DarkestDarkness

2022 June 20th

Some in-line notes too.

Dream:

I'm walking through a small town that could be somewhere in my native country. Small houses, ground floor only. Trims and so on as expected. I'm with dad and cousin T. It's daytime, probably morning. Dad is taking photos and as we get to the top of a hill in the town, I see a somewhat breathtaking view of distant rolling hills much like this one, with pink cherry tree plantations here and there, interspersed with some vivid green leafed trees of similar size.

I tell dad he should hurry up to get to where I am, so he can take a photo. As time passes, the landscape or the point of view seem to change (I might be walking down the other side now) and I fear he won't be able to get a clear and unobstructed shot anymore. I lose track of my cousin. At some point she was telling dad about these aliens that live here with the villagers, whom she calls "Aarkvaads", but dad misunderstands that those would be the villagers rather than the aliens.

(recall gap)

Me and dad arrive at some rustic old restaurant. We climb up some stairs and take a seat at a table by the stairs and by a window. Daytime seems consistent with before but it's relatively dark in here due to the windows being a bit short in height. A guy that reminds me of G from school but who is a unique character, comes up to the table; he's our server. (Can't recall the dialogue)

I need the bathroom now and make my way down two flights of the wooden stairs. At the bottom, I'm not sure if I'm getting into the kitchen area by accident, but I go a bit further and find it is indeed the bathroom area. There's no outside light here, it's dark apart from some poorly placed and dim fluorescent tubes that are clearly too old. I think dad comes down too also looking for the bathroom. I go into this somewhat overly large and polygonal shaped room past a glass door that is barely frosted for privacy. The toilet is adjoining the doors' wall and the area feels dilapidated and unclean. I get ready to have a wee. I'm wearing my normal grey work trousers and it feels cumbersome to deal with everything.

Then I somehow start worrying about the fact that dad can probably see through that pointless frosting. I think I have a short wee and then give up, then leaving the room with dad going past me to use the room himself. Something happens and he slips I think? (Mostly comical in nature if anything)

Then, I'm at the mid level of the building, where the entrance is. I think I want to go outside? It's bright and different from before outside.

(recall gap)

I am outside and the restaurant is located at a sort of edge of a sedimentary cliff. Yellow-ish sandstone. It's sandy out here and there's no vegetation to speak of. It's an immense valley with sharp sand-dusted peaks. The server from before is out here, having a break or a cigarette. He's some kind of furry "bat boy" now, slightly taller than me. At some point earlier, I think there was something about a UI thing about choosing how he looked. Red is heavy to his colour theme and his fur almost looks soaked in dark blood, but not wet.

We talk, or I overhear something. Something about a rebellion? Other locals that are with him have assault rifles, Kalashnikovs probably.

Before this I think I actually had a bit of a walk around. There's this large plaza and some kind of Christian procession ritual is taking place. The entrance to the temple is where they want to go, and that's also (an?) the entrance back into the restaurant? They are standing still enough and I make my way through the very dispersed but neatly laid out small crowd, though as I get closer to the large doors the main ritual seems to be moving forward too. Not wishing to interrupt anything, I stop myself next to a tall older woman. It's daytime, about noon. The plaza reminds me of that in front of church of L. The walls to the side of the entrance are smooth eroded sandstone which bulge out every so often. (In retrospect, some of this sandy/rocky scenery reminds me of James' realm in Sacrifice, and as a God, James is perhaps more Christian in a sense than the other four)

Now, when the rebellion thing is starting, the sky goes dark and there's a heavy blue tinted atmosphere, and for lack of better description, the stench of magic is in the air. I'm in a party with sibling T and notice he's at a location called "Crystallarium Caverns", not at all the valley location I'm in. He doesn't realise that we're in different locations when we talk via chat. Fighting happens around me and I look up over the temple/restaurant and see there's a female spellcaster. She seems to be wearing something slightly harlequin-like. She has an enormous book that in width would be the height of four people, and I see her enounce some kind of runes which make a visible effect coming out of the book as she speaks each one. She throws down fire magic at the rebels and around me.

I start to get sick of her spellcasting and somehow reach my way up to her book (distortion of scale/point of view?) and then I hurl it down toward a much lower tier of the valley, intent on making it land in some water. But she uses some kind of TK to slow the books fall and it doesn't reach or touch the water. I think to myself that I should have jumped with the book. But as it rises back up, I can read its runes on a page now. Each page is organised as a kind of mandala with a number of circumscriptions for each rune. I try to read them aloud myself but I'm not sure about the pronunciation.

I think eventually we beat the spellcaster woman, but the rest of the dream recall is lost after this point.



Notes:

- This dream was particularly vivid and part of that may have been due to the fact that I barely managed to sleep the two preceding nights, on one of which I felt to have had a brief dreamless sleep, which always makes me feel odd for the rare times it happens.
-- Not sleeping was mostly on account of being ill.

- The runes in the book remind me a bit of the node tree in FFX, which I've seen recently after this dream, but given that they appeared more like mandalas it may have been an intrusion either from a discussion I had with my mom or from something relating to Jung. Whatever the source, I have thought about trying to replicate the layouts I saw in the dream.

- G and his bat form reminded me of Troy from BL3 for some reason. I think something about the posture and a drawing I did of Troy some time back. It's odd that it's the second time in not too long that I've dreamt about a bat character. Part of it may be an intrusion from the fact that someone's character I'm drawing lately is a bat, but it didn't feel especially related to that. (Different gender, different morphology/species)

- In the second half of the dream, there was something about the Aarkvaad aliens that was relevant to the context, but through my recall of the dream, I couldn't really pick it back up and so I'm not sure how they actually related. Searching for Aarkvaad online didn't really yield anything interesting and past the dream's context is probably a mish-mash word that sounded alien enough.

- The temple plaza felt very much like being in front of the actual church that it likely had inspiration from, which is interesting for the fact that I had that dream not too long ago where I was at a much more accurate version of said plaza/church. There was something more ancient and mythological about this dream's temple and the procession ritual that was taking place seemed to relate to that. In the dream part of my modern waking behaviour took hold where I was able to just go through the group without caring too much about the effect I might have on it, but as the ritual seemed to begin, my behaviour reverted to something more alike what I always learned to do, which in a sense is to give them space and not get in the way. I think as I walked there I thought about people who are careless and those who care too much, perhaps partly reflected in my responding behaviours.
-- Also curious to the ritual aspect was the fact that I was an outsider to it, even though to me it felt very familiar and normal. I just had no place in it myself; perhaps a symbolic expression or metaphor in itself.

Some dream fragments. There was a third one but I have such a faint and vague memory of it, not even sure where I'd start. I practically lost the other ones while getting up but made sure to keep my eyes closed as much as possible until I could write here, which helped.

---

Dream Fragment:

I remember being at some sort of concrete structure. I'm not sure if I was "me" but a couple of other people were here too, I think one of them was that Torres guy from NCIS. This place was dark and there was a massive abyss right in front of us. Across this abyss was another flat area made of concrete and there were some soldiers there. They were holding us here or something and they shouted that we should stay put.

The soldiers got on a platform and it started moving down very fast. They disappeared from sight. Somewhere down there was some light, but it must have been a literal mile or more away. Then some more soldiers appeared but this time they didn't wait for the platform and just jumped down where the platform shaft area was. I was intrigued but at some point in the dream I simply "knew" that at the bottom was a special fluid that would break any fall, no matter from how high.

Torres like the idea of just jumping across and into that specific area. I felt it was too risky. It was a long way down and there was no way to aim ourselves properly and the gap between the two concrete areas was quite wide. But he got on some sort of pole hanging from our side and got closer to the other side, hanging just over the middle. Then some soldiers came back up on the platform and noticed. They started shouting at him and warning him to stop. He ignored them and now he grabbed onto some rope that was hanging from the ceiling. That's as much as I remember clearly for this fragment.

I do remember there were no light sources. We were very deep underground most certainly, but somehow we had a light radius of our own, like in RPGs where the characters just give off light...

Dream Fragment:

I don't remember how I got there but I arrived at a small lab/office place. This dream was somewhat vivid, more than the other one. There were two researchers, wearing labcoats, and one of them greeted me. He seemed a bit uninterested at first but then he saw my boots. They were covered in some sort of pale golden sand. I realised I hadn't noticed this myself until that moment and he became very interested. He went over to a counter and showed me some tins with rounded caps.

The caps were all a shade of gold or tan. He asked me to see which one I thought was closest. I selected four of the tins first just as a guess. Then I held them and made their coloured cap be over my right boot in my vision. The first wasn't it, too orange. The second and third one seemed similar, the fourth one was too dark but the right hue. I compared between the second and third against the sand and decided the third one was the closest. He seemed happy with this and I felt somewhat happy to help. I made a comment saying "well at least I can definitely tell that my skill at recognising shades correctly has improved". I genuinely felt this was true in that moment and realise now that it was indeed a very accurate test of my skill in this.

The other researcher was just doing something on his own over on another counter but I don't remember what. Oddly enough, despite looking at my feet, can't be certain what the floor was like. Some sort of plastic tiles? Maybe wood. But square shapes. The counters were an off white on the top and a light stained wood on the cabinets. There were a couple of windows to the outside and I made note of the fact that it was daytime outside, but the room was quite brightly lit anyway with some fluorescent lamps that actually gave off a warm colour for once.

This whole dream bit felt like it was in sequence of the previous one or another one between them.

---

Side notes:

- It could possibly be the first time while dreaming where I had to use a skill that I'd use for painting in waking life. For me this is a particularly good sign because for a long time I've wanted that context to come over into dreams in some form.
- The researchers wearing labcoats were clearly dreamsigns that I missed. The labcoat is a dreamsign I successfully managed to insert into my dreams as a dreamsign a while back, I think last year or the year before.
- The dust on my boots reminded me very much of gold powder in the dream. In the dream I had a much clearer notion of where I had been previously, which was relevant for that context.
- Despite looking at my boots and remembering them very clearly as the black leather army-type boots I have in waking life, I only vaguely remember my trousers and can't really say which ones they were. It seems odd that my boots are the only detail I remember clearly from looking down, despite the fact that in the dream everything was the same level of vividness.
- I do remember I was wearing some sort of dark hoodie in that dream. I remember it because I remember the sensation of having the sleeves pulled up, something I often do if I'm indoors.
- Don't have much at all to make note of from the first dream since many details are vague now, but the fall-breaking fluid definitely made me think of stuff from Portal and from Satisfactory.

Had a few dreams but only remembering a couple of fragments.

---

Dream Fragment:

I was playing Dune 2000, doing some sort of special single-player mission. I was struggling a bit with the micromanagement because in this scenario the game started me out with three separate bases each on their own rock islands fairly far from each other, on the south-east side of the map. The map had very large expanses of sand (I could remember seeing a preview in a menu) but also had a lot of cliffs and ruins and old walls.

I remember some of the game's music playing a bit, but even though I remember the interface looking like Harkonnen, my units didn't all seem to match my faction. The enemy was managing to send some engineer units to capture some of my buildings and this was annoying me and something else had also gone wrong so I think I restarted the level. I went back to a menu where I could tweak something and I was tweaking some starting radar thing that allowed me to see further into the fog of war initially.

This second time became weirder, kind of fast too. My vision was more inside the actual game now and despite this being a top-down view game, I was able to somehow control the view and see everything in 3D. I was telling some units to patrol so engineers would stop taking my buildings but this was being wonky. I don't think the game even has a patrol function. Again I was struggling with the three separate bases issue. There were many units on the map and I could see stuff going on in the minimap this time. The game was spawning waves of Zerglings and other stuff from Starcraft I and they were ambushing some unit groups I'd sent out to try and make small attacks on the enemy.

Then some of my spice deposits were running out and more wasn't appearing fast enough. I was afraid the harvesters would be getting destroyed by the worms soon. Then all of a sudden, a bit north-northeast from my middle base some giant walker thing with fleshy tendrils and orange sort of growths on it was approaching and I think I let out a swear. I sent units to attack it because it looked like it had loads of health, and eventually they were managing to take it down. But now the game was spawning so many enemies at the same time, I couldn't keep up at all and was going to be defeated soon.

Dream Fragment:

Was in a parliament. It was dark and a bit desaturated. But the house was full. I was right in front of some middle bit where some person speaks. And this man was there in a suit with no tie or bow, he was speaking about Europe and the future, but I can't remember what he was saying exactly. He seemed happy about not so good circumstances that he would mention. This made me feel uncomfortable somehow, on a less conscious level. It also somehow made me realise a bit where I was standing in the room, but I don't think anyone cared.

I think there was some daylight coming in from the other end of the room, probably why everything looked so grey and dim.

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No notes for now.