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magicforest
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I just woke up from a nightmare. I am writing this down because I don’t want to forget it, although it seems to me currently that whatever path I take will condemn myself. The dream started as a fairly regular one, in which it wasn’t enjoyable, but I could see upon waking the elements of reality which my subconscious had assembled such a dream from. Basically I travelling through Toronto in a limousine, with my friend Holly. It was the driver who I perceived the most clearly; while he looked clearly East Indian, he sang along with the radio in Spanish. Despite seeming pleasant, he gave me a sense of underlying threat—this was the first time the dream seemed more ominous than interesting. At one point, we left the vehicle and upon finding it again, he said with annoyed impatience, “Did you girls tell me to eyescan?” which I interpreted to mean that if we were going to leave, we should have told him to keep an eye out for us. He also abandoned his dog, who had suddenly appeared in the front passenger seat, lonely and barking at a deserted gas station. He also wouldn’t take me where I wanted to go—I asked him specifically to take us to a street with some shops and restaurants still open, picturing in my mind a winding little Italian avenue with bistros and streetlamps and warm bakeries and shops. The time was eight fifty in the evening. I somehow feel he was indirectly responsible for my ending up at the elevator. I don’t remember the destination I was seeking when I entered the elevator, or even the building or surroundings the elevator was in, but merely being inside with the doors closing in front of me as it began to descend.
[setting:] elevator, light in colour, made of wooden panelling, cheap
[wanting:] must go down
[sensation:] ominous, no! suddenly don’t want to go down! kick at doors, they open and remain open, showing the wall moving slowly upwards (of course, in the actuality of the dream, I was moving downwards), revealing
[sight:] etchings—words carved into the wood panelling of the wall that matched the elevator, sloppily, like a teenager who carves rude words into a picnic table or into a tree—the words terrify me, and I can’t read them because of my lack of dream logic, but I can
[perceive:] that they read “do you fear?” or “are you scared?”, a series of similarly challenging questions meant to intimidate, the repeated acronym “fvm” scrawled everywhere lower down, accompanied by various scratched devil images, a creature with horns, possibly a pig with horns, and then as it flashes through my mind to face the final floor defiantly, by gesturing with my middle fingers—and then I see scratched in the wall either a depiction of two hands holding up their middle fingers, or one hand making devilhorns with the index and smallest finger extended and I
[decision:] decide to play it cool despite feeling suddenly terrified, my heart pounding in dreadful anticipation of the bottom floor.
[action:] I get out of the elevator to look around to see if it has my mysterious destination, I seem to want to find a large, public door, but I walk around the narrow bottom landing—about three metres in total, and there is just a hollowed thing, shaped like that nook under a staircase, with two large empty white tin containers, or drums, in it; I knock them around but there is nothing else,
[doubtful?:] there are also some wooden panel doors which I rattle at in a half-hearted attempt to open, before I realize the elevator is going back up again. I frantically try to get in but it closes before I can; I am filled with
[sensation:] the sense that there is no way for me to get back into the elevator—and thus out of the dead-end landing—until I see four or five metal lockers built into the wall, in varying sizes of rectangles and squares in nice clean steel, a padlock hanging and a key sitting in each, all unlocked but one, and I perceive that the lockers are labelled
[perception] ________’s Puzzle (in the blank is an unusual name, like a philosopher, which may have, but probably didn’t, start with a V)
[perception:] I feel that if I solve this puzzle by somehow using the locks and keys in some sort of combination, it will open the unlocked locker, and that will somehow provide a way for me to return to the elevator and get out of the landing—that someone, or something, has created this puzzle, this landing, the elevator, all with this exact intention. In my dreamlike state, however, I can’t figure it out. (Also, side note, now I perceive that the the keys and locks are all different sizes as well.)
Therefore I feel like I am going to die. Just as I optimistically think that surely someone else will, by accident, end up on the elevator and in the landing with me, I hear the elevator coming back down, miraculously. There are shouting voices, I get the sense of someone – either me begging, or someone instructing – either “Let me take my chance!” (let me get in the elevator) or “Take your chances!” (with the Puzzle) – in hindsight I think that this is when I may have noticed and rattled the perceived-to-be-useless wooden panel doors, because somehow I stupidly didn’t get on the elevator in time, and my last sensation was the strongest I have felt, as though my dark fate had blown the wind from me, as though my soul was hemorrhaging, as though my fear had risen to the top of throat and brimmed over, as though I was paralyzed and immobile with the unbelievable terror of the boding evil that reigned over the elevator and the landing.
In the muddled effects of the dream I remember wondering if there was a person in the unlocked locker who would expose the lockers to be an optical illusion (by his ability to fit in all of them without being dissected) and then he would shoot me with a gun, or if there was someone in the elevator who would shoot me.
I was filled with a strange knowledge, almost a complacence underneath it, because my fatalistic certainty of what would happen was so strong. I wonder if my expectations of what would happen indeed caused it to happen, for nothing in the dream so much as surprised me with horror as filled with me with yet more dread. It may have been myself somehow acting lucidly—not wanting the bad things to happen, but affecting my dream with my suspicion so that they did.
When I awoke, I lay in bed for about fifteen minutes, utterly certain that I was going to die, and that rather than having a normal dream birthed of my subconconscious, that I had been granted a vision from Hell itself of my imminent and impenetrable doom. The first thing I did was to pray to a God I had long stopped believing in; one who goes out of his way to help a fallen creature, as having seen a small shell of the suffering in the world I thought that a God who seems to listen only to the prayers of people in developed countries is no God at all. But I prayed because I wanted to be saved. It was the first time I caught a glimpse of the appeal in the Christian methodology.
My heart convulsed and then stilled, and a few hours later when I felt it was safe to close my eyes again, I fell into a dreamless sleep preceded by the single thought, which was more like a wish. I wished that since I was somehow still alive after this encounter with a Satan either human or divine, that someone else must have been taken from me. So I hoped that you were alive too; unharmed, safe, and oblivious. I could not think of any reason for having that dream except to kill me, or to find that you had died. More alarming still is the possibility that it was a premonition. I could live through this again, I could dream it every night, but I’d die in the landing before I’d let you lay eyes on that God-forsaken elevator.
So I cheat death for another day.
invites interpretations
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040709
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