Dream Journal

Context: I've long had issues with sinus pain.

I’m riding on a bus, and it’s full of people. I have a large stack of my drawings and stories from when I was younger. A couple people are looking at some. But diagonally behind me is this bully sitting next to Jeff. He’s tearing one of my drawings into tiny bits, and Jeff is laughing. I’m horrified and gather the rest back to my pile.

We arrive at school, and I find Ed Rimkus. The school is lit in the usual ambient dream light of early morning. Ed listens to my story and says something will be done. The details here are vague.

Jeff and I get back on the bus. It’s mostly full, and we end up in the very back seats, even though there are backpacks and bags there that might have been holding the seats for someone else. As the bully gets on, I begin fantasizing about stopping him and telling him he wasn’t going to be riding this bus, but he had sat down. A lady a few rows up turns around and says that the bully is not going to be riding the bus anymore. I assume she’s going to tell him as he gets off. She says the bully’s name is Tad . . . something, but I think it’s probably not his real name since it sounds more like a movie star name.

Now that I have an opportunity to talk to Jeff, I ask him if he has any of my stuff. He opens his bag, gets out a page of my drawings, and hands it to me. I ask if he tore anything up and he says no. He tries to change the topic, but I push on when he finishes talking, and say I was upset that he was laughing when the bully was tearing up my stuff. He seems awkward and gives a weak sort of roundabout apology.

Then people on the bus begin shouting in amazement and excitement. It’s something about the bus driver. It’s hard to see at first, but I eventually get a glimpse of him. He’s facing back towards the people on the bus, smiling knowingly — he’s not looking where he’s going! The bus is heading towards the side as we approach a steep hill. There’s this moment where I feel we collectively give permission to go over the side of it, and we do. It’s a big bump and the bus tips to the side. For a moment I’m afraid it’ll tip over but it doesn’t. My perspective has shifted to a higher point of view just above the bus, and it remains there as I see the bus head towards a phone pole, then slowly adjust to avoid it at the last second, then towards the edge of the road, then back in the nick of time. Suddenly I realize the driver is outside the bus! He’s walking along the road with that big smile and I realize he is somehow directing the bus on this wild ride, going over big bumps, and almost hitting things before swerving away.

Then the bus goes off-road completely. It heads down a red clay embankment with scattered trees towards a little stream. My perspective is now above the front of the bus, so it feels more like it’s ME moving rather than the bus. I wonder if the driver dares take us across the stream, and he does, crossing back and forth across these shallow parts. Then we go over a hill and come to a wider stream. Does he dare? He does! We splash over the stream and continue.

We arrive at a grassy, forested area with some buildings. They’re like rustic state park buildings, surrounded by campgrounds. We go into the main building and the inside is a sort of game. The whole group takes part. It has something to do with zombies and guns and spraying blood. I am one of two people in our group who get through without being hit by anything. I have a little bit of fake blood sprayed across me. As I reach the final room, I’m not sure what to do next, and someone says that that’s the end. I see another busload of kids entering the game through an open door in the room. As I’m waiting for instructions, I look down and see a severed toe on the floor. I almost ignore it, but decide to point it out to one of the older kids running the game. He seems concerned, or nervous, and hurries us out. As we leave I see two more severed toes.

When we get back outside, the person guiding the group has this big sack of gifts for us. She pulls out the first thing — a soccer ball! I get the most excited, and she says “I think this one goes to Ben,” and she hands it to me. I start trying to juggle it, but I’m doing poorly and I feel a bit embarrassed. Then a couple other kids want to play and we pass it around but I’m not making very good passes. I try juggling again, but do badly.

We begin walking along this wooden walkway the way we came in. I find an egg on the ground, and then a spotted egg (the melted soccer ball!). Both lit up as I looked at them, the way things in video games light up to show they’re interactive when you mouse over them. They still carry a dim light as I hold them up, one in each hand. The bully is next to me, asking if he can hold one, and I say no. Normally I’d gladly share, but not with him. I look at the spotted egg again and it looks strange. The colors of the spots have faded to just outlines now, and as I look I can see deeper into it — about an inch. Underneath each spot is a round, darker circle, and as I look closely, they focus into quarters (coins). Neato! The bully is really jealous now. The outer layer has become hazy and transparent and I start collecting the quarters off what is now the outside. But lo and behold, under each quarter it’s clear and I’m seeing a wavy image of . . . a naked lady! It’s like a three dimensional image within a clear faceted orb which distorts in different ways as you turn it. I quickly slip it into my pocket for later. What a prize!

In the next building, I decide to get something from the administration room. The entrance to the administrative room is a round barrel-sized hole in the floor and there’s a totally naked oiled-up lady sitting on something so that her top half is outside the hole. Undeterred, I go around her and squeeze through the hole into the administration room, which is a short room — fit only for crawling. I find what I’m looking for and squeeze back out the round opening past the oiled naked lady. I have the thought that a lot of people would probably be jealous of me pushing past her, but to me she’s just in the way.

At some point I decide to leave the camp entirely. As I go through the forest to escape, the environment gets trippy as things move and change in front of me. It’s clear to me that the woman running this place is a witch and doesn’t want me to leave. Vines and branches move to block my way. The landscape changes, lengthens before me. A field with a path becomes a dead yellow area with a dead tree whose long scratchy limbs are hard to get around. I am aware of these attempts to block my escape, but I get through them and am able to leave. Yet the witch doesn’t let someone escape so easily.

The next part of the dream I am in the downstairs basement level of a house. The first thing I remember here is that there’s a big booger blocking my left nostril, so I pick it. It comes out, followed by all these green dusty things which fall to the floor. I look down and they’re little insects, squirming and moving about! The horror! As I watch, they quickly grow from tiny motes to a half-inch long. They’re crawling about and increasing in number every time I look away and then back. They look kind of like little green scorpions, and I tried to catch one with my hand but was grossed out. I need to know what they are, as they might be the source of my sinus pain if they’re living in there! I grab a tissue and then grab an insect with it. It’s nearly escaping so I decide a dead one will do if I don’t mangle it too much. I mash it against the floor and it turns this dark maroon, as if it had burst a pocket of maroon blood. I start looking for a something that could tell me what kind of bug it is. I find a big fold-out National Geographic map about parasites, and see what this is right away on it. They’re parasitic moth larvae!

What follows is a cycle of me finding more bugs, looking up informational pages about them, and then those pages turning into the actual insects. At times the floor was a laid-out pattern of informational pages with insect pictures on the ground, and at other times, it was the actual insects as they had appeared on those pages. The scorpion look was only for the first few I examined closely. The rest were long, segmented things with lots of legs and feelers. They were green and semi-transparent when small, then they turn jet black as they get bigger, then brown as they reach the size of 2-3 feet long and four inches tall. The largest ones looked more like shed skins, as they had lost definition, like a melted thought-form.

It was very disturbing imagining these things living in my sinuses, but now there was a literal infestation all over the basement. I had the thought that the witch might have done this. I called someone like Rebecca over to see if we had a vacuum cleaner, and she suggested just picking them up with tissues, until she saw the size of the infestation. That’s when I awoke. I refused to go back to sleep.

Post note: there is such a thing as a parasitic moth but its larvae look nothing like in my dream. The real larvae are caterpillars, of course.

References: Ed Rimkus was my counselor in high school.