Visions in the Dark

Dream starts off with some friends of mine from highschool and I wandering into a craft store. There are many crafts that are made by or influenced by Native American art and mythology, but I find some sculptures carved out og soapstone that are inspired by ancient Egyptian and Greek mythos.

My friend Becky wants to go to a sushi resturant that is attached to the craft store and we all get a seat that overlooks a ski hill through a larg window. For some reason the resturant will only let six people sit per table and our group gets split up.

When are first order arrives some of the dishes are mixed up or are completely wrong and instead of rectifying the situation the waiters get angry and threaten to kick us out of the store. My friend Becky somehow manages to talk to the waiters and straighten things out, but when our second round of food comes, many of them are also the wrong order.

Many in our group get up and try to leave out of anger, not wanting to pay the bill, but the owner comes out and tries to convince us to stay. Menawhile, Becky notices that their order sheets and reciepts are outdated and from 2008 but I say that it doesn't matter or something like that.

I cannot remember any more of this dream.

This is the second dream I had on April 29th, 2010.


Dream starts off with me and my friend Becky atop a mountain at night. It is night time and we are in a desolate mountain range as there are only forest covered mountains on either side of us as far as the eye can see in all directions. The full moon is our only illumination. There is an old Victorian style mansion halfway down the mountain so we walk there. Despite the remote location, the mansion is a popular destination for touists and the place is full of people. People come and go in and out of the building almost nonstop even though it is the middle of the night. The thing is though, that the sign advertising the mansion is considered cursed and no one will touch the fallen lettering on the outside of the building, even though everyone wants to see it restored. I think belief in curses is ridiculous so I go over and rehang the fallen lettering. Everyone, including my friend, now believes that I am now somehow cursed and will not come near me. In fact I am forced to leave by being chased off the property and have to wander the mountains alone.

The dream kind of changes. My physical appearance changes to that of a young man dressed in primitive animal furskins rags and though I am still in the vast mountain range in which this dream started, my friend and the mansion (and all the other people) have disappeared and I am in the post-apocalyptic world that the first dream took place in - except it is a few hundred years later and things have gotten so bad that humans have reverted into primitive warring tribes living off the land. I wander through the vast mountain for ages, hungry and alone until I come across a small tribe of people living in some caves on the side of a particularily steep mountain. They are initially suspicious of me and keep my at bay until I convince them that I am unarmed, lost and hungry. I find out by chatting to a few people that the tribe are Goddess worshippers who have exiled themselves from the rest of the world so that they could practice their faith in peace since most of the other tribes still ascribe to the "archaic" patriarchal Abrahamic religions and still violently war with each other because of it. The chief of this tribe, an elderly lady who looks as old as the mountains themselves, tells me that they have revived the Goddess religion of human pre-history because the fighting between the warlike patriarchal religions are why civillization collapsed and brought about the apocalypse in the first place. They live on the seculded mountain range to avoid persecution.

After talking to the chieftess I am welcomed to stay with the tribe and encouraged to participate in a competition of strength and skill between the men. The winner will be hailed as the Protector Hero of the tribe and be rewarded with the responsibilty of guarding the tribe's safety, which is a huge honour for them. I protest at first because even though my dream character has changed into someone other than the me of reality, I still think I am female even though I now have a male body. The tribe tease me for as a man it is appalling to them that I back down from a challange, but I have no idea how to explain to them that I have a girl spirit inside my male body. Someone suggests that I am a good candidate for Protector Hero because of my modesty (which is very Goddess-like) and every tribesperson seems to agree except for two. Amidst the men of the tribe a young, muscular man appears and challenges the tribe's eagerness to bless me without the trials of the competition. He seems a few years my elder, but is extremely handsome and my girlspirit instantly develops a crush on him. The other man is a shaman of the tribe who also happens to be the uncle of the challenger. I agree that it is not fair for any titles to be bestowed without testing the strength and skill of all competitors and insist that I am not participating in the challange anyway. The men scoff and say that I cannot refuse as it is the way of their tribe and as a new member I have no choice to comply lest I be expelled to survive on my own. The young man tells me his name is Atka and we set off immediately for the first challenge which is a deer hunt in a nearby forested valley.

Every man is successful in catching a deer for the tribe to eat except me, partly because I have no idea how to hunt with a bow and arrow and the deer I was about to shoot at is quickly shot first by Atka who was hiding in some nearby bushes. I stalk another deer but it too is claimed by quick and hidden Atka. I score a deer finally but I am not strong enough to carry it over my shoulder like all the other men and have to abandon it where it lay. Atka, carrying a deer over each shoulder, jeers at me. He considers me an intruder and a rival - for he was the favoured candidate to become the next Protector Hero of the tribe until I showed up. I am determined to win the next part of the challenge, just so he'll notice me in a good way because my girlspirit is still going gaga over him. I am the only one to return to the camp without a deer. After we have eaten and night has fallen I am sitting alone by the fire, unable to sleep, when Atka's shaman uncle approaches me and tempts me with magical gifts that would supposedly assist me in winning the competition. When I refuse the magical gifts (because the dubious and suspicious offer is way too obviously a trick) he then offers to make the most beautiful woman in the tribe fall in love with me if I throw the challenge. When I too refuse that he becomes enraged and summons some shadowy spirits from the surrounding forest to attack me. I grab my bow and shoot at the shadows, but they are hard to see in the flickering light of the dying fire, and being noncorporal spirits, the arrows go right through them (though somehow they are able to hurt me). I begin shooting arrows in a panic in all directions and the shadowy spirits suddenly retreat as one of my frantic shots strikes the shaman in the chest. He howls in pain then quickly retreats into the night. I am afraid that I will be driven from the tribe for injuring one of their reveared shamans, (and be forever hated by the heartthrob Atka for hurting his uncle) but no one emerges from the caves to investigate the ruckus.

The next challenge occurs the next day at dawn. The remaining shamans of the group (Atka's uncle is no where to be found, but equally no one save Atka seems to miss him and I am still too scared of being driven from the tribe to confess the events of the night) demand that all participants perform a miraculous event saying that if we are favoured by the Goddess that nothing is impossible. One by one all of the participants fail to do anything special and are eliminated from the competition until only Atka and I are left. I am to go first so I will myself into the shape of a fish and plonk myself into a nearby stream and start swimming around. Atka tries to one up me by transforming himself into an otter, leaping into the same stream and catching me in his teeth. He surfaces and shows off to the men who appaud wildly because not only am I trapped in his mouth as a fish, but I am also trapped in the body of the fish whilst he has a hold of me and he is yet able to revert back to his human form. He tosses me around in the air a few times to make his point before throwing me back into the stream, where I am able to finally revert to normal. The men all have a good laugh at my expense. Point to Atka.

The next challange consists of Atka and I having to climb down the steep side of the mountain with no protective gear or ropes, pick a rare red flower that grows in the valley below and then returning up the mountain again. It is a race as well as a test of physical endurance. It is midday and the sun glaring down upon the bare mountain side feels like it is going to bake me alive because unlike Atka, I did not strip off my furskin top before beginning the challenge - add this to the extreme physical exertion needed to cling to the rockface I begin sweating like crazy. Though Atka is older and more muscular than I, he is under no stress whatsoever, even though I am ahead at first. Eventually my hands are sweating too much and my body too tired for me to carry on and I silently conceed defeat and start climbing back up the mountain.

As I pass Atka, he strikes out with a hearty fist and knocks my block off, and knocks me right off the block. I am pretty sure I am falling to my death and though I am not scared I resign myself to my fate. I don't feel any anger towards Atka, though I do ponder the contradiction between the peacefullness of the tribe and his overly aggressive competitiveness. It is a long drop but when I hit the bottom I kind of bounce off something soft and coushy. I have landed on the rare red flower that I am supposed to retrieve except I have a new dilemma now because the flower is absolutely massive, being the size of a VW Microbus. I lay on my rose bed and contemplate for a moment what to do next (and enjoy the cool breeze while I catch my breath). Atka is still a ways up the mountain so I know I have time. Remembering how I transformed into the fish I climb off the giant rose and will myself to grow in size so that I am as tall as the mountains. I mearly have to pluck the rose from the ground (which is now the size of the nail on my pinkyfinger) and place it on the mountain ledge where the tribe is waiting.

Atka is not yet completely down the mountain but he decides to copy me and lets himself fall off. Before he is able to grow himself large and copy my feat I am able to revert back to my normal size and land on the ledge where the rose is, which also shrinks to a normal rose size. The tribe welcomes my return and Atka begrudgingly follows shortly after. This round to me, but we are not done yet as there is one more challenge apparently. Before it can be explained Atka's uncle returns and accuses me of asking him to help me cheat as well as trying to kill him the night before. I don't have any proof that reality is the reverse and figure that the tribe will take the word of a respected shaman over the word of an outsider anyway. I also don't have proof that Atka punched me in the face and knocked me off the mountainside and my girlspirit is heartbroken because of what he did. I meet the accusations with bitter silence because I am angry, frustrated and despondant. Just as I expect, the tribe asks me to leave when I cannot refute the allegations. Still clinging the rose I retreived at the bottom of the mountain I am escorted by the men of the tribe to a path that leads away from the tribal camp and told never to return.

Atka looks on without saying anything, his facial expression stern and unreadable. My girlspirt surges up one more time and I shyly offer him the rose, not sure how he'll respond to what looks like a guy offering him a flower. After a brief and almost akward silence, he accepts the gift and even smiles at me. Suddenly the mountain begins to shake violently and everyone is thrown to the ground. The shaking stops after a few moments and I stand and put my head literaly into a cloud. The mountain has doubled in size and now towers over all others in the entire mountain range. Everyone starts jumping up and down and cheers. Apparently I just passed the final challenge by allowing my heart to reugn over my mind, and thus elevated the entire tribe to Nirvana or something. It is revealed that the whole tribe knows about Atka and his uncle attacking me and the test was about forgiveness or something, which I did in the end and magically I am transformed back into a woman. The end of the dream becomes distorted and fragmented and I cannot remember anymore.

I cannot remember now how the dream started but at some point I was with my friend Becky and we were taking a road trip in in her car to a large shopping center across the border, (even though in waking life she does not actually own a vehicle). We arrived at our destination and went inside to do whatever and when our hands were full, we returned to Becky's car. We found that a small green car had smashed into the right side of her vehicle, leaving a large dent and traces of green paint. The green car was parked behind Becky's with the driver no where in sight.

After some angry shouting over the damage of the car, I suggested to my friend that we take photos of the damage with her digital camera (another thing she does not actually possess in waking life) but for some reason Becky was reluctant to do so. She did not want to create a scene and was content to just leave it but I was insistant on taking pictures for insurance reasons, just in case. She eventually agreed but I could not figure out how to activate the time stamp on the camera, which I was convinced existed at the time, and became frustrated. Becky then suggested we go back inside the mall and finish our shopping because the damage was already done and there was no point crying over spilt milk. I agreed, put the camera in my purse and we returned to our shopping spree.

When we again returned to put away all we had bought we found that Becky's car had again been smashed and the damage was to much this time to ignore. The green car was no where in sight. Becky and I were infuriated about the situation and I was fuming that I had decided not to use the digital camera before to get the green car's license plate. I proceeded to take photos of the damage while Becky called for a tow truck.

As I was just finishing up documenting of the damage I saw the green car on the other side of the parking lot, smahed into a wall. I ran over and was thrilled to see two people who I hoped to be the owners. I was right but the owners, a young man and a young woman, tried to argue with me about the damage to Becky's car and would not let me take their photos. The young woman said that the young man had been driving, but it was difficult for him to use the breaks because he was wearing spiked baseball shoes, as if that was a ligitimate excuse for their destructive and dangerous driving!

I became infuriated when I heard that excuse and yelled that perhaps the young man should wear regular shoes until he reached his destination or wait to wear spiked shoes until he was actually playing baseball, to which the young woman just scoffed. I demanded that we exchange contact information for the insurance reasons and they thankfully agreed to that. When I finally returned to Becky and her car, the tow truck was there and ready to go and the dream ended there.


I had a short dream after this one that took place in the gymnasium of my public school, but other than the location I cannot remember anything else about that dream.

The dream starts off in a warehouse of some sort. There are hundreds of people seated at desks working away at drawings and animations and the such. I am sitting at the very back and making little doodles because I am not happy and I do not want to be there. Some of the other animators are gloating and flaunting their talents and everyone is giving them praise. I start making drawings that are not a part of the criteria and get in trouble for it.

There was also some animator guy who stood up and made a big anouncement that he was leaving animation and becoming a wrestler or something, but I cannot remember exactly.

I leave the giant warehouse-animation room and go outside. I am in a farmer's field that is all dried up and devoid of any crops. I can see cars and trucks passing by on a distant roadway. There are a few small aircraft flying overhead. I gaze up at the aircraft and suddenly the dream changes and I am in the cockpit of a fighter jet. I am supposed to bring the aircraft in for a landing, but the small airport is suspended on the side of a large building or cliff and the runway consists of only a helicopter landing pad. Fortunately the fighter jet has hover capabilities and i am able to put it down on the narrow landing pad.

I get out of the aircraft and suddenly I am floating high above looking down on everything. There is a group of people looking at the fighter jet and an older man who is very rich and powerful who is gloating about his prestige and his ownership of the airport. Suddenly the dream is back in the bare field, but it is no longer bare. There are miles of grape vines, but all of the plants are dying. I can hear the voice of the rich old man but I cannot see him. He is still going on about how great it is to be him and it is really annoying me.

I then walk back to the giant warehouse-animation building, but when I go back insode it is different. The inside is now a giant mall (like the West Edmonton Mall) and everything is coloured in an autumn colour scheme. I walk for a bit until I am in the center of some sort of multicultural celebration. I see my friend Rebecca and I run to catch up with her.

We get some food and sit down to eat and talk. She tells me that she she is scared and does not want me to leave and I say that I am not going anywhere. Rebecca has a sad look on her face, then suddenly she stands up and runs away, dissapearing into the large crowd. I try to follow but I cannot push my way past the huge gathering of people and have to go back. I am really upset that Rebecca ran away from me. I go into an East Indian food display and think about buying some delicacies, but I am sure that I do not have enough money for it. I find a credit card in my pocket and just pay with that. I am sort of creeped out because the two men who run the display will not stop staring at me.

Suddenly the dream changes again to the inside of an Oriental food store. Everything is dull and grey. There is an old Chinese man at the counter sorting CD-RW disks. His wife comes in through a heavy metallic back door and starts screaming at him for something. I go through the back door and find that it not only leads outside, but is at the top of a tall building (where as the front door is at groud level). The heavy metal door locks behind me and I cannot go back.

Major Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell is standing at the edge of the rooftop and jumps off. The scene is the same as the jump down from the opening sequence from the Stand Alone Complex anime series. I dissapear from the dream at this point and everything is viewed in third person.

Major Kusanagi lands on a low roof top in a back alley. In the alleyway below there is a black truck and three suspicious looking men loading cardboard boxes into the back of the truck. The boxes are sealed but heavy and the men are trying to load them quickly. The Major draws her gun and yells at them to stop, but the men draw their own weapons and open fire. Two of the men engage the Major in gun play while the last man quickly throws the rest of the boxes into the truck. One box falls out of the truck and bursts open, scattering VHS video tapes and CD disks all over the alleyway. The three men jump into the van and speed off.

The Major is trying to figure out what is on the disks when some investigators show up (though none are other characters from the GITS show or movie - they appear to be random creations of my subconscious). Major Kusanagi leaves them to clean up the mess and figure out what the disks and tapes are and runs off in the direction that the truck went. She runs out of the alley and into a beach front shopping strip. There are thousands of people and hundreds of vehicles on the road and on the beach, making it impossible to find the truck.

There is a bus sitting at a terminal on the other side of the road, seemingly abandoned. The Major gets onto the bus and it starts to move under its own power and without a driver. There are other people on the bus but they stare out of the windows and will not respond to anyone trying to get their attention. The bus travels down the road for a bit and makes two left turns around the block. It stops in front of the Oriental food store. When she gets off the bus, the Major can see the three men from the alleyway talking to the old Chinese man through the window. There is one of the sealed cardboard boxes on the counter.

The four men pick up the box and exit through the heavy metal back door. Kusanagi follows and finds herself back on the roof top in which she started, with none of the men in sight.


The dream becomes too fuzzy for me to remember any more, but it ended soon after anyway.

I am at my parent's trailer park at Lake Whittaker, in late fall. It is cold and everyone has to dress warmly. Despite the fact that the park should be closed this time year, it is busy and there are people everywhere. In the center of the park lays a large parking lot and it is lined with row after row of picnic tables at which hundreds of students have been shuttled in, by old fashioned taxi cabs, for some art lessons. My friend Becky was with me and I showed her around the trailer park when we got there. I spent a lot of time reminiscing about "how the park use to be," because in waking life there have been many drastic changes since I used to go there as a kid.

Outside the parking lot and lurking in the forests beyond it was dangerous because monsters like orcs and oversized owls and bats where lurking around. Occasionally the students where attacked and everyone had to take shelter unter the picnic tables or in gazebos nearby. My friend Becky and I had a trailer in the northern most part of the park and when we went there we found a variety store and gun shop where the playground used to be.

The frequency and brutality of the monster attacks suddenly increased but Becky and I somehow had magic powers that we hid from everyone else that allowed us to make the orcs or giant owls disappear. I do not remember how or why we had these powers. There was one time when a group of students went to hide in the variety store to escape a monster attack. A giant owl perched on the small building's roof and began pecking away at building with it's giant sharp claws. The building was stronger than it looked however and the giant bird eventually gave up and flew away.

Soon after a band of orcs attacked some students taking art lessons in the large central parking lot, but by now most students had acquired fire arms from the gun shop and they made short work of the spear and sword weilding monsters. Only a small number of students were injured or killed. The art lessons continued and because of the commotion some seats had been moved around, including mine. I was no longer able to sit beside Becky and I was upset but there was nothing I could do about it. Some of the people there gathered the bodies of the dead orcs, threw them in a large green trashcan and set the whole mess on fire. The stench was horrible.

The students sitting at the picnic tables were given giant sheets of paper to draw on but I forgot something (my pencil?) and I had to venture back to my trailer to get it. I had to go alone because all of the other students had all of their supplies and could start their project right away. I cut through the southern end of the park (called the tenting area because only tents are allowed there) for a short cut and at first forgot that trailers where not allowed in that part of the park. There were a hole bunch of "weekenders" in the tenting area and most of them had small trailers. I wandered around in a confused daze, before I remembered where, I was because I was trying to find my trailer admidst the weekenders trailers and I could not understand at first why I could not find it.

As I continued through the tenting are and up to the seasonal area in the northern end of the park I passed by many people, one of whom was my uncle Alex. I thought I said something to him as I passed but he ignored me and disappeared amoung the gatherings of people in the tenting area. I arrived at my trailer but instead of going inside I entered a small tent that had appeared just outside of it. Though the tent had just suddenly appeared I acted as if it had been there the whole time. Some people I knew in the park when I was a kid suddenly show up. They are twin boys I used to play with but I can no longer remember their names, though I know their father's name, Kerry, and I refer to the twins as "Kerry's twins."

One of the boys almost literally dives into the tent as I exit, while the other twin paces back and forth between trailers trying to look inconspicuous. An older man with an artificial leg comes hobbling down the road towards the Kerry's twins and I. He is the variety store owner and when the twins see him they try to hide by lying still. When the older man has completely passed by the twin hiding in the tent reveals that the sweater he is wearing is full of stolen goods from the variety store, but the boy swears he didn't mean to steal anything. He said he was gathering things to purchase when a giant bat attacked the store and instead of dropping the items, he shoved them in his sweater. After telling me their story the boys walk away and head towards the tenting area in the southern end of the park. I do not see them again in this dream.

As I walked back towards the art lessons going on in the central parking lot I walked along the main road (rather than take a short cut through the tenting area) and noticed large cube shaped indentations in the road. Some people where digging these large brick shaped sections of road to improve their own trailer areas for some reason. Doing this made the road all but impossible to drive and and very difficult to walk on and I ended up walking alongside the road rather than on it.

Back at the art lessons, Becky and I completed our project and were told that we were now allowed to leave. It suddenly became very cold and it started snowing. This caused a mass exodus of students to begin leaving the park, but rather than wait for the old taxi cabs, the students opted to walk. Instead of heading towards the trailer park's exit, I asked Becky to follow me down to the lake, where the old taxi cabs and a bunch of other cars were parked. I broke into one car that was painted dark red on its front and sides but bright yellow on the back.

Since I don't know how to drive I let Becky get into the driver's seat but something went wrong and she almost drove off the dock and into the lake at first. I can't remember what had caused the near miss but both Becky and I had a good laugh about it. We drove towards the camp's exit and along the way many students tried to flag us down for a ride but we ignored them all.

Becky started driving faster, going 45 MPH in a 15 MPH zone and I told her several time to slow down because I was afraid that we would hit one or more of the students walking along the road. The closer we got to the gatehouse the more crowded the road became and Becky was forced to slow down. The large groups of students trying to leave the park were running into large groups of people trying to get into the park, and strangely, all of the new arrivals seemed to be mothers with babies or toddlers.

Because of all the snow on the road the car we were in acted more like a skidoo and we had fun to fishtails and spinouts and stuff on our way back to the city. The closer we came to our destination the more that scenery changed from that of a rural Ontario winter highway to that of an alternate reality where everything had a purple or blue-ish hue and the snow disappeard to be replaced with strangely oversized tropical plants. Becky and I had to remove our winter layers of clothing because we became overheated.

I wanted to find a way back to the cold Ontario highway we had just left but there wasn't anyway back that I could see and for some reason it was physically impossible to turn our half dark-red, half yellow taxi cab around. We drove for some time and came to the edge of a futuristic looking city that had many twisting roadways and neon lights.

The people walking the streets and driving around in this neon city looked like normals humans except for the fact that their skin tones matched the blue and purple hues found in the tropical plants outside of the city. Becky pulled the cab over and I tried asking several people how to get back to London Ontario (our hometown) but no one in the neon city knew what we were talking about because they had never heard of such a place. Becky and I were also the recipient of a lot of strange stares, I'm guessing because of our different coloured skin to that of everyone else in the neon city. For some reason we picked up a blue skinned man and a violet skinned woman and let them sit in the back of our taxi cab. For some reason they too wanted to find a way out of the futuristic neon city as well, though I did not ask why.

I started having anxiety attacks from being lost in the strange alternate reality city, and greatly feared not being able to find our way home. We came to an intersection in the center of the city and two normal skinned men, dressed in black suits, stopped us and somehow knew that Becky and I were lost and they said they that they could help us but did not say how they would do so. The two men were of middle age and dressed in black suits, like MiBs or something. Indeed, one looked exactly like Tommy Lee Jones while the other man looked like Agent Smith from the Matrix trilogy (played by Hugo Weaving).

The blue and purple couple in the back of the cab were spooked by the men in black and quickly departed. Becky and I were a little perplexed but said nothing as the men sat themselves in the back of our multicoloured cab. We drove around the neon city in silence for a while before the man in black who looked like Tommy Lee Jones suddenly exited the vehicle at a stop light and disappeared into the night. That left the man who looked like Hugo Weaving and though I did not learn his name in the dream, I will refer to him as "Mr. Smith" anyway.

We drove around some more before Becky suggested getting something to eat. We pulled into a neon-sign adorned coffee shop and Becky and Mr. Smith went inside while I waited in the car. When they returned Mr. Smith had bought me a tea and despite never having met before, he knew exactly how I liked it (Earl Grey, one milk, bag in). I didn't say anything about it and neither did he.

We ate/drank in the taxi cab but when we wanted to get going again, the three of us started walking down the neon sign lined street rather than drive. We came to a series of darkend alleyways and Mr. Smith insisted that we try to find our way through them. We walked for a while and came to a dead end where Mr. Smith cornered us. He said that he could not let us change the future and that he had to stop us. Becky and I had no idea what the heck he was talking about.

Mr. Smith pulled a black hand gun on us and raised the weapon to shoot, but before he could fire a misty blue hazy dropped down on him from somewhere above and he dissolved into nothing with a terrible scream. Becky and I quickly found our way back to the main streets which were now glowing neon like the signs, partly because it had started to rain and there was lots of reflections, but also because some parts of the road seemed to have absorbed the neon signs or something and the pavement was glowing brightly as if it was made of coloured gas (neon lights).

We eventually came to a neon tunnel in the side of a large building and started walking through. Becky said she could not hear anything when I asked, but I swore I could hear Mr. Smith's voice talking to us even though he was nowhere to be seen. I cannot remember what he was saying now but it was making me nervous and I was trying my best to hurry Becky along.


There is a bit more to the dream; something about a maze and a bunch of doors or something and getting back to our multicoloured cab and finding our way out of the neon city and back into the wintery Ontario landscape. At the end of the dream we didn't get back home but ended up stuck in a snow drift or something? I cannot remember anymore of this dream.