Dream Journal

My lamictal had just started working again after a week of feeling cold and depressed. I felt warm and good and happy. When I woke up at 4 AM, I felt almost like I was tripping — seeing the spacetime structure/boundaries of things a little bit. But not when dreaming.

It was dimly lit. I was in what seemed like a repurposed roller rink. There was an ice rink behind, kept in darkness, except for a short bit where it lit up to reveal a zamboni coming towards some strangely-dressed dancers. Dancers? Because it was tryouts to So You Think You Can Dance, except a lot of people had on wild costumes and were doing crazy routines. There was an announcer. I remembered thinking “This is one of the tryouts from season 6.” I remembered some of the dancers.

There was a long crescent area that went around the rink, and at the far end there was a doorway to stairs going down. It was quite dark, and the people over there were mostly dressed in black outfits and costumes, but I could see glowing dust on them. The stairway heading down had that same glowing dust on the stairs. The announcer said in a half-joking voice, “I wouldn’t go down there!”

At some point I went down there. It was a series of underground rooms. The order here is all scrambled, as I seemed to relive it and go through it several times. Not long after my first time going down and meeting some people there, we were joined by “John Cleese” (actually Chevy Chase), and I was completely familiar with him — as if we’d known each other a long time. He and I and two people were waiting in chairs in the first room at the bottom of the stairs, and someone came in. John (Chevy) said something like, “I don’t know who we’re waiting for.” Someone else said “or what.” Someone else said “Or when they’re coming.” And then I said “or why” and felt it was the missing piece to the joke, and then John pulled a little silk scarf off a picture which revealed that the picture was of a man’s firm belly, almost showing his “little friend”. The person who came in was shocked and mortified. I laughed and laughed and laughed.

I went to explore the other rooms down there. They felt somewhat like rooms in a college house, with cheap furniture and a brown shag rug. The atmosphere was of one slowly becoming more and more drunk. We re-ran the gag in the front room a few more times. I wanted to shock more people with it. But Cleese wouldn’t play along after the first time or two. He changed it up each time, sometimes hindering me, sometimes throwing the whole joke out of balance with an unexpected picture, leaving everyone hanging. At one point, he ran back up the stairs and I yelled “Cleeeeeeeese!” He came back in a minute, and I said “My mom is here! Let’s do the joke on her!” He asked where she was and I pointed her out in the next room in. He sat next to her and started making out with her. I was horrified. Then after a little bit, his lips and hers began to expand out into big flat pancakes with holes in them, at which point he got up and sang this funny song about their pancake lips . . . it invoked an image of using your lips on too many kitchen tools or something, as if that’s what happened to them. Very funny stuff.

That song led us to a place lower down with a little stream of water going back and forth in a wave pattern across the ground, ending in a little pool. In it were small schools of black and white fish, often in groups of 2-3. At some point I said to someone that “each of these little bastards has this energy inside them” and I put my hand on a couple and some little spirit things floated off into the air. The other person was offended that I called these sacred fish “bastards” and chastised me, to which I replied that everything was sacred, not just the fish but the water and all of it.

Progressively things got more wild and crazy, the people gathering down there acting more and more drunk. It was fun. It was more an uninhibited, raucous drunk. Not blurry or clumsy. I was having a blast and laughing and being so funny. But there was an edge of madness to it all.

At one point I heard screaming from behind a staircase. Curious, I went to it, and though I somehow knew I shouldn’t, I opened up a set of three to four stairs that was actually a hidden door. A woman came out. I instantly knew her as a deeply crazy person, a person driven mad, and I regretted my decision. She had been trapped in there with no way out for a long time. Above the hidden door, I could see the bottom foot or two of what looked like a shower, with lights inside and a glass door. Inside there were 5-6 different versions of that same woman, in different states. One was pregnant. They were alternate versions of her, trapped in madness. This story was vaguely familiar to me and I wanted nothing to do with it. It was bad enough that I let her out.

The growing madness manifested in crazy imagery; things bending and twisting and kaleidoscoping all about, like circus funhouse mirrors.

At some point I decided to leave this place. It wasn’t easy. I made several attempts, as there were replays involved. Each time, it tried to lure me back in with all kinds of distractions. Typically, I made it up a few sets of stairs from the lower rooms (seemingly always bringing others up with me), and I would find myself at the landing a step down from the main roller rink floor. Each time I approached, tons of black cratered asteroid-like magnetic balls and rectangular magnets came flying towards us. These detached from the floor, from the structure of the threshold. I knew I had to shake them off as quickly as possible as I ran through the threshold to the main floor. At that point, I’d run along the crescent, past a dark counter full of vendors providing various services and things. Sometimes I’d get sucked back into it by watching the dancers, seeing attractive girls in their costumes or innovative dancers like the guy in the weird suit and top hat, whose bottom half was hidden by a screen that showed legs dancing as his top half danced weirdly along with it. On a few of these escape attempts I saw the wait staff looking angrily at me, and I said something like “I’m sorry! I promise I won’t come back again.” I felt like I’d made a terrible mess somehow.

On one especially insane escape attempt, I wound back into the scene because this girl dressed in all black with some interesting accessories grabbed on to me. She whispered in my ear that she had finally found me, that she had been wanting to see me again since the first time, that she really liked me. She said she wanted to get it on with me. She must have had butterfly costume elements, as I said “We could make little caterpillars” and I started to feel in the mood. But then I heard a voice calmly say “Brother. Brother, it’s me”, which shook me out of it. The voice came from a big, round man sitting in a chair near the entrance to the underground rooms. He held me in a bear hug. I stepped back, realizing it was someone like Joe H., a strong, calm, benevolent person who was on my side.

I knew I had to rescue Rebecca and Sarah from the madness. I focused myself into perfect clarity of purpose and went through the threshold and down the stairs. The madness reeled around me, more wild than ever, but I stayed separate from it. I went down 2-3 levels and finally found them in a crazy scene. The floor was scattered with huge buds of weed, and they were among a bunch of people on the ground, trying to gather up as much as possible. Neither had a shirt on, but were wearing bras. I looked at this scene with calm detachment. I got down next to Rebecca and told her she was coming upstairs with me, and then said the same to Sarah. I put an arm around each of them, and led them up the stairs. I walked them up past reeling drunken scenes of wild partying madness to the threshold. I made a run for it through the oncoming magnetic pock-marked balls and rectangles, and brought them through the opening. The kind, calm spirit that looked and felt like Joe waited for them and took them into his arms.

To escape the building, I had to force myself through an invisible window boundary a few levels up. In one attempt, I careened towards the street head first, but I was unafraid, as that was the fear blocking the exit. I landed on my feet. Another time, I scaled down the outer windows and jumped down the final story. But then the area around the building was blocked by invisible barriers. I made it through a few boundaries that would have kept less experienced dreamers inside. Finally I was running down a street, and realized I was on an island — the final boundary. I vaguely remembered arriving at this island earlier in the night. But. . . . I got distracted.

After reliving some of the madness, I found myself outside the building. I decided to act a little crazy and freak people out. I put long socks over my hands such that they dangled off, and ran down the street, amused at how freaky that might look. Then I thought to add toddler pants on my head (a waking game Jamie and I called being “pants bunnies”). The image of madness perfected, I ran down the sidewalk of the town past people shouting “Yi yi yi! Yi yi yi!”

This is where I woke up, as Jamie came into the room. I woke up right away, fully awake, and upon taking him to the potty, that’s when I noticed the trippiness of my mental state.

I think I may have got to the roller rink through a mall. Which is typically a big social confluence of gateways. I remember watching a video in a central kiosk/stage of an overweight black mother and daughter in spandex singing a song. It was unimpressive, but they broke down and cried with each other at the end. The lighting in the mall was a bit too bright . . . too-bright shades of blue and red inside the white.

After writing this dream down, I went back to sleep. In the morning I remembered the dream “The Observers”, which very well may have been myself looking at this same area but from the outside. If so, holy shit. The Observers seem less benevolent if so. Or at least unconcerned with trying to trap people inside their simulation.