Thread: 10/16/2011 - "First Night at Dream World Academy"

10/16/2011
"First Night at Dream World Academy"

(Ironically, I had almost forgotten this dream, upon waking. I'd gotten sidetracked, and it wasn't until a good 20 minutes after fully waking up, that I remembered the experience. Unfortunately, sooo many of the details feel lost (), but what I retained still left me with a feeling of total accomplishment.)

I don't really remember anything that happened in the beginning of this dream, and my timeline is a little disjointed, but I will put it together the best I can remember. The earliest memory I have is of having just realized I was dreaming, and trying to fly, somewhere out in the woods at night. I was having a lot of trouble flying, and I seemed to just be sinking back to the ground with normal gravity, whenever I tired to take off. I don't remember the point at which I actually was able to take control of my flight, but I was soon zooming out toward the coastline, having remembered my intention to try to find the Academy. The last few times that I had been searching for it, it was always on the water, so I figured the best way to find it was to just fly out over the ocean and will it to be there.

I overshot the shoreline, without pause, and continued out toward the dark horizon. The sky was this eerily-beautiful canvas of black, dark blue and purple, with the lightest colors having been pushed back beyond the coastline I was leaving; the last rays of setting sunlight behind me as I continued flying into the void, a few dozen feet above the water. The further out to sea I flew, though, the more uncomfortable I got. I could see that this deep, featurless, dark purple backdrop was beginning to project some detail in the sky. I could now see, thick, individual whisps of soft, purple/gray storm clouds, where there had once seemed to be none. (With my speed and low altitude, it felt a lot like the scene in Superman Returns, when he's flying out toward the kryptonite reef.) By this time, the sky was looking even more and more ominous, and I couldn't shake the foreboding notion that I was flying into something sinister. The puffy purple clouds - still barely visible against the dark backdrop - were beginning to swirl, and I half expected to see funnel clouds spike downward from them. Just on the horizon, I could see sporadic flashes of lightning on the water. I didn't like this at all. It's not secret that I'm pretty apprehensive about being way out in open water, in my dreams - because of my constant run-ins with sea monsters - and I realized that I was now out in the middle of nowhere, with no Academy in sight. More than a little intimidated by my new surroundings, I decided to turn around and fly back to the shore. (I have to go over the St. John's River Bridge, every night on my way home, and we've been having some pretty amazing-looking thunderstorms and cloud cover out here, lately. I'm thinking it might have been where the intense storm imagery over the water came from.)

Soon back on land, I began to think of other ways to find the Academy, and I remembered about the portals. At first, I looked around for any of the puddle / water-hole type puddles I had been using in previous dreams. When I didn't find any, immediately, I thought about doors. I began wandering around, going through various doorways and trying to 'will' myself into the Academy. Behind one door, in particular, I walked into the setting of a previous dream from over a year ago. It was a theme park that some friends and I had gone to for a Halloween Horror Nights type of occassion. The room that I had walked into was the lobby of one of their haunted houses. I remembered previous dream and that it had been pretty creepy, so I really didn't have any desire to stay here. When I turned around, though, the door that I had come through was gone, and I was standing in the middle of the haunted house lobby, with no sign of the wall that had just been behind me. A little uneasy about this - trying not to get distracted from my mission - I searched around for another door, spotting a little service door in the corner of the lobby. I walked over to the door and opened it...only to find another door, behind it. Behind that one, was another. I was beginning to get a little fed up with this.

I closed the door and focused on changing what was behind it. When I opened it again, the other door had vanished, and there was a dark, stone hallway, leading off into the distance. There was a soft light inside the corridor, but I don't recall what from. Stepping further into the hallway, I saw an opening on the other side, leading out into the night. When I stepped through the archway, I found myself outside, on the water, as if I had stepped out onto a concrete dock. I walked out away from the archway a bit and turned around, to get a good look at the structure from which I'd just emerged. It was a monstrous, stone building. It seemed a series a buildings, really, comprised of high towers and ramparts, various points in the seemingly-mideval architecture connected by high walkways and bridges. It looked like a great, dark castle, from down here. Immediately, I knew where I was; I had finally made it to the Dream World Academy! I walked along the narrow dock for a moment, looking for a main entrance. It was still nighttime, and it didn't look like there was much more than the moon lighting the outside of this place. Eventually, I came to a turn-off, and rounded it to see a gigantic stairway, comprised of what looked to be hundreds of steps, ascending toward a large set of double doors at the front of the Academy.

I started climbing the stairs, taking in the spectacle, and just now beginning to notice that there were other people milling about the outside of the building. Everyone seemed to just be doing their own thing, and not paying any particular attention to me, which was fine, because I really didn't want to disturb too much, my first time here. I just continued to watch everyone, while I walked up toward the doorway. About halfway up, I passed a small group of people on the stairway. It looked as if they were practicing magic or something, but I don't quite recall. When I got to the large doors, I stepped inside and into a main lobby. Inside the Academy was nearly as dark as the outside; the soft glow of a few, scattered torches fighting against the cool blue of the moonlight coming in through the windows and portals around us, for possession of the black shadows which still dominated the majority of the what could have been adequetely called a 'Great Hall' of sorts. The whole place had a very Harry Potter / Hogwarts kind of feel, outside of being quite dark and having a very 'pre-electricity' atmosphere.

Unfortunately, there is a lot beyond this point that I don't remember. Nothing too noteworthy, that I can recall. I vaguely remember just wandering the halls, talking to a couple of various DC's about the school, most of which were just practicing a few general abilities, here and there. I remember a portly old bald man being one of the instructors there, but I don't recall very much about him. The last memory I have of the dream is being out near the water again and trying to run back over the events in the dream, as a normally do, to try to help remember them upon waking.