from that gun that we heard the ominous click.
Now, it's at this point that we start to freak out--or I in particular start to freak out because I know my brother and some of his friends are in the house, and there are just people everywhere, you know? So I say to my mom, quietly, "Mom, you have to call the police. You have to do something. This guy has a gun!" But my mom just sort of stands there, paralyzed. She just mutters something like, "ummm I don't know. I don't know what to do," and she has this strange distant look in her eyes. So it's at this point that I decide to take charge. Now, if you know me well, you will know that I am not good with keeping up with my cell phone. My family, of course is much worse... ie no one has a cell phone but me, and I don't happen to have mine on me, so I set off across the yard to the neighbor's house to call the police since I obviously don't want to try crossing army-fatigues-man.
It's when I'm about half way to the neighbor's house that I hear a commotion, and I turn in time to see the second guy (the one with the pistol) running out of the door to our house. He is carrying a few things that he has stolen from my room, but it is quite a strange collection he has, really. The most rememberable thing he had was the sheet off my bed because it sort of billowed behind him as he ran. So yeah, I'm thinking, ok good. The guy is leaving, he hasn't hurt anyone, and he hasn't really stolen too much. We can call the police, and they can come and investigate and look for finger prints or whatever. But then he stops a little ways off and just sort of hesitates, and I see my mother start to walk towards him, and I think, oh no. He is going to hurt my mother.
So I start to walk over towards them, too, to try to talk some sense into my mom and get her out of the situation. Then, when I'm about five paces away, I hear the guy say to my mom, "Hey all I need is one thing. Do you have one those glippen pens?" And since I had no idea what a 'glippen' pen was, I just sort of stood there, contemplating what the heck he was talking about. But then, my mom, always eager to help, starts to pull something out of her pocket. I think it was right at this moment, that I realized what was going to happen, so I turn around and just start sprinting away from the scene. Presumably, my mother hands the guy the pen, and the guy starts chasing me. I can hear his footsteps pounding on the asphalt behind me. and I wonder, oh my gosh. Is this going to hurt? Am I going to feel this? and before I have much time to think about it, I just sort of feel this strange warmth that's sort of coming from the area of my neck.
and then I woke up.
Yes, as you might have guessed, I had been stabbed in the neck by a Wizard of Oz pen.
So have you heard that claim that if you die in your dream, you die in real life? I am living proof that that is untrue.
I think there are many interesting implications in this dream. I think that this entry is long enough though, so I might add some theories in a comment.
