Visions in the Dark

The dream starts off with me standing at the edge of a river. On the other side there is a fight going on between a team of strong looking men riding big cats (lead by someone who looks like Heman) fighting some other dudes on horses and chariots. I cannot see any of their faces because they are wearing animal masks, but there is a man with long black riding a Siberian tiger that I keep looking at. For some reason he seems familiar to me.

Suddenly I am in a stone built circular city that is an island of itself and in the middle of a turmoltuous sea. There are many waterways on the lowest level of the city to allow water to flow through, but occassionally there are mini tsunamis that rush through the tunnels and often flood the lowest level of the city, which sometimes even sweeps people not quick enough to move away. There are only two to four levels of the city, depending on what area you are in. The center and the east areas of the city are wealthy and technologically advanced while the west and south edges of the city are downtrodden and poor. The north edge of the city is a huge wall and many breakers to protect the city from the turbulent water and to lessen the inpact of the many tsunamis that hit.

I am at the northern edge of the central part of the city (the "downtown" if you will) looking up at this glass box cars that move along rails in the air, like elevators that move horizonally instead of vertically. I am wandering around looking into shop windows because I am too poor to buy much and I meet a man with long black hair outside of a small museum. He is handsome and really nice and I do know it in the dream but he is the young man I saw the other day riding the tiger. There is an instant connection between us and we spend all day wandering the streets and talking and he asks me out to which I respond positively.

We go on a few dates and I learn that the is the son of a wealthy bookseller in the eastern part of town but I am too embarassed about where I live and always arrange to meet him downtown so he doesn't know I am poor. We develop a quircky way of expressing our feelings but saying "I have a confession to make..." and then revealing something deep and personal. I am able to tell him everything I feel except that I am poor and live in the western edge of the city.

I am totally crazy in love with him and even travel to his father's bookstore in the east (where he works) to visit him one day. When I first enter the bookstore the entrance hall is stacked with old war books and the such and I see one book cover that says "Sexual Trauma for Police Regarding..." I cannot see the last work but I think it is "Women." There is an old man milling about just outside the store. He looks like a scruffy Gordon Pincette and he eyes me warily. As I leave the store a mini tidal wave hits and floods the lowest level of the city.

Inside the store I meet my boyfriend and ask when he is getting off work, to which he says 2:30pm. He then asks me if I would like to go out with him for the weekend to the only hotel on the island city to which I say yes. I visit the resturant beforehand to determine how nice of a place it is and find that it is so posh that I will have to go out and buy a new dress, which will not be easy because I do not have a lot of money. On the weekend my boyfriend treats me to a wonderful meal and then we return to our lavish hotel room and drink wine and make love all night.

The next day my boyfriend is called away unexpectedly and we have to cut our weekend date short. He has been called away because the heman crew needs him, but since his identity is supposed to be a secret I do not know this. He makes up an excuse about his father being ill. Later in the week I drop by his father's bookstore to see him but he is out and I am confronted by his father, the Gordon Pincette character, who is unhappy about his son's relationship with me and tells me that I have to stay away from him because I am a distraction. When I ask what that means the father threatens me and says that if I see his son again, or tell him about the threats, that he will have me killed. I am scared and heartbroken and run home. I do believe that the father could kill me because he is very rich and has a lot of political power in the city

That night I am working on a soapstone turtle by candlelight (it is how I make money) when I hear two men fighting outside. There is a terrible scream and I open my window and look out to see the two men, both whom I do not know; one man running away and the other man laying on the ground badly bleeding. I run outside and try to stop the bleeding but the man dies just as the police show up. They see me covered in blood and try to arrest me, but some of my neighbours come out and tell them that I was just trying to help. The police take me downtown anyway and after questioning me all night they release me in the morning.

While I am walking home I run into my boyfriend and he asks why I have been avoided him. I say that I cannot tell him and start crying which caused him to insist more. He tells me how much he loves me and misses me and I turn away from him, saying that I just cannot see him anymore. I run away from there and to the northern point of the city where the breakers are and contemplate throwing myself into the sea. The two police men who questioned me earlier suddenly show up just stand there and watch me from the highest platform.

In the distance I can see a tsunami approaching rapidly and I make no effort to reach higher ground because I am so depressed that I do not care if the water takes me away. I can hear the policemen shouting too me to get off the breakers and back onto the safe platform but I ignore them. There is a pole nearby and when the water hits I wrap my arms around it at the last moment and avoid being washed away. Afterwards the policemen make their way over to me and asked how I survived because they say that they have seen many people try to grab the pole and get washed away anyway. I remember saying something about crossing my arms around the poll rather then just hugging it or something but the dream changes and the policemen suddenly disappear.

My boyfriend is there instead and he puts his arm around me in comfort and says "I have a confession to make..." and than proceeds to tell me about his secret identity as the tiger riding man. I also say the confession line and than tell him that I am poor and live in the western end of the city. He tells me that he doesn't care where I am from and wonders why I ran away from him earlier. I tell him about his father threatening me and he doesn't seem surprised at all. My boyfriend tells me that his father knows about his secret crime fighting life and told me to stay away from his son because he was afraid that his son would forget about being a crimefighter.

I am relieved and happy, but still feel unsettled about something I cannot describe when the dream ends.

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.