Monday, December 17, 2007
It always begins the same way... I walk into the backyard of the nameless man, who then greets me and leads me to a fenced in area. The man is dressed in a dingy safari style outfit, complete with pith helmet. It's apparent that I know this man and have known him for some time. In the middle of his yard is the fenced in section that is filled with a loose dirt. When I first came across him, there was nothing but the mound of dirt. With each subsequent visit human bones have begun to pile up. At first just a skull, but by now there is a pile a good two feet thick. He always seeks to entice me into the fenced in area. At first I had no reservations about this. It's always been apparent that I knew what he was doing with the bodies, and until recently he seemed to accept that I wouldn't say anything. But a hint of malice is now starting to cross over him on my visits, and I am becoming more and more wary of entering that area. I was further upset last night by him mentioning the need to dig a mass grave to "get rid of some of his problems". What am I supposed to do? Should I join him in the fenced in area? Am I one of the "problems" or am I part of the solution?
You're probably reading all that wondering what the hell I'm on about. Everything mentioned previously is part of an ongoing dream I've been experiencing. Dreaming for me has always been a strange phenomenon. I rarely have just a regular one-off dream that comes and goes over the course of an evening. When I dream, it tends to be a serialized affair. I will have the same dream every night for a month or two. For the first couple of weeks they will progress a little bit further until I reach a point where I am presented with a challenge. My goal is to determine the correct approach to that challenge. Upon determining the correct answer, I always get two things:
A) Some insight into my psyche that allows me to understand what it is the dream is telling me about my life
B) The dream will go away and I will never have it again.
Sometimes the dreams will go away for months at a time. Once they return, I will have them almost every night. Every dream brings a different feeling. This particular dream started out just fine. Oddly enough, I was never put off by the grave or the bones. But the comment the man made last night shot me awake and sent a cold chill through my blood.
As a good example, let me mention my favorite of these dreams. I had this particular dream recurrently around the age of 21. Even though the content seems grim, I never had an ill feeling in it. I was always calm and at ease.
I was walking down the street and would be approached by a man wearing a white suit. He would always look at me and offer enlightenment, if I would but follow him. Every night I would follow and we'd end up at his house. Inside this house was a small room, perhaps 10'x10'. The floor was covered in pools of coagulated blood. Set around this room was a series of shelves, each covered in human heads. Around this time I would turn and face the man in the suit, who was now brandishing a sword.
"The path to enlightenment lies in the destruction of the self. Do you understand?" he would ask me every night.
The answer was ultimately to nod and bow forward, exposing my neck to him. He swung and my head fell. I watched through my own eyes as it dropped, hit the floor and bounced.
As always, I received my insight upon recognizing the question. At 21, I was still pretty freshly out of my teenage years, and I hadn't always been the best person up to that point. I was a manipulator and ultimately untrustworthy. My dream awakened in me the insight that to blossom as an adult I needed to do away with the negative portions of who I was and metamorphose into what I have since become. After some self-imposed exile and a LOT of reading I came to complete grips with what it was telling me.
Ultimately, it was a very eye-opening and positive experience. It almost always is. Though the insights are not always so profound, they do help me sort out my personal issues. They are simply the manifestation of whatever turmoil is rattling inside my head, be it unseen, ignored or otherwise unnoticed.
I have yet to meet anybody else who dreams in this manner. They're not recurrent insomuch as they do tend to change over the first week or two. Once they've provided me with the choice, they are unchanging until solved. They are both exciting and terrifying, and the current one fills me with enough dread that I don't wish to have it again, though I know that ultimately what it's trying to tell me is a good thing.
But fact is fact, and last night's statement of the graves had a pretty profound impact on me. If you've ever seen the episode of The Twilight Zone called "Twenty-Two", then you'll have an understanding of how I felt. It was the same as the woman emerging from the morgue saying, "Room for one more". [shudders]
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