Thread: Alban's Esoteric Exotica

I only remember very little of this as it was the night before last. (This is why I need a journal.)

Fortunately I usually manage to grasp the key symbolic elements. In this case it was staying with my family in a very large hotel.

The hotel itself was strangely luxurious and run-down at the same time. A combination I always find distinctly creepy and a fairly frequent element in my dreams- luxury+decay (shivers)

It was also enormous. We had a very odd room on the top floor in a wing that, from the outside, looked like it should have belonged to a 1950's hospital - flat, asphalt roofed, cream paint slightly peeling and stained with water tracks.

It was very heavily carpeted with beige shagpile, even in the bathroom, which had a dark-green jacuzzi that my sisters and I proceeded to fight over as to who was going to get to use it first.

I relented and went to watch TV by the window. It was a very dark, brooding twilight outside and while I was flicking channels I was suddenly overcome by a feeling of dread. I heard my mother - or one of my sisters, not sure - shrieking: "OMG there's animals down there, loads of them!"

I looked out the window and, sure enough, there were lions, rhinocerous, crocodiles all wandering around the huge, empty carpark and grounds.

I vaguely remember having to get out of the hotel and that it involved dodging the beasts and hiding behind the cracked flower pots, but it all just goes hazy after that and vanishes.

I think this dream had very much to do with a recent change in my state of mind... a good change.

This dream began rather abruptly with my mother at the sea near my house.
We were out swimming a few hundred feet from the shore.

The water was very blue, calm and clear and, as we lazily swam further and further out, I would periodically dive down and see if I could still touch the bottom. (I always do this when I swim out to keep and eye on the currents.)

There were a fair few people around butoddly enough there seemed to be more of them the further out we swam.

It got to the point where I felt it was too deep to swim down - it was really starting to hurt my ears near the bottom.

My mum, however, insisted that I could do it, and after she said this I could, no hurting ears or anything, even though I was having to dive down pretty deep at this point.

We slowly got further and further out until at some stage I realised we were out in the open sea, no land in sight.
There were now CROWDS of people around us in the water.

A large fairground-floating-town-type consruction loomed into view and, because we rather tired at this point, we climbed into it.

Inside there were all sorts of rides and things, a lot of them opening out onto the now very dark ocean beneath.
You had to swim a lot to get from one section to another.
It was all made of brightly coloured resins and plastics, like a kiddies water-playground.

Very abruptly I found myself in a kind of obstacle race, competing with a group of other people.
My mother was on the side-lines now, cheering me on.

I competed as hard as I could and was doing ok until we came to a section where you had to squeeze through a really narrow tunnel.
I kept getting stuck!

On the other end there was a mickey-mouse and a mini-mouse statue and if you got stuck you had to call upon one of magically asist you.
The hitch was, only one would help and the other would harm, but it was different for each person.

The others were all calling upon Mickey and he seemed to be helping them.
Since I'm usually always the odd one out I took this as an indication that I should call upon Mini.

I did... and lost my legs.
They were replace with useless strips of cardboard and wire.

Needless to say, I got out the tunnel but lost the race.
When I went to find my mum she was deep in conversation with a group of people and didn't seem the slightest bit interested anymore.
I was struggling with a very deep feeling of failure.
I felt I'd let the world down.

I have the feeling that the "Deep-Sea Obstacle Course" dream became a number of others before becoming this particular one but this is the only other one I rememeber.

It faded in on a vast, I suppose, gothic rooftop. The pitch of the roof was very gently, though, more like an Italian villa.

The main thing is that there were a lot of bare tree-tops around. All I could see was the roof, (which was like the size of... a village) and the trees, not the building below.

There were ornate, wrought iron railings, gantries and catwalks running mainly along the ridges of the various sections but sometimes down the faces, leading to little wooden platforms and balconies.

I was wandering these strange rooftops aware that I could see various figures shambling about but that they couldn't see me.
It was like I was a ghost, or more like some kind of spirit.

One figure in particular caught my attention. He was a pianist - I just knew this - and he had a 19thc, tortured-by-inner-demons-artist look about him.

I watched him for a bit as he walked backwards and forwards on a walkway, mumbling under his breath.

Fairly soon I was in a huge, but rather dusty and unkempt concert hall, which I somehow knew was beneath the vast roof.
I was invisible, at the back of the stage, amongst the curtains and faded scenery.

The pianist was on the stage as well, some distance from me, preparing to play.
There was another pianist, on the same side of the stage but, obviously, a few feet away.

On the opposite side of the stage was a seated woman, lavishly dressed, surrounded by an entourage of young ladies attending upon her, fanning her, stroking her hair.
They were like her little pets.

She had a smug smile on her face and it was clear that the two pianists were going to play for her, each apparently desperate to win her heart by means of their artistry.

Behind this lot, murmuring and hububbing, was the audence, dissappearing into the far, shadowey extremeties of the enormous theatre.

The audience went silent... and the two pianists began to play.

It was the most incredible piano concert I have ever heard.
Awesome, almost like a super-spectacular kung-fu movie showdown with explosions and flying and the works... but in music.

I was blown away, as was the audience - the woman, however, was apparently only mindly impressed.
And it soon became quite clear that the pianst I was rooting for, the one on the roof, had come off the worse in this round.

Everyone dispersed for the intermission and I found the pianist again on the rooftop - despondent and depressed.

Somehow, without him seeing me, or even speaking to me, I managed to bolster his spirits again.

We went back to the stage for the second and final round.
But this time, his opponent was nowher to be seen.
The lady however was in exactly the same place, with all her little girls.

The pianist began to play something - slow, intimate and beautiful.

And this is where the dream gets VERY weird -

I have to stress that the following scene was in no way sexually arousing.
It appears to me to be purely symbolic. Of what, I don't know.

A pair of ballerinas appeared ut of nowhere at each side of the piano, and started performing ballet routines, pirouetting and whatever else ballerinas do, you know what it looks like.

The thing is, they had no underwear on under their tutus and their girly-bits were very clearly visible.

As the music continued, it started becoming like that was all I could see, their parts, until they simply filled up my whole mind to the exclusion of everything else!

And that's where it ends.

Strong undertones of feminine tyranny methinks!

So, after a couple of mornings with only the vaguest memories of anything, I woke up from a very vivid dream today.
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comThe first bit is a bit cloudy. Once again I was in some vast hotel. (Not sure why I get recurring hotels and why they’re always vast.)
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Anyway, I was desperately trying to get out. I have no idea what the urgency was, I just knew I had to get out of there and it was well nigh impossible to do so.
It didn’t actually look like a hotel at all, more like an ultra-modern office block or some kind of conference/expo centre.
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I remember the lobby bit had huge ramp running the width of it, instead of the usual stairs and lifts. I was running up and down this ramp like a headless chicken, completely devoid of any logic or capacity for reason, and getting no closer to escaping the place.
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To make it worse, the front was completely made of glass, with bridges and concourses at various levels, leading to buildings on the opposite side of the road.
I could see where I wanted to go but just couldn’t get there.
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Well, to cut a long story short, I managed to escape into the glorious sunshine and fresh spring air outside.
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That wasn’t the end of my quest however because I kept on running down the pretty little suburban streets with that panicked, “Gotta get out of here!” feeling.
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The neighbourhood was a maze so I was soon back to the headless chicken scenario.
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In the middle of this I heard my name called.
I turned to my right coz that’s where it came from, and saw a house on a corner. It was a proper corner house. The front porch faced onto the corner, as did the steps. There was a cool little corner garden in front of it as well, with perfectly manicured hedges, gravel beds and other garden-ish elements.
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The person calling me was a girl who happened to be an old friend of mine in the dream but in actuality I have never met before in my life. My guess is she was some manifestation of my mind. (Calling from the right-hand side.)
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I forgot about my panic and walked over to her to have a chat. We talked for a couple of minutes and then she said that she wanted me to meet her friend, who she only met herself a couple of days before on the beach.
I was thinking: And you’re roommates already?
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She called the friend and then started busying herself in the garden.
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The friend came to the door in a beach sarong. Her chest, shoulders and face were orange as… an orange, and deeply wrinkled and blistered, like she’d been done over with a blow-torch.
Her neck and “wattle” ,for want of a better term, were pretty much just gaping holes, showing the flesh underneath.
It was like a horror movie.
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I just stood looking at her, mouth open.
She said hi and started talking to me as if nothing was wrong.
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“Oh, overdid it a bit sun tanning yesterday..” she said. Like it was nothing.
I was just consumed by this feeling of horror, wanting to pity her but feeling repulsed at the same time.
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Sometimes when a dream turns nasty, it scares me into questioning if it’s real and I remember to do an RC.
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Not this time.
It just ended right then and there. I’d had enough and I woke up.
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