Dreamscape 7/26/05

I had the dream again. One that I only remembered because I found my signature in the same book that I had signed several years ago. The palace, which is what I will refer to it as from here forward, consists of several thousand rooms. It's the equivilent to a maze, but it's very easy to get out---but very, very difficult to get in.

The maze, I believe, is my subconscious way of saying that it's hard to get into my head. I think.


Dreamscape

I'm moving. I'm not moving myself though. As I look up, I see that I'm in a large vehicle. Not necessarily in it, but on it. I'm sitting on a tank. Why am I holding a fully automatic rifle? I put it down and pull out a pistol instead. The streets are busy. I want to think it's Branson Missouri--and in a way, it just might be. The feel of it is proper. I've been here before, and I know that I've been here before.

The entrance is just ahead, I can see it, but I can't make out the words on the sign. As I come closer they become more garbled, almost as if pixelated. I put a bullet in the sign out of frustration. My eyes are better than that, and that makes no sense. Especially since I can read the fine print of "must be this tall to enter" on one of the doors across the channel. The tank drives through the doors that open for it, and as the tank pulls into the parking/landing pad, the driver gets out. A friend of mine from a long time past. He nods curtly, withdrawing from the tank with his own automatic rifle in hand. No uniform--as I notice I'm not wearing one either.

I ask him what the plan is here, and he only responds with a quote that I'd learned to hate, then learned to accept a long, long time later. "Do what you like." I visibly twitch at this, but I say nothing. It's not my place anymore. We both step off of the tank, and he throws the keys to the valet park people as we enter through the doors adjacent to the pad.

Inside is the largest corridor you'd ever imagine seeing. It's walls tall. It's ceilings and floors wide. The path long, and seemingly unending. My friend takes the first few steps, as I start immediately after. We both smash our faces on an invisible wall. Turns out it's the best painting we've ever seen, and we're really in a very small corridor. We shrug at one another and I lead to the right. He taps me on the shoulder and hands me my rifle, stated that I forgot it. I shrug again and put it around my shoulder. We keep walking both groaning about our faces.

We find the door and enter. Omonia Square, Athens. My friend (we'll call him Byron from here forward) looks rather confused. Befuddled. I know this place. Hell, I miss this place. I wish I could go back. Maybe this means I wish I could take my friends with me to help them share and bask in the splendors of the place. I turn to him and explain that I know where we are, and to follow me.

Byron and I walk down the main avenue for probably two miles when we find the place that I didn't know I was looking for until I found it. It looks like a small internet cafe on the outside. We step inside, and all there is is a couple of ropes. We both attach harnesses to ourselves, and latch on to rapel down.

It's a long, long drop. Whenever we would think it was the end it would just open more. Like an endless pit. Not one of darkness though. Every time we pass something, Byron looks more and more confused, and I look more familiar with my surroundings. We keep going. Down, down, down. Suddenly the ropes cut. We both begin to fall. Our control is gone. What do we do? Nothing. There's nothing to do. It looks as we're about to die.

Byron looks at me and calls me by name. "I love you Bro." Is all he says before he ignites into flame. I say nothing. I can't say anything. There's nothing to say. My vocal chords refuse to work. A tear runs down my cheek as I fall silently down into the abyss, watching him burn brighter and brighter, silently. I hear something behind me. There's a noise. Something familiar. I turn to look at it, wiping the tears from my eyes.

Shit.

I wake up. I remember this place. I wiggle my toes, knowing that considering how long I fell, I had to have been moving at least 30-50mph. The only question is why was I not dead? Was it a dream? Did I imagine it? I get up and look around. I feel my skin go white as I see a smoldering blackened carcass. I walk slowly over to it and look. Byron's eyes open as wide as the day is long and he gasps for air at me, and reaches out his hand for me, but I jolt back out of shock and he barely misses me as he suddenly falls silent.

I don't know how long I sat there next to him and cried. It could have been minutes, hours, or even days. But it felt like an eternity. I looked around again in the green grasses. I realize that it's just the way of this place fertilizing itself. It seems that nobody ever gets past this part. As I look around more closely, I see bones. Old bleached bones of not so many, but far too many people.

I stumble out through what I see as an exit to this grove. Beyond it I see an immense chasm. In the middle there is a floating platform. On the sides I see fine groves and greeneries very similar to what I stand in. As I look more closely at the platform, I think I see something. I pull out a pair of binoculars to check. I don't believe what I see. I look again, and this time he looks back. It's... me... One eye pure red. A dark red that you would think that it would only exist in the deepest of Dante's levels. The other, a light blue, almost sky blue, but unbelievably bright, almost like an arc welder. He looks at me deeply. I'm suddenly paralyzed. He begins to float up into the sky, holding his arm out in my direction. Suddenly I'm floating over to him, although more like psychokinetically grabbed and pulled over in a very unkind manor.

He looks at me deeply again, almost as if he's scanning every part of my mind. Looking for something that he cannot find. Or maybe he did find it. He punches me square in the mouth. Picks me up without touching me, and kidney punches me. For the next few moments he treats me like his own private punching bag, and then he drops me on the ground.

"You wouldn't listen to me when I you needed me. So maybe I no longer need you." And he hits me again. His eyes seem to glow even darker, yet brighter (per eye) at the same time, which seems impossible. "Look at this place, and what you have wreaked!" He holds my head up to look at the greeneries, and points me back to Byron's body. I understand why it's all so green now. I begin to convulse.

The world shatters around me. I seek to end it all. Make the silence come. When he turns his back for a moment, I lunge myself off the platform, into the darkness. I fall for what feels like an eternity. My fall is broken abruptly, and without warning. The ear shattering "Crack" that I hear and feel when I land causes me to scream out in pain.

I hear nothing. No echo. No stir of leaves. No bugs. No wind. Just... silence. I can hear my heart beat, I can hear my hand grabbing my shattered shoulder and collarbone, ignoring my bleeding face. I am in an old room. A very old room. Seemingly 19th century. Maybe something that you'd expect in an old mansion somewhere. The silence is earshattering itself. I grunt and groan trying to get to my feet.

"SIT YOUR ASS DOWN!" I hear from the other direction. I turn to look, realizing that it's far too red from one eye being covered in blood for me to see properly. I recognize that voice. I...

I wake up again. I can see with both eyes now. My arm works, my collarbone doesn't feel pain anymore either. Where did she go? She was here just a bit ago. There's a note on the table. I pick it up and try to open the envelope. It won't budge. I look at the back. It says "To be opened only when you've grown up." It's too bazaar, I struggle with the thin paper envelope for a few moments. It won't rip, tear, or anything. I find a knife and try to cut it. The knife goes dull in an instant. I say to myself out loud, "Talk about a slap in the face."

I get up to leave the room. As I exit the door, I find myself in a lobby. There's another me standing there. This one doesn't really look like me. On account of the tits, long hair, and no show of 'omg man face'. But I can tell it's an odd copy of myself, albeit shorter, and seemingly more fit [At least now I can look back at that and know what it was, in my dream it was just really freaking fucked up and freaky]. She looks at me and says nothing. Goes back to doing whatever she was doing.
There's a man behind the desk. Definitely another copy of me. He's 6'5" at least, on account of being a bit taller than me, and he's gotta weigh about 230 pounds of nothing but pure muscle. He asks if I would like to sign the guest book. I look over to the guest book. It's massive. It has a ribbon bookmark going down the middle, and there's a beautiful fountain pen sitting next to it. I notice that there's only a few signatures in here, and I ask why. He only responds by saying that I would understand later. [Note: I don't remember the other signatures except for three, and those are personal damnit ;o] There were seven signatures, 4 of which I recognized. 1 of which, was my own. I put my John Hancock right there in big bold manuscript. I wonder to myself as to where I learned to write like that.

I take a closer look at the lobby and I realize that the windows aren't really windows at all, but they're doorways to something else entirely. I step through one, and I'm no longer in the lobby, or anywhere close. I'm in another gigantic room. This one seems like a school. It ... is a school. I recognize many of the people here.

I walk around closeby where all of the tables are. Someone calls my name and I walk over to where the sound came from. The conversation is a long and drawn out one about theories of the universe and how to make strawberry jam taste 'purple'. Quite a jump from the norm, but typical. I head into the bathroom since I need to go. There's gotta be several hundred stalls in here. I pick the empty one, and walk in front of it and do my business. Suddenly everyone in there doing their business starts talking to one another. I finish up, and proceed towards the sink to wash my hands.

"Hello." A female voice says.

"Excuse me?" I respond back. Her accent is British. Plain as day, British.

"I need an escort to the erogenous zone."

"WHAT?!" I jolt back in shock. Who the hell is this girl?

"To the erogenous zone, what, I didn't stutter, did I?"

"Uh, no, you didn't." This girl isn't quite drop-dead-gorgeous, but she certainly is quite a looker. I wash my hands while trying to figure out what the hell this is all about. "But why are you looking in the mens bathroom for an escort to the erogenous zone?"

"I was waiting for you."

"Oh." That's about as simple a response as I could muster.

I take her by the hand out of the bathroom, and I let her lead to wherever she was wanting to go. I didn't recognize this place, how should I? Although technically I should, since I've been here before--as per my signature. She drags me through doorway after doorway. Each time we go through a doorway I see something different. Something familiar but distant. Sometimes very close but unfamiliar. Each doorway, as I start to realize where I am. What I've been traversing this entire time. I stop the girl in her tracks, and explain to her what I think I've just figured out. I look away for a second, and then she's suddenly gone.

I'm alone again. This room is a bright orange. I try to look through a window...or a door. But there are none. As I turn around again, there's a huge fucking eye. Staring at me. The orange around it comes up to enclose it as it blinks. The eye comes closer to me, and opens wider, and the pupil dialates. I see the lens shear itself off like a tiny door. I step inside.

Charles DuGalle International Airport. With it's many automatic sidewalks, escalator automatic sidewalks. Hundreds of people flowing through here. The security checkpoints are even more tight than I remember. I go through the security checkpoint myself, and I'm somewhere else again.

This time I just find myself sitting in the front row in front of a sand pit. There's moving sand directly under me. Some guy with an Australian accent comes out and starts talking about the thing under the sand. The way he describes it makes me laugh out loud, and makes everyone else stare at me like I'm an idiot.
"This here is the Large Purple Wurm. It has a 2d10 hit die, and a CR of 9. Thankfully, I'm level 9 meself, so this won't be much of a problem for me. I'm also a fighter, so I've got quite a few feats to use in my favor, whereas the purple wurm you see hea, does not. I have a feat in "jam thumb in butthole", and another feat in "hump dead body"."
I fell to the ground laughing so hard I went into tears. Finally I pulled myself back up, and there was the purple worm, sliced into several hundred pieces, and a chef came out and cooked it while I was laughing. The Aussie was busy humping the rump. Everybody around me was eating. I took a bite of the wurm. Well done. Tasted like snail. Which coincidentally, tastes just like chicken.

A note fell into my plate after I was done. No clue where it came from. "Meet me at the peak after the stars have fallen to us." I look around, wondering who could have dropped it. I asked someone where the peak was. Everyone just started laughing at me. I left, slightly embarassed and walked down the large corridors.

I walked out around this place. Through many more corridors and rooms. The more I saw, the more I realized that this place was much more of a metropolis than I even thought possible. There was so much activity. So many words being exchanged.

I passed by a monestary of some sort. There was a monk meditating out front. He held his left hand out to me and beckoned me forward. I did as he asked. He pointed towards a pillow. I sat down, removing my shoes first. He smiled in thanks to that. His left hand took my right hand, and he held his right hand utmost, to the sky. I shut my eyes, and did the same, albeit more nervous and silly feeling.

I felt my body go limp, but I found myself unable to control anything as I found myself on a bus. I recognized the surroundings. It looked like the Kenyan Wildlife Refuge, Masaii Mara. As I watched out the window, it turned slowly into Nairobi, Mombassa, Lamu, Cairo, Greece, France, London, Ireland, Japan, and then California, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Tennesee, Pennsylvania, New York, and then it stopped at my house. [Note: I just described this like this, because every place that I just listed, I remembered every memory I remembered, good and bad--almost like one of those "life flashing before your eyes moments, but not so dramatic. It was just much easier to list it this way, because I don't want to spend the rest of my life typing this up.] I stepped out of the bus, not even really knowing why, or how, considering that I couldn't control myself.

A girl came up to me out of nowhere. One I know very well. And one that I wouldn't exactly expect here.

"You're here." She said. "You're at the peak. The peak of your life. Your present. Your current. Yourway of life before the way of your life is done. The life you have after the life you've lived. The life you could have before you even realized that you couldn't have the life you wanted anymore. The life of your life. Your peak."

"I'm where?" I returned--right before I realized that I was definitely at a 'peak'. I was on a tower of some sort. I look out, and I realize that the tower I'm standing on is an eye lash. Over my own eye. It was closed right now.
"Morning is coming. A fresh and new day awaits you. A fresh and new piece of life for you to take. For you to conquer. For you to make into something for yourself."

"You're talking a lot. That's unlike you."

"Time is short. I have to. Before the end." She was speaking very briskly.

"Before the end of what?"

"You know you've been dreaming. You figured that out seconds ago."

"Seconds?"

"Dreams only last a few seconds."

"But I've spent days in here."

"Doesn't matter. The sun is coming up. Sit, be silent. Watch the beauty as it flows from darkness into light."

The light came over the horizon. There we were, sitting close to one another. I could see the skin of my eye beginning to energize with the sunlight beaming just barely over it. I began to wonder if we were in a safe place, on the end of the eyelash. Once the eye opened.... Although it scarecly mattered at this point. Every tiny fold of skin looked as though it was an individual mountain range as the sun began to rise. Tiny hair folicles from beyound the eye looked like massive trees in the distance. The small pink valley at the edge of the eye was starting to quiver, as though it was experiencing an earthquake. The mountain to my right, my own nose, twitched several times. Twice a hand came from nowhere. Seeming as though it was moving slow, because of the small size that I was right now.

"I felt that."

"You're waking. Don't wake until you see it."

The sunlight beamed straight on now. You could see the oils on the skin that were shoved out during the night, like a natural spring pushes out water.

"I need to wash my face, look at that."

"SSSSH!! Be quiet or you'll miss it."

My eyelid began to quiver. And flutter. I noticed looking around that it wasn't just me and her. But everyone. My parents, my siblings, almost everyone, it seemed. My best friends from long ago were there, each with their significant other. They all turned and smiled, as did everyone else. All looking at me as though they genuinely cared to see this. Almost as if none of them expected to see it at all, but now that they were here, were sure as hell not going to miss it.

My eyelid opened a little bit. And the light glittered like water off of a lake in the early morning. Like the moon over the ocean almost. It was more beautiful than I could ever imagined it to be. [Huzzah for brains and detail! I R FAIL! But I R TRY] The tear drops looked like oceans of dew against a white ball of paint. The little red rivers running through it.

The eye shut again, and opened again, and repeated several times, until finally you could see everything. The eye slowly moved around, looking about. The pupil increasing and decreasing in size, focusing. The cornea, looked as though somebody had painstakingly painted it just for this occasion. From the angle, it looked like the pupil and cornea were a pit underneath the massive clear dome, which is what it was. The cornea was a blue gray, with dark green edges. Some of it looking like the shallow waters of the Mediterranean, and some like the Marianas Trench. The darkness of the pupil was only offset by the sunlight glintering off of the ocean of teardrops cascading in and out on it like a tide.

My eye suddenly stared right at me. How, I don't know. But it did. I felt as though I had just gazed into my very own soul. I looked around, and everyone's smiles faded as they faded. She faded. And then I found myself sitting beside the monk at the monestary.

"You have walked into the most beautiful thing the world could ever imagine. And like many times before, you will walk away, not knowing what it is you have. You will die unhappy unless you discover what your happiness really is."

"What? No--I want to get my degree and help push mankind to the stars."

"No, you do not understand. That is your passion. Not your happiness."

"I'll be happy when I complete it."

"And if you don't?"

"I..."

"I thought so."



The monk let go of me and I fell down again. My shoes followed. I could see up and I noticed the monk waving. What was weirder, is that I noticed his right palm was exactly like my own. Only one line running across. I landed on something. It hurt, but I was getting more or less used to that. I put my shoes on, and dusted off. The valet park assistant handed me the keys to the tank, with a weird look of wonder, as to where Byron had gone to.

"He's gone."

The Valet nodded, and left. I climbed the tank, and put the keys into the ignition. Climbed out, and left. I left behind my rifle, and my pistol. A few minutes later, I came back for the pistol and tucked it in my pants. Just in case.

The sun was rising over the trees now. It was going to be a beautiful day.