Category: dreams

Later that night I had another dream. This one was unsettling and somewhat sad.

I was in a room with E, and we were standing holding each other in our arms. It felt like one of the bedrooms of the cabin in the community garden from when I was a child, although it looked quite different. This was not the real, physical world, because I knew that E, and possibly both of us, were dead.

I asked if she was indeed E, or if she was my dead grandmother in E’s body. I didn’t get a clear answer, although I asked in several ways. Then I asked if she was both E and my grandmother. This too elicited no vocal response, but I thought I perceived a slight nod. But I realized that it couldn’t be true, because my grandmother had still been alive when E was born, so one could not be the reincarnation of the other. I expressed as much, which made E take my hand and lead me to the living room. Several old black-and-white photographs hung on the opposite wall. In silence she led me to one depicting some people standing some distance apart from each other, neither of them facing the camera. She pointed her finger at one person, then the other.

A few days ago I had two vivid dreams that I was able to recall parts of.

The first was a nightmare, but it was an unusual one – for me.

Throughout my life I have often had dreams where I’m partially aware that I’m dreaming or at least that what I’m experiencing is not fully real. At some point as a child, I started using this insight to force myself to wake up from nightmares. It didn’t always work, but more and more it did, as if I was training myself.

What made this dream especially terrifying was that I experienced it as if it was entirely real. I was lying, half sitting, in bed feeling sick. Even thinking back, I don’t know when the dream started.

The room was completely dark. I suddenly became very afraid that there was an evil presence in the room, a ghost like in a Japanese horror movie – a person that would suddenly be sitting in the room staring at me, or a hand that I would suddenly notice on the side of the bed. I thought now that it could be under the bed. Sometimes in nightmares I get an urge to go towards the scariest place, to confront the evil head-on, even though this is scarier than avoiding it.

I jabbed my hand quickly under the bed – but felt nothing. So I reached further in, back towards the wall, and to my horror I felt some clammy skin. I grabbed hold of this body part. I was holding a hand, and I pulled it; somehow that was better than leaving it there, although I was also terrified of what would happen when I pulled this body out from under the bed. Having the light on seemed better, so at the same time I was desperately trying to reach the light switch with my other hand.

Then I woke up, in the same room, in the same bed, in the same position, very surprised that I had been dreaming.

I’m in a dark room with other people. I’m standing in the middle of the room and I faintly see something white shaped like a spindle or cone, a meter from the floor. I don’t know if it’s glowing or if I can see it because of some dim light source. I try grabbing it, but my fingers grasp at air. Every time I try, my hand passes through the object and it stays floating in the air. But then I notice that the process does produce some tangible material in my hand, which I start putting to the side every time I grab at the object. I think that this is some kind of renewable source.

Then I feel a thick cord strung diagonally up to a corner in the ceiling. I pull it and feel how it pulls back heavily. Somehow I know that something living is at the other end, and in fear I envision a huge spider. The room lights up and I’m able to see the other end of the cord. A horrifying sight meets my eyes: There’s a black mass sliding slowly between the cord and an open window – a myriad of small insects instead of one big spider.

That was the beginning of a new world: Insects are now sentient, like humans. Later in the dream, I’ve been doing some activity together with several humans and insects, and now we are all leaving through a big doorway. These insects are big, some as big as human children. And as I’m walking, I’m thinking how important it is that I don’t step on any of the smaller ones as they skitter by. The feeling is that humans and insects have found a way to live together.

Then another change occurs, as frightening as the previous one: Metal is now also becoming sentient. A man is holding or being held by a big metal claw that has started moving by itself. Then I’m this man, struggling and trying to get away from the claw. Protruding knives appear, stabbing into my hand and arm.

I’m very successful in the field of music or movie production or something similar. At one point I’m in a meeting room with two women and I suddenly tell them that I’m not actually famous and successful. I’m referring to the fact that I’m dreaming, but I don’t express it that way. I say that I have created them, and that sometimes I create people and control them completely (meaning that I’m aware of the dream and choose exactly what happens; although in reality this never happens to me), and other times I don’t know what the people I create will do, which is the case for these two women. Then there is a man in sumo-like underwear running in the corridor past the room (which has glass walls). I point out that I created him too.

Apparently there’s also a man that has been very important in my endeavors. He is a bit tall, not dark and maybe wavy hair, a long but not thin face. We are walking outside with some other people in a great plaza. Erasing my identity (and I guess everybody else’s) is still happening. The man becomes smaller and smaller until he has the body of a little boy, but still the same face. He runs ahead, and I run after. I think he’s upset about the change, since he’s essentially lost the whole life he has built. I comfort him like a little boy. We are in a great gathering of many people, something is going on, and people are standing or sitting looking in one direction. I’m sitting next to him, stroking him gently on his back.

There is another event with a group of several people. I don’t remember the details, but it seems like an exercise in letting go of everything. At some point everyone is lying on their backs with their limbs stretched out. Maybe this includes me. But then some movement occurs, which bothers me. Pretty soon the gathering has evolved into a dance class or dance performance, the participants striving to get it right. To me this is contrary to what we were trying to achieve. I walk away dismayed. This event was apparently going on in some corner of the great plaza or in a room adjoining it.

For the second time (or it feels like that in the dream) I stand in front of a huge monument mounted on or carved into the side a tall stone wall. It consists of gigantic statues of the Greek Gods (somewhat similar in appearance – or at least to the impression I get from – the Great Fountain sculpture from Gustav Vigeland). Some statues are mounted high up, others further down. There is something like an enormous gate or arch in the middle, and a fountain or pond under it, with the Gods arrayed around; but it’s all carved in stone.

This time, I decide to finally address them: “Gods of Olympus!” I don’t remember the next words, but I command them to come. They come alive, breaking out of the wall. People start screaming and running away. The lower part, the pond, cracks open and a big head with snake for hair emerges. I look at that face and the other Gods, and think that they look a certain way, not completely natural, but I know it’s because they are sculpted like that, and Ray Harryhausen comes to mind.

The gods come after the people. Then I too become afraid and start running. Maybe I’m not ready to give up everything anyway? There’s a low tree in the middle of the plaza. With all the people running everywhere, I think maybe my best chance of escape is to climb up and hide there. But the Greek god of trees or plants sees me and starts transforming the tree so that I’m absorbed in and merged with it. I’m terrified but then I think that this is exactly what I’ve been seeking, so I should be content.

I was in the forest with G, probably close to some cabin. We were building or overseeing a canal or pipeline in a stream. The stream was running between trees and over rocks, and was then lead into this construction that was around 10 meters long, the water flowing out on the other side. At some point there was a glowing object, like a pale star, floating in the air a few meters above ground. For some reason we thought the best way to deal with it was to lead it into the canal (the construction) somehow.

Then we noticed that the water was slowly rising upstream of the canal. We checked downstream, and sure enough hardly any water was coming out. It was blocked. We wondered if it might explode. I started backing away, standing behind some trees. But G said that it might explode and emit radiation, and then we would both just melt.

Then we were standing in a lab. Several people were sitting in office chairs, some in front of terminals. (We were now different people, but still it was a continuation of the events.) One of us had less muscles than the other, and also problems with arthritis – I think this was me. We both wondered what had happened in the woods. A woman sitting in a chair told us that the canal had indeed exploded catastrophically. I knew that we couldn’t have survived – we were in fact dead, which meant we were ghosts. I asked how they were able to communicate with us. She said that we had indeed died, but we were not ghosts. Instead our minds were now inhabiting different bodies (maybe artificial). But they were not functioning well, especially the weaker body.

There was a flashback to the two of us in the past. Now we were even more different, somehow connected to our current bodies. We had been romantic partners, and this was how we met. The scene was a public bathroom. I was both of the men, or none. Both were body builders, and at least their legs and upper bodies were unclothed. One of them was in the bathroom when the other entered. He was even more muscular than the other, with freakishly big thighs and arms, making him move in an odd way. He leaned in a weird angle to urinate. The smaller man had problems drinking liquids – always thirsty but never feeling like drinking a lot at a time. He drank some water from a glass and then left it half-full on the sink. There was a feeling that this was how everything started.

A dream from a couple of nights ago.

I was living in a cave with several other people and animals. The animals were mostly rabbits and different kinds of apes. At some point some bad men were after us, and we escaped into our cave. The entrance was accessed by climbing up a ravine of big boulders and I thought nobody would be able to follow us inside. But once inside, sitting in an elevated part of the cave close to the ceiling, I noticed an opening above me. I think it was meant as some kind of easy access or escape route. But now I was deathly afraid that the bad men would find it.

They did gain access somehow, and the dream turned into a true nightmare. I tried to will myself to wake up, but I only partly succeeded. I woke up sitting in a chair in a cottage, feeling very tired. My grandfather was sitting in another chair, also dozing off. My uncle (his son-in-law) was going back on forth organizing something—maybe packing—and was telling us, somewhat annoyed, to help out. But I couldn’t keep my eyes open and drifted in and out of the nightmare in the cave.

Finally I woke up for real, but I’m not sure if it was because of doubled efforts to wake myself.

This dream is from 4 April.

I was in a house with E. I guess in the dream it was our house, but actually it was the old house of my aunt and uncle, at least partly. E had been in the bathroom upstairs, but now we were both downstairs doing something. I then decided to go upstairs. The following is hard to explain.

I knew that E was also supposed to be upstairs (I think because she had never actually gone downstairs). But I also knew that she was definitely downstairs. This was a paradox that was presented or created somehow – almost like “reality” (or the dream, but this was not a lucid dream) was trying to fool me – but I did not think those thoughts explicitly in the dream. Still, I wanted to challenge this concept of E being upstairs. I knew that she would seem to still be there, in the bathroom, but I also knew that it couldn’t possibly be her, since I knew for a fact that she was downstairs.

I opened the door to the bathroom. There she was. But instead of acting naturally, she just stood there staring straight ahead (or at me) with one hand covering her mouth. This creeped me out. I was sure it was not really her, so I wanted to tear down this illusion, this trick, this simulacrum of E. I think the first thing I did was turn around her somehow, but whatever I did, she remained standing there the exact same way, hand covering her mouth. I don’t remember the details, but somehow I tore apart or deconstructed her, until in the end all I was left holding was her hair attached to a dark, flowing cape or perhaps shadow. This did not feel like any kind of success; it actually terrified me.

On 2 April I had another intense dream that woke me up.

I was driving a car, although I don’t know how to drive (also true in real life). It was very nerve-wracking, especially navigating between the other cars – although looking back, the cars were not going very fast. At some point the view shifted: Now I was observing this car from afar, even though I was still the one sitting in the driver’s seat. I was driving onto a side road from some bigger area or road, and I had done this before. But now I was observing it from a distance. I was commenting on this with some other people also observing. I was driving the car further away from my viewpoint, and this made it very difficult to see and manouver the car between the other cards.

At some point there were no other cars on the road. But my car was driving too far to the right, where the side of the road went off a steep cliff. I turned the control to the left (some kind of hand control instead of steering wheel), thinking I was just a little bit too far to the right. But then I noticed that the right-side tires were actually scraping just off the edge, shooting up gravel and dust as I went. I realized that I wasn’t able to correct the direction of the car; it was about to fall off the cliff, and I would then probably die in the crash. And then it happened: The car fell off. I hoped the drop would not be long, but I listened for several seconds while the car seemed to be in freefall.

Then I was standing on the bank of a river or lake, and it was underneath the cliff. Suddenly the car came falling past me, right in front of my eyes. I knew that since I was actually in the car (even though I was standing on the bank) I would be drowning any second. Then it happened: I was pulled down into the water, but I was somehow not in the car but beside it. I was already submerged. The car was sinking past me, section by section, while I tried to use it to get myself upwards in the water, crawling and running across the different parts of the car as it sank. Then I realizes I was not getting further up, and I felt tired. I somehow knew that struggling and swimming like this in the deep is not enough to move upwards faster than you’re actually sinking. (This was true in the dream, not necessarily in reality.) So I needed to start swimming up harder. I swam up as fast and forcefully as I can, although I felt my energy depleting and my terror increasing. I didn’t know how far up it was to the surface and I was running out of oxygen in my lungs. After expending all my energy and oxygen, I still had not reached the surface.

Lately I have been having several intense dreams where the world is ending, and the dream wakes me up in the middle of the night.

In one dream, sometime in late March, I was with someone when we saw something unusual in the sky. A section of it was pinkish red like at sunset, but shifting like if wispy clouds were traveling across it at great speed. At first I thought it was indeed some kind of weather phenomenon, but then I saw that it grew bigger and came closer and closer. I knew that it was something that would kill everything.

—

In a more recent dream, that I remember more of, I was in some big building complex with many people (as I often am in dreams), but none that I now remember from my real life. I was standing on a balcony and looking at the sun (or was it the moon?). It was pale, as if covered by a layer of mist, so it was possible to look straight at it. It was ascending towards the earth. Then I noticed the actual sun further up in the sky, realizing that this was something else. The landscape consisted of several hills behind hills, with trees on top, although everything seemed quite close. The round object kept going down and suddenly disappeared behind a hill – but I was quite sure it had not been the farthest hill, meaning it had actually hit the earth between the hills. This terrified me. I then saw several more of these planet-like, burning objects descending towards the earth – some near, some far. The building now seemed like it was a hospital, having to deal with this crisis, and apparently right after another recent crisis.

After a while I went back to the balcony, and found a man looking out while leaning against the rail. I asked him if he could tell me what was going on. He joked that I shouldn’t worry, since only the bad people had been dying. I told him to be serious. He said that this was it – almost all the world was destroyed by these orbs, and this place was one of the last standing. I went inside. I was amazed that everything looked so normal and calm. I wondered if I could survive by staying in the building, but then I realized that the heavenly body would just consume the whole building whenever it hit and there was nowhere to hide.

I had a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream recently, which I remember parts of.

I was having a dream in which several people from my life appeared. My mother and maybe my cousin were among them. Then I woke up from this dream. I told one of these people about the dream, and it turns out they also remembered it. In fact, all the people I told had had the same dream! We all thought this was incredible. I thought about it and then presented my theories: There are only three possibilities, I said. One, we were somehow telepathically linked during sleep. Two, our minds were actually all transported to an alternate world. I fixed my eyes on my mother and continued: Three, this… the present moment… is actually still a dream!

Before I had said the last words of that sentence, we all woke up at the same time, proving the third theory to be correct: we had all been dreaming. The moment of awakening was signaled with a sudden shift in reality: the gloomy and gray room all of a sudden turned bright and colorful. This was the passage from dream to waking. However, the shift didn’t cause anything else to change. My mother was sitting in the same chair; and I was standing in the same spot and even finished my sentence.

After actually waking up, I of course realized that when waking up from a dream, you don’t actually find yourself in the same place and continue doing what you had been doing in the dream. Also, although the theory had been correct inasmuch as it had been a dream, in actuality it had been only my dream, not everybody’s. In fact, this theory was inherently invalid, since you can’t explain a shared dream with another shared dream.