I dreamt a lot last night, but only two distinct parts of the dream I remember well.
I was in a gloomy cellar. It seems I was there willingly. There were three doors, each one a doorway to Hell, very reminiscent of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (although these doors seemed to be there all the time). Like in Hellraiser, there were labyrinthine corridors on the other side. I can’t remember being afraid.
The hallways to which the three doors led all connected on the other side, so it didn’t seem like it made a difference which of the doors one went through.
But at one point it became apparent that it was the middle door that had to be opened. The door, or perhaps Hell itself, made this clear by turning the door invisible so that we (or I?) could see it leading down a corridor to another door. Then, the middle door was like a TV screen, zooming in on the other door, even zooming so far that this other door appeared bigger than real size and one could only see a part of it. Then the view panned down to the handle of that door, which was pink and rubbery and shaped like a smooth erect penis. (I associated this with the sexual depravity of Hellraiser, the whole pain/pleasure thing.)
The later part of the dream was quite different. It’s strange to me now writing down these two passages, because they seem so related. But when I woke up, the connections didn’t occur to me, they were just the two parts of the dream I remembered best.
I was on an open-air plaza of a gigantic structure, some sort of temple. It was daylight. There were two big buildings, one to each side, sort of like mosques. I think we were high above sea level, maybe on a mountain. Everything was of stone, seeming like sandstone.
A priest was there, my superior or someone of authority. We were to perform a ritual, maybe a summoning. Between us was a casket, maybe a little smaller than a human sized coffin. It was quite plain looking, maybe wooden, with a perfectly rounded lid. What was in it was of some importance, but I don’t think I knew what it was, and maybe the revelation of the contents was part of the ritual.
It’s not clear what we did as part of the ritual, but for each step, we somehow went higher up a tower. Either the tower was already there, just that I couldn’t see anything higher up than the level I was on, or the tower appeared one level at a time. Each level was different, but made of stone.
When we had reached a great hight, there was another casket there, exactly like the first one but much bigger. The priest and I were standing on each side of it. I’m not sure where the first one was now, but I think we had it with us the whole time. The level where we were standing consisted of not much else than this casket, in any event nothing to stand on except the floor directly underneath the casket – so we had to stand on our toes, tucking them under the casket, where there was a gap because of its four feet. I was deathly afraid to fall down; behind me there was no support, just a plunge hundreds of meters down.
I noticed then that we weren’t on the very top of the tower. There was something even above us – a huge cross, or maybe even a crucifix or Christ figure.