Visions in the Dark

Two parts to this dream.

In the first part there is something to do with mini go-karts or remote controlled cars in a forest. Also a four room building where people rotate through the rooms or something.

Second part takes place in a city that's been destroyed, but I do not know by what. People are scrambling for supplies to survive. There is one train that runs through the center of town. I don't know where it goes but it frequently hits people crossing the tracks or people commit suicide by standing in front of it. I don't know where the terminal is because it never stops, even when it hits someone.

The buildings are mostly destroyed or empty and many people have gathered together in groups for survival, often attacking other groups to steal their supplies. I am on my own and every day I am afraid of being attacked or killed. One day two men armed with electric drills try to attack me but I am able to disarm them and get away. I run into a large building and find a doctor (A Middle Eastern man with white hair and a white goatee) there who is helping anyone he can and has a small shop where he lets people underpay for many things. Most of the food however is gone. His volunteers find crates of Kraft Dinner and Mr. Noodle Ramen and I trade a small green pencil and the promise of being a volunteer later for one of each. I have to argue with a Chinese looking lady at first, who I think is the doctor's whife, who wants to give me a small fist size ball of rice for the small amount of money I have, because she doesn't want to give me the boxes of food.

I set out from that place with my food hidden inside a garbage bag and forget my shoes and have to go back for them. It is dark and I don't know how I am going to get home in the dark and alone without being robbed or killed. Dream ends after I leave the doctor's store and head out into the darkness of the destroyed city.

There was a train on a very linerar track that moved automatically on autopilot. It moved through a dark city. Unlike many other dreams of mine that have trains I had a little bit of control over this one. I could not steer it or make the train deviate from its pre-programmed route but I could use the brake to slow the train down or even stop it, which I had to do several times because there always seemed to be people on the track who would not notice the train until it was very close. I managed to never hit anyone by slowing the train down and sounding the loud horn.

At one section of the route, which seemed to be the edge of the city, the streets were tilted and twisted and very very oddly placed and I had to stop the train to avoid it crashing into a building or something. I got off the train and it continued its automatic route without a pilot. The twisted streets defied gravity and were on steep angles yet all of the buildings stayed in place and looked like they had been built to accommadate the twisted and angled streets.

There is some more to this dream, something about being on or near a warf by a large bridge that spans a river or something, but I cannot remember any of it.

I am young than I look now and wearing a grey and red poncho. I am in some sort of museum or cultural center focusing on North American Aborigonal Societies. I am there to participate in a vision quest and arrive late in the afternoon to recieve instruction on what to do. I am told by some Elders that this vision quest is more like a savenger hunt because I have to obtain seven various items from safes that are hidden around the facility. The safes are locked with complex systems that require finding the right item to open them, and not all of the items are plain keys, which are also hidden from plain view.

I see that there are several other young people in the meeting room, some I know in real life and some I know in the dream. They have already completed their vision quests and are just visiting the facility. One of the coditions of the vision quest is that I must find and do everything alone and cannot ask for help from anyone. I go over and say hello to some of the people I know but many of them outright ignore me or are reluctant to talk to me.

Evening comes and many people leave but I want to stay as late as I can and get as much of my vision quest done as I can. I walk through the facility and looks along all the walls and corners for hidden safes. I find one but it is locked and I do not yet have the key to open it. At first I am closely observed by some Elders who follow me around and take notes on my progress and discuss it amoungst themselves, but I lose track of them at some point and left to explore on my own.

I find by self on the second floor of the building and come to an area that is open to the floors below and is crisscrossed with wooded suspention bridges. The only way to the other side is across the bridges and as I start to cross I notice two Tolkien inspired elves standing in the middle of one, observing my movements and loudly discussing me. One elf looks like Peter Jackson's version of Elrond and the other is a dark haired elf with a stern look on his face.

I cross the bridge and explore some of the rooms that have many indegenous artifacts on display and see two of my friends who are First Nations peoples. One of them I know completed their vision quest years before and the other says that he is just starting his, which confuses me because I thought I was the only one. It dawn on me that this is now a race because if he obstains the items before I do than I will obviously be unable to collect those items. I do not tell him that I am also on my vision quest. They move on and I continue searching the display cases until I find a gold token, which I hope can be used to open a safe.

Finding nothing more of unterest in the remaining rooms of that area I head back towards the wooden suspension bridges where the two elves are there and still watching me. They are having an argument about something and as I cross the bridge and walk past them, the Elrond looking elf grabs my arm, leans in and tells me tells me where to find the next safe and how to open it. I pull away, plug my ears and run because I am not supposed to recieve help from others and I don't want to get in trouble.

Back on the ground floor though I go straight to the safe he told me about but it will not open. Nearby in a potted plant I find another gold token. I wander around some more and find an arts and crafts room that has a safe sitting on a table. Down the hall from this room is a women's bathroom and another safe. The safe on the table contains a coin operated locking system but which I put my two gold coins in, they are immediately spit out. Ayoung boy working on a craft in the room tells me that I need three tokens to open that safe and the the item and key inside will open the safe down the hall.

Just then my friend who is also doing his vision quest walks in the room and inserts his three gold tokens into the safe which pops open and reveals a green jadestone medallion and another key. He then uses that key to open the safe down the hall and loudly declares that he has completed his vision quest. Several Elders and other people enter the room and congradulate him and they all walk out to celebrate somewhere. Just then the public announcment system plays a message that the facility is closing. I watch everyone in the building leave via the main exit, but I am crushed by my failure of the vision quest and I hide in a women's washroom that contains a lounge and cry.

I suddenly have a backpack with me and I open it and find several key chains with lots of keys on it, some stones and shells, a picture of my first cat and various other random crap that seems pointless and meaningless to me because they would not have helped me on my quest anyway. Many hours pass and a cleaning man discovers me sleeping in the bathroom and alerts security. A friendly brown haired security man wakes me up and offers to drive me home. We hop into is light blue 1956 Ford pickup and drive through the country. I don't talk to him because I am very despondant and depressed. We approach some train tracks and despite the warning lights that a train is coming the security man just keeps on driving. I fear that we will be hit by the train but cross just before it does and it misses the truck by just a few feet.

The beginning and middle of this dream are too fragmented to remember. Here is what I can remember from the ending.


I am walking my friend's dog (a sheltie) at night. It is snowing and there is a frozen fountain to my right and a throng of people to my left. The people are lined up along a train track with digital cameras and photo capable cell phones in hand, waiting eagerly in the cold for a train. There is supposed to be a dragon riding on the train but it is invisible and will only occasionally appear on camera. I drop the dog leash and join the crowd, suddenly having my own camera, just as the train approaches. It is a freight train and all of the cars behind the engine are flat slabs. The night sky is suddenly aflame with hundreds of flashes that make it difficult to see but I just close my eyes and click away. When the train is gone, eveyone reviews their photos. One by one they discover that the dragon has not appeared for them. I check my camera and find that in some shots there is an image of a long chinese looking dragon laying on the the flat freight cars. The dragon has black and grey scales, and white fur(?) and claws. In some of the pictures the dragon appears to be fading in and out of visibility. Since many people in the large crowd are angry that they waited in the cold for nothing, I am reluctant at first to reveal that I have captured the dragon's image because I fear a violent reaction. Some people walk away in dissapointment, but others stick around and congratulate me.

I was standing at the waterfront of a beach that had lots of sharp rocks and debris shrewn about. It looked like it had recently been devastated by a hurricane or something. My appearance in the dream was young and slender and with flowing silvery white hair. I was wearing a lavender-coloured dress and a white apron and my feet were bare.

There were random people standing amongst the rocks and garbage. They watched and did nothing as a huge wave came suddenly from the sea and almost washed me away. I somehow regained my footing and turned to see another wave coming. It was bigger then the previous wave and I yelled at the people on the beach to run and get away from the water - but no one seemed to take me seriously (or even acknowledge the approaching wave for that matter) and I assumed that the people were all washed away while I ran for my life away from the beach. For some inexplicable reason I could run faster then the incoming tsunami.

When I was too tired to run anymore I found myself in a grassy field. I could see the beach in the distance behind me, but there were no huge waves or flooding or even debis anymore; it looked like just and ordinary beach. In front of me there was a small Mideval looking castle and beyond that - maybe a mile or so away - there was another small castle. There were armored knights on horseback riding between the castles but they were not attacking each other or anything. The knights would just gallop their horses from one castle to the other and then turn around and do it again.

I went into the castle closest to me and most of the rooms were devoid of people - but the people I did come across were seeminly paralyzed in mid-action and could not move. They were like statues but they were neither made of stone nor frozen like ice. I came across an old man who was holding a letter and though frozen in place he could still talk. He asked me if I could take the letter to the other castle across the field. I said that I would and he asked me if I would bring him some tea from the next room. I went into the next room to get the tea but when I picked up the tray that had the tea silverware on it, one of the horseback knights came galloping through the room and told me to leave. The knight then grabbed the tray from me and spurred his horse out of the room.

I apologized when I returned to the old man but he said something that upset me so I ran away. I ran seemingly endless halls until I found some stone stairs leading down into thick darkness. I ran down the stone steps and found what was very much like subway station. There was a small group of people waiting on the boardwalk and I joined them just as the train was pulling up. The subway train did not look like a standard "subway train" by more like a large submarine made of thick clear glass.

The glass train flew up out of the dark tunnel and out into bright daylight. It soared over a vast "s" shaped lake where the water was crystal clear and the lake's fish and other water creatures could be seem swimming around. There were also many small fishing boats in the water and I was jealous because I wanted to be down there. I remember commenting to someone sitting beside me on the size of the fish. The train suddenly entered another dark tunnel and when it came to the station it was not a modern platform but a thick undergroud forest.

The trees were oversized and deciduous, the roads narrow and maze-like. I wandered aimlessly at first because I was lost. Eventually, I ran into a male elf that appeared to have come from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings triliogy, but I was upset because it was not Legolas. I followed the elf for a while as he walked through the forest because I was lost and I figured that he would lead me somewhere. Eventually he dissapeared up a tree at a fork in the road.

There was a left and a right path. I headed left because I could see open sunlight and that direction felt warm. I came out of the forest into a trialer park that was occupied by domestic cats and not people. The first three cats I saw looked sort of like dark grey occelots with glowing, firey orange eyes . I walked down the singe gravel road until I came to a hill. I turned around and there was a large pet superstore. The trailer park dissapeared (faded out) and now there was only the superstore floating in space in front of me with the front doors wide open. I did not have a choice but to go in really.

I was appalled by the conditions in which the baby animals were kept. They were in cramped honeycomb shaped crates (with one baby animal to a cone) behind large panes of glass without food, water or litterboxes and all of the little animals looked absolutely miserable. I started crying because I could not do anything for the suffering baby animals and I was also upset because no one else in the store seemed to care about the poor conditions in which the animals were kept. It was set up almost like a museum display: each crate was numbered and people stolled along gazing at the crates behind glass at their leisure.

I came across a side corridor and followed it until I found myself in a large warehouse or barn or something. It had a corral for sick and deformed baby animals and on the inside the coral was an oriental woman. She handed me a thin bamboo stick painted black and told me to start beating "the black one," pointing to a listless long-haired kitten. I was appalled and horrified and I picked up the kitten and cradled him in one hand and grabbed the long switch from the lady and hit her a few times with it. The dream ended here.


The large wave coming out of the sea, almost washing me away is parallel to my near drowning incident that happened when I was about 4 or 5 years old.