Way of the Lizard

While this series of dreams never reached a high level of lucidity, it did feature two odd and intense epiphanies, and much of the time I was aware that I was dreaming.

The first stage of the dream, I was playing with a pet, a small lizard that could sit in the palm of my hand, and liked to race around my forearms and take short, gliding flights from hand to hand or from me to its terrarium. It was familiar to me and I loved it as a pet. Someone, maybe someone at work, mentioned that the lizard wouldn't live that much longer, and the next time I was playing with her (I knew she was a her, probably having just asked myself the question and come up with an answer), I noticed she was slowing down, and there was a scare where she stopped moving, but revived, and I felt strong attachment and fear for her death. The dream progressed so that she had died, and I was feeling strong grief just as if a real pet had died. I remembered seeing and playing with the small creature over months, maybe more than a year, and considered how I would hold myself together at work. Then it struck me, the whole life I remembered for this creature was in dreams. I was able to search my memories and recall that I had no terrarium and no pets. I believed, and still think it may be the case, that the lizard had appeared in my dreams before. A couple times before, I've had the experience of grief in a dream, and then the realization that the events had not taken place, though this time may be the first that I was grieving a creature who only lived in dreams. It can be emotionally powerful, feeling relief but also feeling in a sense robbed of your grief, still feeling the echo of strong emotion while knowing you have no reason to feel it. Also, I suppose it illuminates mortality and impermanence in a strange light. It's not exactly an "Aha!" moment because of the sad, contemplative quality of the realization.

Here ends this dream, more or less. It's memorable in itself, though not singular. However, it probably set the tone for the experience which followed.

The initiating conditions of the next dream are hazy. Perhaps I set out with the intention to go out drinking, and several times throughout the dream I was convinced that I had drunk too much to drive or thought I might have been drugged. I can't say I've had many "drunk" dreams, and I wasn't drinking last night. I found myself in a crowd at some kind of play/concert/pageant - some elaborate group performance with a standing room only audience. It was quite impressive and immersive, but also blatant monotheistic allegory. At some point I found myself speaking to the producer/director (quite possibly a God stand-in, but a pudgy, red-bearded one) in a corner of the balcony. He said something to the effect that he tries to get everyone excited about putting on a good show, but those who refuse to participate certainly won't be invited to the after-party. Afterward, I found myself in the crowd again, and experienced a powerful sensation of epiphany. The content of the epiphany was very much in the "born again" narrative, that there is someone behind the curtain of our existence and he/it was reaching out to me personally to be accepted into my heart. The strength of the sensation was such that not accepting wasn't really an option. Indeed, for a time after the experience I was ready to buy whatever the man upstairs was selling.

I rather expected it was Christianity, but when I exited out the front, I found it was a Minecraft-themed mosque, with big creeper parapets and mineral blocks you could pluck off the front of the building. I had the feeling I had seen this place in dreams before, too, but like the lizard, it may just be dream time and deja vu at work. Out front there was a sermon with some fairly incendiary language, and then we newcomers were handed off, presumably, to recruiters. Mine was a hunched, bulgy old man with a thin beard and lopsided features. He didn't get very far in his spiel before coming right out and saying he was a demon. He said some demons would be more coy about it, but he was more the bind you in fire and pain variety, and the ground under me morphed into a lady demon face like something out of Diablo, with bone spikes growing up around me like a cage. My go-along-to-get-along had already been wearing thin, and I was able to break free of this attack.

The dream kind of wandered on and restarted several times from there, focusing on a "Dude, where's my car?" theme and leaving me with overall decidedly mixed feelings and no inclination to dump too much meaning into the events. Still, the two "revelations" taken on their own terms were unique experiences.