Last summer I had a dream that inspired some very intense feelings in me. I’d like to write about it, to offer up a little picture of my brain.
I was being led in a long, single file line into a military bunker to avoid an ongoing natural disaster. Like sheep to the slaughter. Thunder storms were booming overhead. There was a skyscraper-sized radar tower on top of the bunker. In the line with me was my chef from the restaurant job I held that summer. There were probably about 50 of us all together, and I felt very claustrophobic as we marched in. Thankfully, my girlfriend was with me too.
Inside the bunker was otherworldly, it reminded me of playing Yume Nikki. Every floor was different as it went deeper and deeper down into the ground… The one shared trait was that each was a bedroom. Some had cold, slabs of beds, like jail cells. Others contained silken sheets and hanging curtains. One was wreathed in gold. Another was pink, like a Barbie Dreamhouse.
Somehow I figured that we were to be staying in these rooms, so I ran ahead of the crowd to lay my claim on a good one. I probably went down a floor ahead of everyone else. Then I went down another, and then another. My head was spinning, because I realized that I went too far… I lost the group, and my chef, and my girlfriend. Staying still made my skin crawl, so I kept going further into the dreamspace.
At the very bottom, after what felt like a dream-year of climbing down stairs, I reached a huge structure. It was like a dream-cavern hollowed out in the Dream-Earth and full of military dream-equipment. My fear transformed these surroundings into a dark, black void of a space. Machine guns and barbed wire covered the ground. The structure felt alien, like something out of Evangelion, a cavity formed by a birthing Angel. There were sci-fi instruments and technologies, like pylons, and antennae. The layout made no sense at all, and I soon found there were separate caves connected to this one via large drops-- If I wanted to go farther I’d have to make a leap into the void.
Down below, the caves just got bigger and bigger. I could’ve been standing above ground with how far they stretched on. I even started coming across old war vehicles like tanks and crashed planes.
I didn’t make it much further before something compelled me to turn back. All I remember was fear, and a pervasive fog. I just remember feeling deeply unsettled, and the vague recollection of a curse.
Not only was I forced up out of the caves, but I kept going up, all the way through the bunker and to the surface. Whatever I found down there, I figured that braving the storms above was preferable. I found my girlfriend, too, and the last thing I remember was holding her in my arms in the middle of a huge, blinding storm.
It was a scary dream and I felt so hopeless. I keep thinking about it lately, for whatever reason. Sometimes a feeling will stick to me like glue, so strongly I can’t shake it.