Published on 2024-10-23
I saw a dream, it must have been several months ago.
The first thing I remember is finding myself in my house, more precisely, my bedroom. It's the same house as always, but all the lights are off, and it is apparently the middle of the night, because it is pitch black everywhere.
From my room I proceed to the hallway, and from there to the kitchen. The hallway and kitchen, too, are dark and pervaded by an ominous atmosphere. Though I can barely see anything owing to the darkness, there is one thing I do see quite clearly: the staircase.
It starts to my right, going up a few steps there before turning 90 degrees and continuing up to a space above the hallway I have just come out of. In reality, my house does not have a staircase here. However, my aunt's house has one just like it. If this were my aunt's house (which it's not, as I said it is my own) this is where that staircase would be. In the waking world, that phrase "would be" suggests the lack of actuality, the inability to meet that critical standard, but I guess in dreams that phrase works differently, possesses a startling power.
How curious. It is almost as though the two houses have merged into one. In my aunt's house this staircase opens into the living room at the bottom, but here in the dream house it is the kitchen, not the living room. But the position of the kitchen in my house relative to the front door is exactly the same as the living room of my aunt's house to its front door.
It seems that the only sensible thing to do, in that moment, is to climb the stairs, so that is what I do next. They lead to a little antechamber above the hallway. It is fairly wide, but the ceiling is lower. In my aunt's house of wakeful reality, this space leads directly into my cousin's room. But here, while it is much the same as far as layout and appearance are concerned, there is another, most curious thing: yet another staircase. This one begins to your right as soon as you get to the top of the first staircase. It doesn't exist in reality, not in my or my aunt's house.
This staircase must lead to some yet higher room, of some yet stranger arrangement, but I do not go up there. I continue going straight into the space that would correspond to my cousin's room.
Just like the rest of the house, this place is filled with a terrific darkness. I cannot make out any objects in the room once I enter, but soon afterwards I begin to intuit the presence of something. In some undisclosed manner I am made aware of the fact I am sharing this space with a few shadowy humanoid figures.
Somehow or other, these figures, despite being shadows in an already dark room, stand out with the utmost clarity. Looking back from my present state of wakefulness, there was nothing about them that should have seemed especially threatening. They were just shadowy, humanoid figures. But while I was in the dream, in the presence of these beings, I must admit I was utterly frozen in fear. The fear came not from their appearance, but simply from the consciousness that they were there.
What followed, was some motion on the part of the shadowy humanoid figures that may be akin to "attacking". I might therefore say, they "attacked" me. But what precisely this "attacking" entailed, I cannot say with any confidence, knowing full well that language will fail me here. Perhaps the sheer dreadfulness of their existence becomes magnified as a part of this "attacking", which would explain the extreme degree of discomfort I felt at that moment. There was nothing in the ballpark of pain. All I remember is my heart racing.
I woke up around that time and, yes indeed, my real heart was racing, too.
I have come to understand that a house in a dream can be interpreted as a scheme of our lives and our minds. The house is a spatial conception of these things, which are ordinarily too abstract to think of along these compartmental lines, which are akin to the lines the architect draws, dividing one room from another, delineating the kitchen, the living room, the bedrooms and the closets. But consciousness is compartmentalized in a similar manner, and our lives are, too. We have work, school, family, friends. They all live under the same roof, and are therefore subject to all the usual conflicts that arise from proximal living.
This dream I found to be shockingly similar to one I've had many times before, though it must have been years since I had last seen it. In that dream, just like this one, my house is full of the additions of things that aren't really there. The interior space itself has been expanded, for the most part, vertically. A massive vertical space stands at the core, from which one can spot (let's say) the living room and the kitchen below (in my house, as it is in many from this era, these two spaces are combined).
And in the midst of this vertical space there is a whole jungle-jim of staircases. They are variegated, parting ways and joining, and leading to several interior balconies and alcoves of varying heights. Elsewhere there are doors, windows and strange passageways.
However, most of these places give one the impression of a house that is still under construction: unfinished walls and floors, visible pipes, wires and insulation, webs of two by fours decorated with sharpie marks above your head and to your left and right, knobs, beams, panels, and so on. In summary, that house was extremely complex, but it was unfinished, and it was unpolished.
I saw another dream about the ocean.
Looking about me, I discover I am in a huge depression in the ocean. What I mean is, by some impossible power, a certain region of the water had been lowered, and I am trapped in it, and from this vantage point the rest of the ocean, which surrounded me on all sides, appears like waterfalls, fifty feet tall at the least. But the water isn't filling in the hole, again, because some impossible, godlike power is at work.
I am not the only one here. There are many others, as this scene resembles a shipwreck. The destructed remains of what had once perhaps been a great ship of wood are floating about in this hole, and people are clinging to them, and I too, must be one of those people.
Perhaps, just perhaps, we had been attacked. For some utterly inexplicable reason, the scent of gunpowder is in my nose, and a sound like cannonfire rings mutedly in my ear. Not a sound in its own right, but if a sound could have a shadow, that's what it was like.
Just as was the case with the shadowy humanoid figures, I intuit the presence of warships, and I intuit the circular formation they have assumed around this impossible hole in the ocean. Though they cannot be seen, because the angle of depression is too great.
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