Devil's Den Dream

I had another very strange dream this morning that went on forever. Stay with me here. Get a cuppa Joe and get comfortable, this is gonna take a while.

The dream starts at some unknown distant relative's house. It is a special occasion, but I don't know what occasion. The house looks more like a commercial building than a home. It has white cinderblock walls, white square tile floors, fluorescent lighting, and suspended ceilings like a dorm, frat house, or insane asylum. The rooms are huge, and the "family room" has three couches in one corner around a TV. There are 50 or so people milling about from room to room.

I'm sitting on a 1960's harvest gold couch and a girl who looks vaguely familiar sits beside me and snuggles up to me like she knows me. Humm....she tells me who she is, but her name doesn't ring any bells. More milling about, then most of the people mill out of the family room to other parts of the house. The hostess, a short blonde lady, comes into the family room and looks at the floor in disgust. There is a checkerboard pattern of sticky yellow wetness on the floor. I look up to see the suspended ceiling tiles have gotten wet and fallen. There is a leak from the second floor bathroom. The yellow stickiness on the floor is urine.

As I'm looking at the bottom of the floor above, it starts to collapse. I run for the door. It's a double glass push bar door like in commercial buildings. Outside to my right is a long, buff brick wall. Extending for about 50 yards is a corrugated tin walkway cover. The far end of the cover is starting to collapse and the collapsing tin is coming at me in a rolling wave. I realize I will be crushed by the metal in seconds. However, when it reaches me, it is not tin at all. It is actually strings of flat, white, lightweight plastic beads. They made "curtains" for teenagers out of the stuff several years ago.

I turn and go back in the building, but it's no longer the family room. It's a big vacant warehouse. The roof is collapsing because of a deluge of a reddish-brown substance, like wheat or rice grains. It's like a blowing sandstorm this stuff, and it's causing the buildings to collapse from the weight. As I go from room to room the ceilings are all collapsing. This is an apocalyptic end-of-the-world sandstorm of red rice.

I figure if I get under a doorway opening, or better yet, the fire escape stairwell, that the building won't collapse on me. I realized that was a bad idea because the red rice was filling the stairwell and now I was going to suffocate.

The red rice was coming in but I saw a hole underneath an AC duct and wiggled through to another larger room. But that room was filling up with the red rice too and it covered me in seconds. I was now suspended in and trapped by the red rice. I was holding my breath and trying to "swim" to the top but getting nowhere. As I was swimming away, I realized I was breathing normally and the red rice wasn't getting in my nose or mouth.

(flash)

I am running diagonally across the junior high gymnasium screaming, "Get out! Get out of the building! It's collapsing! Get out NOW!" There is a P.E. class sitting on the floor in rows and the teacher is taking roll. They are all wearing white T-shirts and navy blue, double-knit gym shorts. They just stare at me as I scream across in front of them and out another set of double glass doors.

Outside is a large parking lot with another of those corrugated tin walkways. People are running wild-eyed towards the building, or away from something terrible. They are yelling "Devil's den, devil's den!" Apparently there has been an expedition to find seven markers around the world which have been lost for ages. They have just uncovered the sixth one outside the building. There is a ceremony to recognize the discovery.

The marker looks like a heavy iron manhole cover. It has strange markings on it and sits atop a concrete pillar. A tall scaffolding has been erected around the top of the pillar so people can get up there and look at the marker. I'm suddenly up on the scaffolding with a small crowd of people. The devil is coming up the stairs shaking hands. He is six or seven feet tall and wearing an ugly green zoot suit made of a rough material like burlap.

I know he is the devil, but everyone else knows him as the wealthy businessman who has financed the search for the marker expedition. He is coming up for the grand unveiling. The devil is not powerful now, but when the seventh marker is uncovered he will unleash his devilness on the world and it will be destroyed.

So the devil is coming up the stairs shaking hands. But I don't want to shake the devil's hand. I know somehow that if I do not extend my hand, he will not be able to harm me. I stand with my hands clasped in the fig leaf position. The devil extends his hand but then sees that mine is not out. He gets an embarrassed look on his face in the awkward social moment, and kinda hangs his head with an embarrassed grin. He then lightly swipes his hands a couple of times along the hem of my jacket.

And his hands, oh my. He had four hands. One set looked like human hands but were a pale green. The other set were fake and wooden looking and were on rods coming from his elbows. The wooden hands were small, painted black, and were covered with yellow-green puss filled blisters.

(flash)

I am in a small electronic control room high above the world's largest fair. It is nighttime and through the large plate glass window I see the vast expanse of the fair with all the pretty lights. Between the fair and the control room is a lake and the lights of the Ferris wheel are reflected in the dark water. I remember Blonde Hostess had mentioned something about going to the fair after the party was over.

I am exhausted from running from the apocalyptic red rice and the encounter with the devil. I don't feel well. In the room are three 3' x 3' x 3' black flight cases for shipping electronic equipment. I kneel behind one, suddenly naked, dizzy. I know this is a dream, and a bad one at that. I am wanting it to be over in the worst way.

The door to the room opens and Blonde Hostess and Snuggly Girl come up to me. Blonde Hostess says, "There you are! We were wondering where you had gotten off to." When I look up at them, they and the room around me are fuzzy and suddenly in black and white. Through my fuzzy fog I tell them about my dream....using a British accent. I realize that people with head injuries sometimes awake from a coma and suddenly have strange accents. I wonder if that is what has been happening to me. I laugh and exclaim, "Where did this British accent come from????"

They give me knowing smiles and help me to my feet. My clothes have suddenly reappeared. The control room is actually the garage of Blonde Hostess's house. They explain that the weird dream was caused by a party drug that was spiked in the food at the gathering. It is usually quite harmless, but had a bad effect on me because I still had my appendix. They thought everyone at the gathering had had an appendectomy. They didn't know I still had mine and were very sorry about my bad dream trip. Snuggly Girl explained to me she was the one with whom I had a one-night lesbian fling when I lived in Texas. Oh! I remember her now...vaguely.

We walked back in the family room where I found my cousin John and his best friend Paul wearing silly long blonde wigs. I knew they were the ones who spiked the food. I ran over to John, jumped on him and pinned him to the couch. I hadn't seen him in a long time and was glad to see him. He was laughing and so was I.

(flash)

I'm at my mother's house and I'm helping her clean out stacks and stacks of old magazines, notably Popular Computing and National Enquirer. I'm hauling the stacks out on the front porch when my friend John Allen stops by. He asks if he can have the magazines to take to his mother. I go back in the house and there is a blonde lady sitting at Mom's kitchen table. I start telling her about my weird dream. She says she knows Snuggly Girl and explains who she is. When I go outside with the stack of mags for John Allen, I suddenly realize Snuggly Girl is probably Jackie Sue's (yellowdog granny's) daughter. I go back inside to ask the lady and she explains that *she* is Jackie Sue's daughter, not Snuggly Girl.

[END OF THE DREAM]

Phew! I woke up and looked at the clock. It was 5:30 a.m., just two hours after I had gone to sleep. Cheezburger the cat was yowling to go outside like he always does at 5:30. Today I'm glad he woke me up.

Like all dreams, some of the images and people were real and some came from the dark recesses of my mind. Here's a rundown:

1.) Snuggly Girl is a real person. I've seen often in the past but I don't see her now. I can't quite place her. I think she works at the local hospital. If I were to have a lesbian tryst, she wouldn't be the one.

2.) Blonde Hostess is the face my imagination has assigned to Kate Johnson, a watercolor artist in the on-line sketch group. I know her only by a sketched, self-portrait icon. I don't know what she really looks like.

3.) The devil looked just like Jim Carey's character in "The Mask", except for the rough textured suit.

4.) My cousin John, his friend Paul, and my friend John Allen all are real people in my life and had their actual faces. John Allen's picture was in the paper yesterday. Hubby asked yesterday if my family was going to have our big Cousin's Christmas party this year. I would have seen my cousin John there. That may be the family gathering occasion in the dream. I have no idea why Paul showed up.

5.) The blonde lady at my Mom's kitchen table was totally unknown to me.

6.) Jackie Sue (Yellowdog Granny) is a real blogger person in Texas. I have guilt feelings because I haven't been over there to read her stuff lately.

7.) The "family room", control room and the fair were all unknown to me.

8.) The long, buff brick wall is outside the front door of my high school, but there's no covered walkway beyond it.

9.) The junior high gym is the actual local junior high gym.

10.) The stairwell with the AC duct was in my church when I was a kid. It was torn down in the 70's.

11.) The open room where I was covered with red rice was the actual gym in the junior high I attended.

12.) The P.E. class uniform was similar to the one I wore in high school in Texas.

13.) The scaffolding with the devil's marker is an actual location. It's between the science building and nursing building on my college campus. Some years ago they built a planetarium on that spot though.

14.) The manhole cover atop a concrete pillar is something I see frequently. I think there is one across the street from my bank, or maybe the post office. They are located in low, swampy areas prone to flooding, so they build the pipe way up in the air. I guess it's done that way so rainwater won't backwash the sewer system.

15.) The devil's marker is from a TV ad for a movie I think. I recall the image of a gloved hand brushing away snow from a marker that looks like an iron manhole cover. Does this sound familiar to anybody????

16.) The rolling wave of collapsing roofs/ceilings is from The Universe series where they describe Einstein's theory of General Relativity. The Earth is pushed towards the sun by space-time and they have a neat graphic to show the theory. The rolling wave is that graphic.

17.) The apocalyptic sandstorm of red rice is also from The Universe series. It's the red sandstorms on Mars.

18.) The lightweight plastic curtain beads were purchased by my sister for her granddaughter several years ago when they redecorated her room from little girl to teenager. I think the actual bead curtain was purple though.

19.) The devil made his appearance because I was reading an art history book just before I went to sleep. I was looking at a triptych painted by Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1510, titled The Garden of Earthly Delights. The first panel is The Garden of Eden, second is The World before the Flood, and the third is Hell. I looked at Hell and thought, "Hummm...Hell looks like fun." I immediately thought, "Oops, I shouldn't have said that." Nothing like a good dose of religious guilt right before bedtime.

20.) The British accent is from watching waaaaay too many "How to Paint with Watercolors" videos on You Tube produced in the U.K.

21.) I still have my appendix.

22.) There was never a single issue of Popular Computing in my mother's house. She had a subscription to National Enquirer though.

OK, anybody want to venture an analysis?

Weird Dreams

Hubby went off to sand sheetrock by himself today and said I didn't have to go. Yay! Spent most of the day horizontal napping on the couch and had two very strange dreams.

In the first dream we were in the process of moving to California and I needed to find an apartment. I assumed apartment rent in California would be sky high and we couldn't afford anything more than a hovel.

A gay friend of mine, name unknown, face unfamiliar, was showing me his apartment to show what we could get for the money. It was a plain white box kind of place, but it was spacious enough for the two of us and the rent was reasonable. I decided that maybe California wouldn't be as bad as I feared. Then I woke up.

Got me a root beer, ate some popcorn, and fell back to sleep.

In the second dream Hubby and I had moved back to the little town where we went to college. (We actually want to move there BTW.) We had just moved into a ratty old 1970 era single-wide trailer with low ceilings, avocado appliances and dark paneling. It was nasty. (I actually lived for three months in a place just like this in 1990, it was miserable.)

All 15 of Hubby's family had dropped in to see the place. I was trying to pull together food to feed them all.

There were leftovers (whose?) in the fridge, so I started pulling all that stuff out. I pulled a sheet cake pan of tea from the freezer, but the liquid wasn't frozen. (Why was the tea in a sheet cake pan, and why was it in the freezer?)

When it came to room temperature, mosquitoes started hatching out of it and flying away. I was madly slapping my hands over the pan trying to kill them. I kept slapping and slapping but I couldn't kill any of them.

I finally decided, "I can't serve this."

Then I woke up.

Yet Another Weird Dream

Monday night was dream-free and I actually awoke this morning feeling rested. Hooray! A big dose of milk products before bedtime might have had something to do with that.

Sunday night, however, I had another weird dream. I want to record this dream (and all my other dreams for that matter) because I experience déjà vu fairly often. When I tell folks I'm déjà vuing, they look at me as if I've lost my mind. I thought the déjà vuing thing was common since somebody created a name for it and all, but apparently not. Once again I seem to be the odd duck. However, if I have my dreams recorded, I can go back and say, "See! Here it is! Told ya so!!!"

Back to the dream. I was getting married...again. The wedding was at my hometown church, but the room in the dream was unfamiliar. The wedding was to be a small, formal affair. Only family was invited, but with my family that would be about 100 people or so. All my cousins were there looking fabulous as always.

The dream started as the bridal shower was ending. The day's events were a bridal shower in the morning followed by a luncheon, then the ceremony and reception was later that afternoon. When the cousins come in from all over the state, we make a day of it.

Anyway, folks were milling around visiting before lunch and I was picking up all the cards and gifts. I was thinking to myself that my bridesmaids should be gathering this stuff up, not me, I'm the bride. I need to go start getting dressed. There were just a handful of gifts (third wedding, no gifts expected), but folks had brought tons of cards. Funny thing was I had opened all the cards but none of the gifts at the shower.

I was bustling around the room picking up all the cards and gifts trying to get them all in one place so none would get lost. There were about 7-8 small 2" boxes and one big shirt box. The big box was wrapped in a hideous dark rust-colored metallic paper with a huge matching net/wire bow and flowers. It was really ugly wrapping for a wedding gift. It looked more like a birthday present for a grandma.

Among the little boxes there were two round gold foil boxes; they looked kinda like little cheese wheels with rounded edges. One had a big glass stone on one edge, the other did not. They were supposed to represent an engagement and wedding ring. The boxes pulled apart to open 'around the equator' so to speak. I looked at them a moment and thought, "What a clever idea for a box for a wedding gift. I wonder what could possibly be inside this tiny box????"

Then I woke up. Hummm.....

Could this be a sign from the Magic Entrepreneur Fairy telling me the hottest new idea in wedding gift boxes? I love building boxes so that would be right up my alley. They would fly off the shelves if I could just figure out a clever wedding gift that would fit in a box that small. I need a marketing person post haste. Figger out what goes in the box Pris, would ya?

I can smell the money.

Bizarre Dreams

I've been having some really bizarre dreams lately. I've always been a vivid dreamer. They're in color with sounds and smells and I remember them on waking. Apparently that isn't ordinary because when I tell people about the details of the dreams, I get quizzical looks and the questions, "Your dream was in color???", or "You could SMELL something in your dream???" Well yes, of course. Doesn't everybody dream in color and smell-o-vision?

Anywho, I've been having a lot of covert military ops dreams. I've been crawling around through creeks and tunnels and trenches clutching some type of weapon in my hands. Hubby says I shouldn't go to sleep watching The History Channel any more.

THE COVERT OPS DREAM

Last night in my covert ops dream I was dressed in khaki fatigues and my platoon was trying to sneak out of our own base. It was in the middle of the day, the sun was shining brightly, and some huge luncheon awards ceremony was happening. The ceremony was held outside in a space the size of a football field and there was a tall stage on one end. Hundreds of people were on the field seated around tables listening to the speaker on stage.

The stage wasn't straight across, it curved in slightly, concave to the audience. Stretching across the front of the stage was a long table with red, white, and blue bunting draped across the front. People were sitting at this long table, maybe a dozen folks on either side of the speaker; non-military people in civilian clothes.

Our mission was to crawl under the table along the stage to a truck waiting on the other side. The speaker and the two dozen people sitting on the stage knew what was going on and they had pushed their chairs back from the table so we wouldn't be crawling across their feet. The bunting on the table was there to hide our presence from the audience because they weren't supposed to know what we were doing. There was a guy at our end of the stage telling each soldier when to go...."Wait, wait, wait....now GO!" Each soldier would then scramble up under the table and began crawling the length of the stage.

The weapon clutched in my hands today was an old, wooden pump shotgun. While I was standing in line to go under the table the shotgun racked loudly making that unmistakable shotgun racking sound. It was loud enough to give our mission away because the hubbub of the dinner eating was over and everyone was quiet, listening to the speaker. So I had to clutch the shotgun tightly so the slide wouldn't rack again. I clutched it so tightly it came apart in my hands. I had the stock part in my left hand, and the barrel and wooden slide in my right hand. I was squeezing it soooo tightly that the slide splintered into pieces.

Then it was my time to go under the table. I managed to climb onto the stage, which was about four feet off the ground, without a free hand because I was still clutching the shotgun parts in both hands. I was crawling along and had made it by about six people when I woke up.

I woke up in a sweat, realized I could unclench my fists and let go of the dreamland shotgun pieces, and turned over and went back to sleep. Then there was this:

THE NEWSPAPER OFFICE DREAM

It was my first day on the job at a small-town newspaper. I don't know what my job was at the newspaper, I was still unpacking my office supplies. About a dozen women worked in the office; no men. (OK, it was a nightmare, not a dream.)

I somehow knew this day happened to be the editor's first anniversary as the editor so I had purchased a greeting card for her. It was a really cool card. It was aged, hammered, embossed metal, almost like a thin book. It had all kinds of little gewgaw charms hanging on it here and there. The greeting was something benign like, "Congratulations on the First Year!" or something of that nature.

I showed the card to a couple of the women and like a ripple effect, word of the card spread around the office. Somehow like the telephone game, the card's greeting had been misstated with each retelling. In 15 minutes the office grapevine was all abuzz about the "inappropriate" card, and rumor had it that I was going to be fired for it.

Several of the clucking women had met the editor at the door as she arrived for the day and bombarded her with the tale that I had brought "inappropriate" materials to the workplace. They hadn't told her it was a greeting card for her.

She came into the office with a dazed look from all the hen clucking, and followed by all the clucking hens approached me at my desk. She then reamed me for bringing "inappropriate" things to work and told me not to do it again. She turned on her heel and sat at her desk and the clucking flock of hens dissipated.

I stood there just stunned. I picked up the card, walked to her desk, flung it down and said, "Here is the 'inappropriate' material. Read this and tell me what is 'inappropriate' about it." She opened the card, read "Congratulations on the First Year", and realized it was for her. She got a weird look on her face and said simply, "Oh."

I was enraged that she had listened to and believed the gossips without checking the facts herself. I was enraged at the juvenile, gossipy behavior of the women. The corporate culture that tolerates tongue-wagging on that scale will be a miserable place to work. My head was spinning.

I went back to my desk mad as hell to unpack the rest of my office supplies. After just a few seconds I mumbled, "I have to get out of here." I went outside to pace around, smoke a stogie, and calm down. I was back at my desk in about five minutes. I was standing up to unpack the box of supplies. I remember there was an old green stapler and two staple pullers.

(Vanessa, a real childhood chum from junior high, made it into this dream. She was a sweetie. I haven't seen her since about 10th grade.)

Vanessa had the desk next to mine. She said in a snide voice, "Well! You were sure out there a long time. Aren't you even gonna bother to sit down now?"

The office manager lady piped up at this point. The office manager was a little Napoleanette. She was about 4'9" tall and about that wide. She had mousey brown hair pulled back in a tight bun and horn-rimmed glasses. She piped up and said in a fakey sweet voice, "That's OK if she was out there a while. She can make up the time tomorrow." The fakey sweet voice came with daggers as if to say, "I'm gonna make your life a living hell, bitch."

Me: Tomorrow? Tomorrow's Saturday!

Her: That's right. We work half a day on Saturday.

Me: Why????

Her: Oh, it's not so bad. If we work on Saturday, we get to leave thirty minutes early Monday through Friday.

Me: But you work from 8:00 a.m to 5:30 p.m. now. When do you take off early?

Her: We leave thirty minutes early at 5:30. If we didn't work on Saturday we would have to stay until 6:00 p.m.

They came to work for a sixth day and worked four hours so they could get off 2.5 hours early the other five days of the week. The stupidity of that logic made my head explode. This was just my first few hours on this new job and I realized I had made a HUGE mistake coming to work here.

Then I woke up in a sweat again.

I don't know what is going on in my head to cause such bizarre dreams, but I wake up more tired and stressed than when I went to sleep. "Sweet Dreams" doesn't seem to be in my vocabulary these days.

Sigh.

112 Main St., Prescott, Arkansas

Back in April of this year, April 6th specifically, I had a dream. It was a strange dream, but one so real it was unnerving.

In the dream I was standing on a sidewalk in a downtown area looking at a vacant lot. The lot had broken concrete slabs, cold pack asphalt, and gravel rubble. It was a site where an old building had been torn down. There wasn't anything in particular to see in this lot. It looked the same as any vacant lot in any downtown area in any little town in Arkansas.

What was so odd about the dream is that it came with a specific address: 112 Main Street, Prescott, Arkansas. Now that part was the scary part. Dreams aren't usually that specific. Prescott holds no particular importance for me. I've driven through there once or twice in my life, but that's about all the connection I have to Prescott. This dream was getting curiouser and curiouser.

What was the significance of this rubbley lot? Was I supposed to buy it? Was I supposed to meet someone there? Was I supposed to see something important? Was the former building of some relevance? Was the ghost of someone buried under the slab trying to contact me from The Other Side? I didn't know, but I knew I had to find out.

On April 8th we went to find the address. Lo and behold, it was exactly as I had seen it in my dream. Judging from the addresses of the neighboring buildings, 112 Main Street, Prescott was indeed a rubbley lot. It was serving as a parking lot for the business next door.

I stood in the parking lot with an open mind. I didn't know what would happen next, but I was ready...ready to see, to meet, to listen, to experience.

I was ready, but maybe I was late. Maybe I should have been there on the 7th, I don't know. If I was supposed to met or speak to someone, they didn't appear. Maybe I was supposed to *see* something there, so I took pictures.

What is it that I should be seeing??? Do I need to contact Henry George??? Should I switch to Coca-Cola??? Should I be taking Cardill tonic because I'm a woman???