Visions in the Dark

I dreamed I was in some sort of classroom, and it appears that it is situated in a basement. The walls were concrete and painted a pale blue, with three windows near the ceiling along the north wall. Flourescent lights provided most of the illumination. There were many students in the room but I cannot remember any specific details about them. I cannot remember exactly what it was about them but I knew that I did not like them because they were bullies and stuff. I was relieved when they all left when the bell rang. I do not know what time it is and what the bell was for as I am busy painting on two canvases. I can clearly remember every step I took and every stroke I made with the paintbrush and it felt like I was engaged in this activity for hours.

There were no clocks for me to look at but the daylight did not change from what I could see and it was unusually quiet for a school. It felt like everything outside of me was frozen in time. As I finished the second painting, however, the group of students who left at the beginning of the dream returned. They surrounded me to see what I was doing but I ignored them because I do not like bugging me when I am painting and I assumed that they were just going to bully and harass me like they always did.


I cannot remember anymore of this dream.

This dream is not the first in which I have created art but it is frustrating because my dream art skill level is always much higher than my skill in waking life and I can almost never recreated the images that I see in my dreams anyway. The two abstract paintings I made in the dream are still fairly clear in my mind, and I want to try and paint them for real. The first painting was made with the colours blue, green and purple, while the second painting was made with the colours red, orange and yellow. The second painting also had three distinct curved strokes, painted in red, in the lower left quarter of the image. I have tried quick sketches with pencils but they are colourless and insufficient.

I cannot remember much from the beginning of the dream and what little I recall is kind of fuzzy. Everything is coloured in shades of dark blue and black. The setting is inside a small village where the buildings are all made of wood and the entire area is surrounded by a stone wall. There is one large building in the cener of the village that looks like a warehouse and has no windows. I am exploring the villiage much like an RPG videogame and everything is in thrid person perspective. The transition from outside to inside (or vice versa) is like the survival horror game Resident Evil where everything turns black, except for the door, which slowly opens and you then advance through in first person perspective before returning to third person perspective on the other side.


I am moving through some wooded gates and doors, heading towards the large building in the center of the villiage. Whenever I see a cabinent or desk in a room or hall, I open it and search for items. I don't recall finding anything of interest before entering the large building. When I pass through the last door that will take me inside, the blue and black colouring of the dream dissapears and normal colours return, though it is still dark inside the building. Directly in front of me I can see metal frame bunk beds scattered about. There are lumps in some of the beds but it is too dark to tell if it is people or just a bunch of pillows and blankets. The bunk beds are scattered in a disorderly fashion across the floor and not in neat rows. There are a few beds that do not have a bunk and seem to have white hand knit woolen blankets on them.

I walk towards the back of the room because I can see a row of cabinets in the dim light. As I approach them the room slowly begins to get brighter, as the row of florescent lights on the ceiling high above seem to slowly turn on. As I pass by the metal bunk beds, more and more of them become single non-bunk beds and their placement on the floor becomes more straight and orderly. It becomes bright enough in the room that I can see some young adults in some of the beds, while others remain empty. All of the beds have the white hand-knit woolen blankets now.

At the row of cabinets on the back wall I find some objects when I search them. In the first I find a little glass vial filled with a clear liquid. There is a white label on the side but absolutely no writing on it. I put it away in my bag and a few cabinets down I find a syringe filled with a translucent redish brown liquid that still has the bright red safety cap over the needle. This item also has a white label on the side and is blank except for a scribble in hand writting in blue ink. The writting is two words and appears to be water damaged and faded. I cannot recall now what it said though I am sure that I could read it in the dream.

I hear people talking behind me and to the left. I turn and see a row of desks with many older teens and young adults sitting at them. To their left is a chalkboard, to their right are the misarranged bunk beds and an elderly man with wild frizzy white hair and in grey clothing is standing in front of the students, pointing to something on the wall in front of them. I put the syringe in the bag and walk over to see what they are doing. As I approach them the lights come fully on and everything is bright and washed in florescent ambience.

The elderly man turns and smiles at me and I think he looks a lot like Albert Einstein. He doesn't say it but I get the feeling that he was expecting me. There is something about him that feels "mystical" to me, though there is nothing about his outward, physical appearence that would suggest there is anything special about him. I do not know how to explain it; he was just giving off these warm, positive vibes that grew stronger the closer I was too him. The students in the desks all looked up at me and seemed to be expecting something. I looked back and forth from them to Albert in confusion, before the elderly man asked me: "Are you ready?"

I have no any idea what he means, but I say yes anyway. Albert asked me to give him my bag, saying that I did not need it anymore. When I did so it felt as a great weight had been lifted from my metaphysical body (if that makes any sense). Albert moved to the chalk board on the left side of the room and said to his students that I could show them how to fly because I used to do it all the time.

I became lucid because I realized what he was talking about (in dreams in childhood I used to fly all the time), but protested that I could not fly anymore and had not done so for years. I cannot remember what he said next but it was something about making the air below me solid like the ground. I closed my eyes and imagined an invisible platform below my feet lifting me into the air. There was a loud "crack" and a dull sensation shot from the top of my skull and down my neck as something hard hit my head. I thought for a moment that Albert had smacked my with his pointer, but when I opened my eyes I realized that I had floated up above the classroom and smacked my head on the ceiling. I was excited but also kind of anxious and scared because I felt stuck and did not know how to come down. Albert told me to do exactly what I had done to lift myself up, except in reverse. I closed my eyes and imagined a ball of light above my head and shoulders that was heavy enough to push me downwards.

When my feet touched the floor and I opened my eyes Albert asked me to hover. He said "It's easy. Use the Force." I imagined what the Force (from Star Wars) was like in my own mind, and "felt" the space between the walls, the floor, the ceiling, everything in the room and myself. When I did so, hovering was damn easy. I wanted to show off and fly across the room above the students heads but...


...the darn telephone rang and woke me up! D'oh!!! Stupid telemarketers! Who was that old guy? A dream guide? Or just a random figment of my subconscious? I really have no idea, but man, what a trip!

I have to take my neice, M, to school. It is winter and we are dressed accordingly. M appears to be a few years younger than she actually is (about 3 or 4 years old) while I look about the same as I do now. We are walking across a large, open yard that leads to the school. It does not register with me until after the dream ends and I wake up, but the school we are walking towards is my old public school, not the public school that M currently attends.

We are halfway to the school, almost to the tarmac even, when a huge machine appears at the far end of the yard. I do not know the measurements but the machine looked equivalent to a four- or five-storey building in height. It was very painted blue and rolled on these huge tank-like treads. I do not know what its purpose is, but it starts driving in large circles around the school yard. I think the machine is kind of cool looking, but I am also afraid that it will run M and I down.

I pick M up and run as fast as I can for the back door of the school. As I cross the tarmac, I come across three little boys who are running out of the school and towards the giant machine. I can't place their names, but they seem familiar somehoe, as if my subconscious is retreiving vague faces from my childhood. We get into the school and M immediately insists that I put her down, which I do. She runs into a classroom and I follow, but she is nowhere to be seen. I glance into the desks to see if I can see her name written on some paper or something, but all I see are bags of candy or blank sheets of paper.

I am at one desk when a young boy comes up and I recognize him as one of my classmates when I was in grade 5 (though we are in the grade 6 classroom), Matthew Shaw. He doesn't say anything to me and just sits down at his desk, eyeing me suspiciously. I am a bit confused, but leave the classroom and wander down the hall. I stick my head in the doors of other classrooms to try and locate my neice, but I cannot find her.


I cannot recall anything more from this dream.