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.