This is long. That was one of the amazing things about the dream: how freakin LONG it was, and how uncommonly and unsettlingly VIVID. Here goes.
The dream begins with me walking in a large plaza in the middle of a big city. The sky is overcast, the pavement is cobblestone. It looks like London. Then, in the plaza, I see a large old-fashioned carriage driven by a guy in tails and tophat, pulled by two beautiful white horses. They are driving around the plaza and people are stopping to watch and appreciate them. I watch, too. Somehow (this part is fuzzy) I begin talking with the driver and he invites me to ride one of his horses. He unhitches them from the carriage, and he and I both mount one. (The next parts I remember clearly.) The horses were highly trained in "dressage" (ever see the Lippizzaner Stallions perform?" and we are both showing off the horse's 'dancing', parading around, leaping into the air. More poeple are gathering and applauding. I have ridden horses like this and the feelings of the powerful horse performing under me were extremely vivid and exhilerating. But it has begun raining, and the cobblestone is getting slick. The next thing I know, as the guy is next to me on his horse, his horse slips and falls. This causes my horse to spook and he goes to rear up, but he too slips and falls.
Me and the driver are fine. However, the horses are not. They had still been wearing most of their harness, and pieces of the hard harness have injured them as they fell. My horse has a huge gash on his side. Blood is just pouring out, stark red against his white flesh already wet from the rain. The driver's horse had taken a bad fall; I don't remember specifically what was wrong with him but I think he hit his head too hard or had broken a leg; in any case, he was a goner. The driver implored me to take a handful of flesh from his horse's side to plug into my horse's gash to stop the bleeding and heal him. I refused, because it was such a grotesque proposition. I didn't understand why he didn't just do it himself; they were his horses. But he insisted. For some reason, it was ME that had to do it. He said something like "The flesh of the dying will heal the living" or "one must die so the other may live". So, I grimaced, and somehow I dug my bare hand into the dying horse's side and came away with a large lump of bloody flesh. I transferred it to the bleeding horse's hole in his side, and plugged it in hard. It stopped up the bleeding, and he seemed to revive a bit and managed to get to his feet. The people in the plaza applauded. The driver looked somber, but approving.
I did not feel so satisfied. I had to get away from this grotesque scene. I ran away, down through a narrow alleyway, shivering as I began to notice how cold the rain was. I must have been in a foreign city because I wanted to get to my hotel. I made my way there.
My room was up on a high floor of the hotel. I went up there and was doing some work on a computer. After a while I heard lots of commotion in the hallway. I opened the door and poked my head out. Everyone was running and shouting; there was a big fire, but no alarms had gone off. They were all running in one direction of the hallway to a stairwell. The lack of alarms must have made me feel less threatened because I thought it was an OK idea to go back into my room to save what I'd been working on to floppy disk so I wouldn't lost it. It only took a second, and floppy in hand, I went back out into the hallway.
There was NO ONE in the hallway. There still weren't any alarms going off. It was perfectly still. This scared me worse than the running and screaming. I ran in the same direction everyone else had gone, to the stairwell. I stopped short as I reached the stairs, because I was met with a huge wall of black smoke. I could hear the most god-awful death screams from the people on the floor below. It was the sound of being burnt to death. I tried to look down over the stair railing. I could see desperate hands reaching up out of the smoke and flames, screaming for mercy, screaming in unbearable agony. I could see the flesh being charred. One hand held up a plaque. It had someone's name on it, and dates. Two dates. Like a gravestone.
I ran the opposite way down the hallway. I found another stairwell that was free from flames and had only a little smoke. I went down until I saw people and they ushered me in. There was a large room. It was on the corner of the building, and had lots of big windows on two walls. It looked like a sparse studio, maybe an artist's. The people inside informed me that even though we were close to ground level, we couldn't go down any further on account of more fire below. We just had to wait for the firefighters to reach us, they said.
But it made no sense to me. We must have only been one floor up, and the ground outside the windows was soft grass. And the bit about the firefighters made me suspicious. If the alarms weren't going off, how would the fire department be alerted? I didn't hear any fire engine's sirens. I started to ask about this, but with insinuating tones and piercing looks, they made it known to me that they would prevent me from trying to leave via the window if I attempted it. They said it was for my own well-being because I'd hurt myself on the jump and it was best to wait for the firefighters, not give in to hysteria. I reluctantly agreed, as we didn't seem to be in IMMEDIATE danger. I could smell no smoke in there. I could hear no screams.
But as I listened to them talk, and as I watched them, it became clear to me they were some kind of weird cult. They seemed to be determined to stay in the building even though they knew it was very much on fire and would get to us sooner or later. I began to think they were trying to keep me there to die because I'd be "saved" or some silly notion like that. So, I tried to look relaxed and like I was listening so they would stop watching me so closely. Then, at an opportune moment, I bolted for a window, and leapt right out of it onto the grass below. I fell to my knees, but wasn't hurt and took off running. They all came to the windows, and made a commotion, but they didn't come after me.
At some point I got home. I remember getting into bed, next to my boyfriend. I rested awhile, just trying to chill. I got up to go to the kitchen to get something to drink. I noticed something falling past the kitchen window. It looked like little chunks of snow or ice, but darker, and not making a thump sound like snow or ice makes when it hits the ground. I moved closer to the window, and noticed that these large "drippings" were red. Freaked, I ran to my bedroom and flung open the window. I looked up to the eaves and to the sky. It seemd like blobs of red blood was raining from the sky, dripping off the house. The sky was a very weird shade of gray, and it moved fast and fluidly, as though it were liquid, but not quite like water, more like plasma. Amazed, and too confused to be truly scared, I crawled out the window onto the porch roof, even though I was wearing nothing but a kinky little gothy black lingerie thing. I sat there on my hands and knees, looking at the blood falling around and on me.
Then I looked left, and saw my mother sitting on the upstairs porch. She was wearing a robe, like a monk's tunic, but pure white. She was sitting stolidly, hands in her lap, looking both sad and content. She looked at me, and said: (this is one of the freakiest parts.) "So, "Rowan". What does a witch know about the end of the world?"
She was addressing me as a witch, and as if I somehow knew what was going on. I looked down past her, past the porch, past the porch, past the house, down the hill behind our house. There is what used to be train tracks way down behind our house, but they haven't been used in years and have become more of a trail. Down there, there were hundreds and hundreds of people in the same white robes, hands clasped, saying prayers aloud, trudging along as if on their way to meet their destiny or their god or something. But my mother wasn't with them. She was wearing the robe, but she was up here, and asking me what was happening. Basically asking me, what it was she should do. What it was she should do. She seemed to be accepting this was Judgement Day or something. I freaked out. I don't know entirely if it was because I am not Christian and not religious, or if it was because I was angry that my life should be over so soon! I said something like "I don't know." And went on to dismiss these people's belief and that they were getting all worked up about something that was probably a natural phenonmena, not a sign of the end of the world. I scrambled back into my bedroom and went around the bed. I tried to rouse my boyfriend, who was napping. As I did this, my closet door on the opposite side of the bed opened. A very large, darkly clad figure emerged from it. His face was not really something I can describe well. It was whitish, it looked dead, but he was obviously alive, in some form. It was not decomposing. It looked hard, like it was frozen, or metal. It was very frightening. It was unearthly. In a second, he had rounded the bed. I had had only enough time to stand when he was in front of me, that solid white face growling in mine. Before I knew it my upper arm was clamped by an (iron?) rod, and he held it tight. It was as if the iron had just come to life and wrapped around my arm. I screamed and struggled but it was an unearthly grip. My boyfriend stared, too surprised to do anything at all. The next thing I knew, my mother, still clad in her white robes, was next to me, fighting off the demon or whatever he was. He let go and disappeared, but the iron bar still remained on my arm. I panicked. I felt as though I had been marked somehow.
And there the dream ends.
(Applause for those who made it this far! You have an above-average attention span in this MTVMental Age.)
When I explained the dream to my boyfriend, who for most of his education endured Catholic school, he pointed out many symbolic features I had not thought of. In the hotel, the floor below me, reminiscient of hell (the fire, the screams, being BELOW).
Another thing he pointed out was the horses. He related some of the information on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the Bible. I had not heard of them before.
The role of my mother in the dream was very significant to me. She was raised as a churchgoing Catholic, went to Catholic school, still brings my grandmother to church on holidays. But she never displayed any loyalty of her own and never brought me to church or imposed prayers or beliefs on me at all. And she loves to read new age books on Popes and Nostradamus and UFOS. ;) Therefore, her middle ground position in the dream was very appropriate; she was loyal (in her white robes) but undecided (she hadn't joined the praying pilgrims.) The fact that she asked ME what was going on and the fact she addressed me as a witch gave me a clue to how she may think of me. Ever since I was a little kid, I would blabber on about past lives/weird dreams I had/ghosts I had seen and heard, stuff like that. I figured a lot of kids must do that, but later in my life on a rare occassion where she'd opened up, she revealed that she had never experienced anything like this and that she was sort of in awe a little bit of my...whatever, I don't like to say powers...my IMAGINATION, and my questioning nature of the Christian Church and of norms/accepted ideas in general.
But the dream itself is very ominous. Remember that when I go out onto the porch, I am dressed trashily and darkly. This is a stark contrast to everyone in their pristine robes. Also, when I verbally denied the possibility that it was Judgement Day, that demon or whatever he was emerged to tackle me and "brand" me with that iron bar. What that means, I don't know. That I'm evil and I'm going to go to hell while everyone else gets to go to Heaven? I don't know.
I'd like to hear YOUR thoughts. Email Me.
