Visions in the Dark

I am in a house I do not recognize and most of the action takes place in the large kitchen, dining room or hallway to the bedrooms. The house sits at the top of a hill amidst a forest whose leaves are ablaze with all the brilliant, fiery colours of autumn. The inside facade of the house consists of very natural colours and materials: wood floors and earth tone colour schemes.

There is going to be a party if sorts tomorrow, maybe a family reunion or something, and I am in the kitchen making dish after dish of salads and casseroles and other side dishes. I think the party is a pot luck because even though I know that other people are going to be bringing food, I have an almost uncontrollable urge to make as much food as possible. I worry that there will now be enough for everyone even though I am not sure how many people are going to be there (though I know it is going to be a lot).

I have guests who have arrived already and they are going to stay the night. There are two men and two women. I am suddenly in the living room talking with one of the men who has a beige polo shirt and who has a bushy brown beard. He is joyful and always smiling and seems very happy to talk to me. We are related in the dream, but I forget how. From just above the knees down to his ankles his pants become transparent and I can see his leg bones. The transparency effect becomes stronger the further down the leg you go and his feet have completely disappeared. I know this is wrong somehow and I sit back with a white marker to blend the white of his bones with his pants and try to colour in his legs to make them look full. For some reason I think that the man will be embarassed about it if other people notice. Suddenly I realize that the bearded man I am talking too is a ghost and that is why his legs are transparent. I am not afraid or anything but I am confused as to why he has come here and not gone to the afterlife and I think I ask him this and his response is that he is glad that family is getting together. He disappears soon afterwards and I think I realized that there were other ghosts around as well or something but I cannot remember if I talked to them or not.

While I am the same person in the dream in mind, my body has suddenly aged significantly and I am now an old lady. Also quite suddenly I am in a foul mood (though not because of the aging) and start throwing plates and cutlery around roughly and pushing the two women guests (one is a blond middle aged woman in a baby blue sweater and the other is younger with brown hair?) around in the kitchen . They are visibly shaken by my sudden mood change and though they say nothing I can tell by the expressions on their face that they wish I would retire for the night so they could finish their work in peace. I stomp out of the kitchen in a huff and scream "Dont touch my fucking cheese casserole or I'll fucking kill you!" as I enter the hallway to my bedroom. For some reason I think they will eat it when I am gone and it only adds to my sudden and inexplainable rage.

I go up to my bedroom and lay down on the bed and though the house has three other people in it downstairs I cannot hear them at all. They have either gone to bed or are tiptoeing around because they think I am trying to sleep, but honestly, to me it feels like they are not there at all. The house feels empty again like it did for a long time before they arrived. The window is open and I can feel the soft night breeze coming in the window and hear the rustling of the leaves on the trees. A few autumn leaves are blown in with the wind and scatter across my bed and my floor but this doesn't bother me and I find that I am no longer so full of rage but feel very lonely. I become confused and start to think all the planning and cooking was not real and I imagined the whole thing. I get up and head downstairs. I cannot find my three guests but there is indeed many plates of food prepared and scattered through the kitchen and in the fridge.

There is a knock at the front door and I open it to see a young black man in grey clothing standing on the path leading to my house. He is smiling and asks me to walk with him for a while. Even though it is the middle of the night and I don't know this man I go with him anyway and we walk through a path that leads to a forest talking, though I cannot remember any of our conversation now, but I am very content to be with this man because I feel like I know him but I cannot articulate how. The sun starts to rise and we go return to my house and stand at the very top of the hill and I am surprised to see a very long line of people outside of my house consisting of thousands of people, most of whom I do not recognize as family or friends. I have trouble believing that all of these people are here for the party and the young man in grey just responds that these are all the people whose lives I have affected or who love me.

I start to realize that something is amiss and suddenly I am back laying in bed, half conscious and vagely aware that I am waking from a deep sleep. Instead of being in my bedroom though I am in a hospital room surrounded by the three people from before who were my guests. It dawns on me that I had died the night before and the walk through the forest with the young man was actually a walk through a replay of my long life with my guardian angel, though I did not realize it at the time. I was able to talk to the ghost of the man with the transpartent legs before because I had been a ghost too.

I reach out and take the hands of the people surrounding me and tell them I love them. I feel so full of love for them and for the whole world that I feel like I am going to burst with joy. Even though I had just died the night before the doctors let me leave the hospital and go back to my house for the pot luck party. There are not thousands of people there but there is a lot and everyone is happy, filled with good food and enjoying life and the company of others.


This is a very unusual dream for me, because it ended positive and there was lots of positive feelings in it, when usually my dreams are dark and depressing and scary. I'm not complaining, I'm just saying...

(Sorry for the length)

I am in a valley that is damp and fog-laden. It looks to me like the highlands of Scotland or something. I appear in this dream as my dream incarnate Kalima (image), but wearing a plain grey Victorian dress and white apron. The hills surrounding the valley are covered in ancient, crumbling castles and decaying ramparts while the valley floor is a huge never ending hedge-maze.

I am desperately lost in the maze and I am in a panic because I can feel not one, but two, dark presences nearby and I can sense that they are hunting me. I run through the maze as fast as I can but because of its enormity and the fact that it never ends I don't really get much farther ahead of the pursuers. I am not try to memorize or mentally map out the hedge maze and just run hoping I will get lucky and either find my way out or find the middle (where I instictively know I will be safe).

No matter how far I run I can still hear the creepy snuffling of my dark pursuers, like they have giant nostils and are sniffing me out. I find myself in a dead end and can hear the sniffing sound of one of the pursuers just on the otherside of the hedge. I know it can smell me because it stops to hover around the other side of the hedge where I am leaning in fright to sniff, before it lets out a terrible high pictched shriek to inform the other dark presence that it has found me and start running through the maze to find the fastest way to get to me.

I am so terrified that I fall to my knees and forward onto my stomach, because my legs have gone numb with fear. This allows me to see the smallest of spaces between one hedge and the ground. It looks as if a small pit was dug by a fox or ground hog or something to get under the hedge. I scramble to deepen the hole as quickly as I can and am able to squeeze through and start running again, long before the two dark pursuers find the dead end I was trapped in. They are much to large to fit through the hole (I'm not sure they even noticed it actually) and have to turn around and find their way back through the maze.

I suddenly feel two things simutaneously. First, a heavy object in the front pocket of my apron, which turns out to be a large cast iron key. The blade of the key is plain but the bow part of it is intricate in detail and had a peice of dark red glass set in the middle of it. Secondly, I feel someone close by who is watching me, but their presence is not threatening, though I cannot see them because they are invisible. The being feels warm and radiates love and kindness and for some reason I believe it is a guardian angel, even though I don't believe in angels in waking life.

The being starts to move through the maze and I am able to follow it by moving in the direction of where I feel the warmest air. After a long while I am led to what looks like another dead end somewhere near the middle of the valley and the warm presence suddenly disappears. I know there is something about this part of the hedge maze that I am supposed to discover but I can only pace back and forth in frustration for a long while because I cannot figure it out and I can hear the snuffling of the two dark pursuers getting closer again.

I pull out the key that appeared in my apron pocket a while ago and assume that I am supposed to find a door, but none can be seen with the naked eye. I feel around inside some of hedge wall where there are little openings in the heavy brush, but all I encounter is thorny branches and after several times I have sore and bleeding fingers. I feel like I have been misled by the thing I thought was a guardian angel, as well as abandoned, and I am angry and frustrated and I remember thinking to myself "this is why I don't believe in angels!"

The blood on my hands makes me think about the dark red glass set into the bow of the key and I look through it like one would a spyglass, mostly out of bordem rather than thinking anything would happen, but as it turned out I could see a glowing red outline of a door at the very end of the dead end, where the hedge appears the thickest. Upon investigation the thick hedge is even thornier and more difficult to get my hand through than the ones before, but I can feel a metal door on the other side.

I fumble around with the key, trying to find the lock, all the while the two dark presences are getting closer. So close in fact that I can here them on the other side of the hedge and I start to panic because I cannot find the hole for the key. Almost at the last second the key finally slips into a hole in the door and the door opens, but I have to force by entire body through the thick wall of thorns and it is terribly painful and unpleasant.

I get through and am able to slam the door shut and lock out the pursuers just in time because they were so close that one was able make a swipe at me and catch the end of my grey dress and rip a peice off. The creatures looked like tank sized crosses of a pot-bellied pig and a bulldog. They had rough black skin, large snouts and glowing red eyes. There bodies were covered in scars like they had been badly beaten and tortured. I had been terrified of them the whole time I could not see them but as soon as I caught that short glimpse of their battered and beaten bodies, as I slammed the door shut, I felt kind of sorry for them because they made me think of domestic dogs that become ferocious and violent after being mistreated and abused. I wanted to open the door again and have another look at them, even try to pet them and be nice to them, but I realize just then that when I slammed the door shut I left the key in the lock and since the door has no handle on this side, I was essentially locked in (and unless the pig/dog creatures suddenly grew fingers, they were esentially locked out).

I take a moment to catch my breath and have a look at my surroundings. I am in a large open area that has rows and rows of plots for planting, but the whole garden is dead. The small trees and bushes around the perimeter are barren of leaves and many have broken branches. The few plants, and what looks like stalks, that can be found in the plots are whithered and dried. The grass is brown, the air smells of earthy decay, the few marble staues around the garden are weather worn or crumbling to peices and it looks as if the garden has not been tended to for hundreds of years.

In the center of the dead garden is a a small stone fountain at the base of a huge oak tree. The fountain only contains some dried and decaying leaves from the oak tree that has mighty, thick branches that reach eagerly upwards, but it looks pretty pathetic without its leaves. I feel sad and wish there was something I could do to revive the garden but all I can do is sit on edge of the fountain and sulk.

My eye catches something white sticking out of the ground in a growing plot not far away. At first I though it was just like one of the many dead and dried out flower stalks found throughout the garden but when I get closer I can see that it is actually human finger bones sticking out of the ground, which sends a chill down my spine. Now that I am aware of it, an awful lot of the stalks sticking out of the ground look like skeletal fingers, and I even notice the old sun bleached bone hidden under the bushes and trees.

I suddenly want to leave very badly but don't know how because I've locked myself in the garden when I left the key in the otherside of the door. I briefly think that I will became another skeleton in the garden when I suddenly feel the warm angelic presence nearby again. I follow it to the locked door which suddenly unlocks and swings open. The pigdogs are gone but I am able to retrieve the key. The warm presence complels me to return to the fountain where I suddenly notice a keyhole in the bottom of it. I stick the key in and when I turn it, fresh clean water starts to flow out of the key hole and fill the fountain.

I am all excited and happy and stuff, because I think that the garden will now suddenly recover, but the dream ends there because I wake up.