Thread: Put your feet up and grab a beer. (Another long dream)

Yet another exerpt from the elusive Dream Diary; recent:

The Dreaming was sporadic before it was stable. I saw the … whatever they were… my friend calls them “shadows”. They were in my room. They were coming for me. I grabbed Emme (my lizard) and my keys, which were in my purse nearby, and I climbed out my window. I ran to my car and started driving. I don’t know where I was going. I just drove as fast as I could. It started to rain, so hard that I couldn’t see anymore even with my wipers on as fast as they would go.

And then someone was beside me. I felt her presence before I saw her. It was the little girl, Cass, from my dream a couple of nights ago. She looked up at me. Her eyes were white. She said, “See.”

My car, the little girl, and Emme were gone before I could blink. I was standing in the middle of the road, the rain soaking through my clothes. And then the rain changed to droplets of fire. The street changed to a city street… and I saw it all again… another tower must fall… that’s what she said… Huge spheres of flaming rock were hurling out of the sky. Meteors? They took chunks out of the earth wherever they landed. The ground beneath me crumbled and fell into a massive chasm of nothing…

I fell…

I was on an underground stairway made of stone… in a cave? People were running all around me, screaming. Mothers holding their babies close to them, men yelling and pointing… Someone grabbed my arm roughly and dragged me down the stairs with him. We ran through some caverns before we finally arrived in the main area; an enormous cavern that seemed to be everyone’s destination. There was a screen, a very large monitor that was showing images of fire and devastation… buildings all over the world were falling. There was a number in the corner that kept going up… I remember this. It was a death count. People were sobbing all around me. I barely heard the sound of a bell…

I was above ground again. Meteors smashed into the ground… there wasn’t much left… I looked up to the sky, and I felt something inside me. It felt like… like my soul had finally woken up. Like I’d been living in a dark room all these years and the drapes had just blown open… I held up my hand and I said, “Fire.” The meteors slowed down and instead of hitting the ground, they came at me. My body absorbed them, like a whirlpool would suck down a ship.

Then they stopped coming and I was standing in a field. I heard a voice behind me, “Very good.” My heart nearly stopped. I knew that voice. I would always know that voice. I whirled around to see him…

“I’ve been searching for you!” I said. I ran to him and he caught my hands in his. “I’ve been looking for so long! I knew you existed!”

He laughed. “Of course I exist. But you won’t remember me when you wake, I’m afraid.”

I said his name aloud, hoping that it would imprint onto the mind of my waking self. But it didn’t… I fucking said his name so clearly and I can’t remember it!

He smoothed my hair with a hand… a rough, gnarled hand. A fatherly hand. “You did very well.” He said. I beamed. I couldn’t help it; his approval meant the world to me. “This isn’t the last test you’ll face, however.”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “You’re with me.”

He smiled and kissed the top of my head. “It doesn’t work that way, Sunflower. I wish it did, but it doesn’t. You’ve others to teach you now. You’ve others to teach.”

“But I’ve been looking for you for so long!” He was slipping away from me again. He was right in front of me, so solid, so real, and he was slipping away! I tried to hold him, to hold us, in that dream area. But I couldn’t. I’m not strong enough. Damn it, my heart was breaking (it still is breaking, even in this waking world) and I wasn’t strong enough! He disappeared and before I could weep, I was somewhere else.

Water… Lots of water… flooding… we were in a room, filled with people, slowly filling with water. Faster now… I looked around and saw a dear friend. He was building a wall, trying to dam the flow of water. He was glowing, but he was getting tired. I wondered how long he’d been doing that. I swam to his side and immediately added my energies to his. The wall was built, but the water was still rising. Both of us flew to the top of the dam and directed the water over the wall and safely onto the other side. It wasn’t an easy task and it took a lot of energy to do. Water can either be a very serene or chaotic element to work with. In this case, it was chaotic to the extreme.

Both of us realized that even doing what we were doing, we were becoming overpowered. The sea will never cater to the whim of any mortal being, and this was no different. That worried me. And I could see that my friend was growing exhausted very quickly. He looked like hell… Still, he didn’t want to give up. I wondered briefly if he was a construct of my mind or something else…? I decided that I didn’t care. Dream construct or not, I still loved him and didn’t want to see him hurt.

“I’ll finish,” I said. “You rest a minute, I can handle it.”
He gave me a look.
I said, “I know you’re powerful, but you’re also tired. I’m not, so just let me do it. I’ll be ok.”
“Liar.”

I had to laugh, but it was a crazy sort of laugh. Maniacal would be a good word. “You make no sense to me whatsoever!” I punched him as hard as I could. Had he not been so drained, and maybe had he expected my attack, I don’t doubt that he would have easily resisted—and won. But he didn’t, and I watched him fall away from me. It was weird but I felt content somehow. I knew he’d be safe.

I felt the same something inside me wake up again—the feeling of my soul waking up. This time, I spread my arms wide and said loudly and clearly, “Water.”

All the water rushed into me, through me, and onto the other side of the dam. It was angry and violent and it was doing some serious damage to my body. It felt like it was literally tearing me apart. I could see my friend trying to get to me. He actually looked pissed. I smiled at him, that feeling of contentment growing into one of warmth… like the womb…

I was drowning…

And then I was in a small room with a fireplace. The others were with me. All eleven of them. I looked at each of them, trying to burn the image of them in my mind, but I couldn’t. It looked like some of them were trying to do the same.

“Yo, we need some weapons,” a male said.
“Where are we supposed to get weapons to fight this kind of battle?” a female voice asked in answer.
“The old guy said they were here somewhere,” said another male voice.
“What old guy?” another male asked.
Yet another male said, “Hey, check this out.”

We gathered around the fireplace and he pointed to a crack in the floor under the wood. “There’s something down there, but I can’t open it.”

Some of the others took turns trying to open the trapdoor, but none of us could. We sat around in the room, thinking. I stood up and started to pace. I noticed that there were wall sconces hung on both sides of the fireplace and above it. One was Cernunnos, one a mermaid, one a phoenix, one a dragon, and two were strange symbols. All representative of the elements… I grabbed a chair, dragged it beneath the wall sconce of Cernunnos and climbed up. The others stared at me, not sure what to make of what I was doing. I leaned close to his beautifully carved face, almost like I was going to kiss him, and I said softly, “Earth.”

I felt the powers of earth fill my body and flow out with my breath, igniting the wall sconce with a greenish flame. I grinned and turned to look at the others.

“No shit!” someone said.
“Do it to the other ones!” someone else shouted.
I moved the chair to the mermaid, climbed up and got close to her. “Water,” I whispered. This time the powers of water filled my body and flowed out through my breath. The sconce lit with a blue flame.
Someone blurted, “Hey, you think if she does ‘em all, we’ll be able to summon Captain Planet?”

The rest of us laughed (those of us who were old enough to remember that show, anyway). The youngest ones just looked at each other, befuddled. I moved to the phoenix and whispered, “Fire”; it lit up with a red-orange flame. I moved to the dragon. “Air.” But nothing happened. I skipped that one and moved to one of the symbols. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I took an educated guess. “Light.” I said, but still nothing happened. The last one, of course, had to be “Dark”. I felt it flow through me, but when the sconce lit up it was with a black flame that was difficult to see.

“I can’t do these two,” I said, pointing at the dragon and the first symbol. “I tried, but I don’t feel anything.”

Someone touched me. I looked down from the chair into blue eyes. My friend didn’t look quite so pissed anymore. Construct or not, he had apparently forgiven me for punching him in the face. “Try again,” he said.

I nodded and climbed up to the dragon. His hand was on my back and I felt something this time, something flowing from him into me. “Air,” I whispered. I felt the power of air fill me. The sconce lit up with a pale blue flame. We moved to the symbol. “Light,” I whispered again, and it lit up with a white flame. With the last sconce lit, there was a scraping sound from the fireplace, the grating echo of stone on stone.

We rushed over to see, and the trapdoor had opened, revealing a small, very deep, very steep passageway. Everyone was just standing there, staring like idiots. I rolled my eyes.

“I’ll go first,” I said. I pushed by the others and started to lower myself into the hole.
“I’ll go with you,” said one of the females.
“Me too, but ladies first,” said one of the males.
I never got to the bottom… I woke up before I could lower myself all the way into the passageway.