Through the Looking Glass--Alice Doll in Dreamland
Hello and welcome to my dream journal! Hopefully I will have some lucid dreams to report soon.
Day One
Tokyo Subway
It is a sunny, cloudless day, and I am walking along in some sort of complex of warehouses. I walk past a mechanic who is cleaning out the back of a brown van with a rag. I enter one of the warehouses, which turns out to be a subway platform where I think I have been just a little while before this. Now I am on a subway platform in what I think is Tokyo, Japan, but I am the only one around other than the mechanic I just saw. I find my suburban parked on the platform, indoors, and I begin to open its doors. Then I realize a train is coming and am concerned that the train will run into the open doors of my suburban, but it passes and turns out to be too far away to hit my car, by several feet. I begin to close the car doors, thinking that now it is time to go pick up my sister from the airport (something I am doing in real life soon). Then the train stops and people get off, lots of people, filling the previously empty platform. One of these people is Heather, my ex-girlfriend from high school, and she is walking along in the crowd, towards me, and we catch each other’s eye and for a moment I don’t know whether or not I should say hi to her (something I was reading about at length in one of my old journals yesterday). I don’t think we talk.
Cranium and Jealousy
Before this, I am at a party with about twenty other people, including my parents and sisters, and Mark, an old co-worker. We organize into a large circle and sit on the floor to play some kind of game, possibly Cranium; I am slightly nervous about having to act things out in front of all these people. Also my friend Joseph and another boy are there—I think it is his gay friend Scott—and they are flirting and then they are kissing and they get up and go somewhere else to be alone. I think this is cute, but am also slightly jealous.
Jogging and Nightgowns
I am involved in some sort of fitness bootcamp which required me to jog along a trail with a bunch of other girls, but as I hate jogging, I make some kind of excuse to return to the cabin where all our stuff is being stored. I am rooting around in a duffel bag looking for my cell phone. The cabin becomes a sort of discount pajama store that mostly sells tacky nightgowns, and there is a snooty male sales clerk who gets upset when I make fun of the nightgowns. He is tall and pale and blond and looks kind of like one of the Volturi from Twilight.
Mog Lamach--the prison on the hill
Mog Lamach--the prison on the hill
I am imprisoned in an elaborate fortress complex on top of a hill, along with about two hundred other people. I am in high school again, and all the other prisoners are my age or younger--some much younger, like elementary school age. The people keeping us captive are adults, and they run the prison like a concentration camp. We are constantly divided into different groups, pitted against one another, and generally kept from forming alliances amongst ourselves as much as possible.
However, I quickly become a leader of the underground rebellion against our captors, and try hard to foster unity and strength in our ranks. I make sure that we all share our blankets and food rations, and quickly a sense of community forms. I am allowed to keep a journal and spend a lot of time writing down, in code, what is going on. The prisoners greatly outnumber the captors, and so it becomes easy to smuggle secret messages along ourselves.
At one point, a guard comes into the room where my group and I are being held and tells us we are no longer allowed to communicate in English. I begin speaking rapid Spanish to the other prisoners and smile at the guard as if to say, so there. From that point on, a great deal of my time is devoted to teaching the other kids in my group Spanish, which is difficult.
There are always rumors and whisperings about what is happening, what will happen next. There are recon missions where we sneak around in the dark, under staircases and in cellars, our hearts pounding as we listen for footsteps. The adults have aircraft and vehicles which they use to come and go from the prison at will, and one day a plane returns with a huge load of about a hundred sixth-graders dressed in school uniforms and carrying band instruments. They seem to be under the impression that they are on some kind of band field trip. These are the newest prisoners.
The prison camp expands more to include these new arrivals, and the sense of community among us is stronger than ever. We become close friends and cling to one another, all the older kids helping to care for the little ones. At night I walk around the camp and pull myself up over partitions to see the other groups of kids lying around in their blankets talking, and I tell them, "Good night! I love you. I'll see you all tomorrow." Meanwhile I despair that we will never be rescued, while also enjoying the sense of community that has cropped up among us captives.
One day the prison is reopened to the college students who use it as a campus, and they are allowed to come and go at will, though we captives still are not. Two other girls in my group and I become brave enough to attempt an escape, and we take piles of books to disguise ourselves as college students, and follow a group of them out of the front gates. We can't believe it--after all this time we are free, we've just walked right out of the prison complex.
We stand around in front of the complex, shocked, chattering, laughing, relieved. Suddenly I realize that I don't want to leave my fellow prisoners, who have become like my family. I turn around and race back towards the doors, lunging to catch one of the heavy doors before it swings shut, locking me out forever. My fingertips are in danger of being crushed, but I remember thinking, "It doesn't matter as long as I get back to them."
I open the door and race back into the giant front room of the prison. Where a moment ago it was filled with children lying around in blankets and sleeping bags, now it is completely empty, and all the bedding is gone. I am desolate. I race around yelling, "Prisoners! Prisoners!" but everyone seems to be gone. Then I come into one of the back rooms, where a group of about seven or eight prisoners remain, sitting at a picnic table playing cards. It is all my closest friends that I have made here at the prison, and they're very glad to see me. "You came back!" they say, and make room for me at the table. I explain that I realized I didn't want to leave them. They agree, explaining that everyone else escaped, but they didn't want to either. I tell them that it felt like a dream, when I was running around yelling "Prisoners!" I said, "It felt exactly like something that would happen in a dream." (Yet I didn't think to do an RC, I just assumed it was reality. Grr.)
So they deal me in to their card game. They are playing an inexplicable, incomprehensible, rule-less game with multiple incomplete decks of cards. Some of the cards are chopped into small pieces, but are still used for game play. I begin playing with them and comment that this game is ridiculous, and I feel like I am at the Mad Hatter's tea party. Everyone laughs, and I feel at home.
The dream flashes forward to some years later, and I am explaining my adventures to someone who is either my child or my grandchild. I am drawing a picture of the prison complex and in elaborate, Arabic-looking script I label it, "Mog Lamach--the Prison on the Hill."