Darker me

Last night, I found myself sleeping in a bed other than my own.  This can sometimes result in some strange dreams, and this was one such occasion.  What I've written below is what I remember.

The first part of this very odd dream I remember is me in my sister's old bedroom in the house I grew up in as a kid.  This house has featured in quite a few dreams recorded here.  Anyway, I'm sitting on the floor in front of a laptop, facing the window at the far end of the room.  I'm supposed to be working on the computer, but can't really concentrate, finding myself distracted by the window.  The window itself is pitch black.  It isn't nighttime, it's just that the window itself looks out into a mysterious, perfect blackness.

I eventually leave what I'm doing and walk over to the window.  Through it, I barely manage to make out the faint figure of something in the distance, looking a bit like a skeleton lying on the ground but floating in mid-air.  I then feel compelled to open the window and step out into this blackness, and when I do, I am consumed by it and feel what seem to be disembodied hands trying to grab at me, but I am able to repel them all.  Even so, I feel them changing me somehow.

I'm then in a hospital looking for a client I've dealt with at work but didn't get on with (long story).  I've been sent to assassinate him, which I eventually do after hunting him down.  I'm then transported to a school to look for another similar antagonist whom I also subdue.  With these encounters, I feel there is something in me that wasn't there before; a force playing on darker impulses, urging me to destroy without mercy.  I am both repulsed and empowered by it and know it started from when I jumped out of that window.

I then find myself in a forest and I'm approached by two potty-mouthed old ladies whom, amidst a flurry of expletives, tell me I have to find the "black palace" that is in the forest.  As I walk with them, a large, pink church-like set of double doors appears in front of me.  They tell me the black palace is behind those doors, so I open them and climb an invisible staircase, only to find the palace has been destroyed.  After that, I climb another invisible staircase and confront someone who tries to attack me with psychic tendrils that I am able to repel using the same dark powers from before.

There are other bits to this dream, but I don't remember them well.  At some point, I knocked on some old man's door and he helped me, but I can't remember how.   There was also another bit that took place in an area like the previous entry, but I don't remember that either.

Above all, this dream left me with a very strange feeling; in it, I was driven by a dark, destructive force that I didn't understand, but it had helped me progress, even if I felt bad about using it.  It seemed to awaken a dark side within me.  If you've ever Xenogears, it was akin to Id from that game.  Interestingly, I told my fiancee about this dream the following morning, and she said "It sounds like one of those games you play".  Perhaps she was onto something.

Parallel Universes

Not so much one dream, as a collection of different dreams that connected together or continued after I woke up and fell back to sleep.

So this started off with my floating over a landscape, which is a familiar scene in a lot of my dreams, particularly those I go on to eventually forget.  I floated over a back garden then into a house where a family were gathered in the living room.  I made my way over to them and it seems they were expecting me.  The children were very excited and wanted to play with me and their parents were eager to talk to me.  What was unusual about this is that in a lot of these dreams where I float over an unknown place and eventually attempt to talk to people, the people I meet are usually very unfriendly, but this was not the case now.

As I was speaking to this family, the wife told me that our mutual friend, a man called Mr Walker had told her a lot about me.  She also seemed to be under the impression that I had moved to the area and I did not attempt to convince her otherwise when in actuality, I was from a parallel dimension and was just passing through.

After I finished talking to the family, I wandered off but could not float out of their living room because the ceiling blocked my ascent.  I also didn't want them to see me floating off so I wandered across the other side of the room where they couldn't see me then made myself invisible.  The husband walked over to where I was and couldn't find me, so just figured I'd left.

As I floated around their house in an invisible state trying to find a way out, I came across a large mirror in the dining room, but when I looked into it, instead of seeing my reflection, I saw it acted as a window into another living room.  It was essentially a dimensional portal.  I floated through that into a room in a house in another dimension.  There was no-one around, and I was able to find a window I could float through, into the outside world.

As I traversed this new place, I came across a guy who wanted to talk to me and as we chatted, he told me a bit about the world I was now in.  The subject got onto gaming and I learned that in this parallel earth, the Sony PlayStation never really took off and ended up much like the Phillips 3DO in "this" world.  Also, Commodore was still a big player and their Amiga computers were hugely popular for both gaming and business (in other words, they were akin to PCs in this reality).  I also found out that Apple was around, but was not quite as ubiquitous as they are in our reality and as such, they had to diversify into household appliances as well.  One of their most popular was something called an iKnife which was used in catering and was essentially a very powerful laser that was used to cut through food.  Yes, all very odd.  And random.

Later in the dream, I floated around, saw the iKnife in action and also tried to look for portals in other mirrors, but this time, only found my reflection (which in itself is unusual for dreams).

That's really it.  I suspect the parallel universe stuff came from a conversation I had with someone in the week who was telling me of a drunken guy who'd reeled off a bunch of inaccurate gaming trivia, and whom I joked must have come from a parallel dimension but either way, it made for a memorable and compelling dream.

Ominous club

So, it goes without saying that I haven't posted here for a long, long time.  One would be forgiven that I've completely abandoned this blog, but that's not the case.  The reality is that I've had very few memorable dreams in all that time, and the ones I have remembered have been fleeting.  It's something that has both perplexed and frustrated me for the last 2 years.  Some say that the very act of writing dreams down facilitates the process of remembering, so here's hoping.

In this dream, I visited a club in my hometown that in the waking world is actually a theatre.  Upon entering, I realised this was some kind of fetish club; the clientele was dressed in the sort of leather BDSM attire you'd normally associate with that sort of culture.  Sitting in one of the side rooms of the club was a friend of mine I haven't seen in a long time and in this dream, he was gay (he isn't IRL).  He was wearing an all-white outfit open at the chest and his hair was dyed blonde.  He never said anything about his sexuality, I just "knew", in that way you just seem to in dreams.

Anyway, he asked me why I was there, and that the club didn't seem like somewhere I'd visit.  I told him that I'd never seen it before and wanted to check it out, but was starting to have reservations.  The next thing I know, the scene had changed and the two of us were in some basement rooms beneath the club.  In this basement area, there were several rooms behind doors and another set of stairs leading even further downwards.  We were standing in some sort of atrium and on the wall in front of me was a large pane of glass.  I looked through it into a small room that contained a little bed.  My friend entered the room and noticed the pillow on the bed had bloodstains.  At this point, I started to sense a threat and told him that.  He responded by running down the stairs, which I didn't think was a good idea.  I, therefore, decided to run back upstairs into the main area of the club so I could leave.  However, I couldn't find the door that lead back to the staircase.  I opened one and found myself looking into a room with a body on the ground and someone crouched over them.  This got me even more worried.  I closed the door and left.

I eventually found the staircase leading back upstairs and frantically tried to find the exit, but it seemed as if the layout of the club was shifting and changing, making it harder to escape.  Fortunately, I managed to find the way out and ran out into the street before floating away to safety.  This ending leads me to a recurring theme that has featured in the little I have managed to remember from dreams over the last few years, but I'll save that for another post.