A dream about... the afterlife?
Everything is dark. I'm falling, slowly. I land in a tunnel, or perhaps a tube. It's well lit, has a dirt ground, is about twice my height high and from one wall to the other. I look around and see I'm not alone. Rukia, a character from the anime Bleach, is also with me and she's animated like she's straight out of the show. Everything else seems to be "realistic" looking.
Rukia calls me to get my attention and warns me we should start moving. That's when I hear a loud grinding noise coming from around a bend in the tunnel. We beat feet in the other direction. I think to myself that this is going to be a long walk and I don't want to lag behind to find out what's rumbling through the tunnel. Despite the fact all the tunnel appears to be all dirt, I notice small holes with light coming from them. I jog over to one to investigate. A nickle-sized hole in the wall seems to have a sticky gel in it that's a couple of centimetres thick and beyond that looks like.... water? Something liquid? A ocean? I try to poke the gel with my finger but Rukia warns that, indeed, the gel holds back water from the tunnel. We run further down the gently turning tunnel and pass several places where large gaps in the ceiling are covered by this this layer of gel and nothing but ocean blue water can be seen through it. Definitely not an escape route. Around one more bend and we break out into sunshine looking down on Wiltondale.
If you didn't know before, I lived in Wiltondale until I was 6 years old. The town is based around a T-shaped intersection. Route 430 travels straight through from Deer Lake to Gros Morne. Route 431 connects to form the long end of the T and goes to Woody Point. I emerged from the tunnel on the 431 end of it looking down on the village (it's really that small). From my dream view there was no "road" going to Gros Morne. The path I was now on extending straight down in front of me and took a 90o turn towards what would be Deer Lake. In My dream, this turn led into another great tunnel. My family still has a house in Wiltondale we frequent throughout the year. Our neighbours, Will and Daisy, still live in the house next to it. That's the end of the similarities between RL and Dream Wiltondale.
Rukia went ahead to scout out the new tunnel and I decided to head towards my house. As we got to the bottom of the hill I ran across two teenagers I know from RL Rocky Harbour. They were wandering out of a derelict train yard and looking lost so I told them to go with Rukia and I'd join them soon to go through the next tunnel. When I got to the house I found Dave waiting there. He too came through the tunnel I did, running from whatever made the noise and he didn't want to go on alone. We agreed to travel together after we took whatever we could to prepare for the journey. He told me he had already searched the house and only found some hiking boots and a baseball cap. I changed from sneakers into hikers and grabbed a hat. We went next door to see if the neighbours had anything we could borrow.
Will answered the door (looked diff from RL). He was tall, bald except for a scruff of tangled white hair around the sides, and obviously senile. I explained that I had come from the tunnel, fleeing the noise and that I wanted to keep moving. He said it was a good thing I had fled the tunnels since that (and he gestured over my shoulder) would have surely killed me. I turned to follow his pointing finger and saw a huge tunnelling machine poking it's conical, digging head out of the tunnel. Will told me that he too had come from tunnels years ago, fleeing that machine and had decided to stay here rather than risk being killed further along the tunnels. From what he said next, I gathered that the tunnels must form a sort of circuit since the great machine (that left no space between it and the tunnel at all when moving) passed by this place about twice a day. I asked Will if he had a shovel I could take to carve out a small hollow in the wall in case the machine overtook us in the tunnels and he said yes. And then he handed me a baseball hat. I looked at dave and he seemed as confused as I was, when at that moment a beautiful woman came out of the house beside Will to greet us. There was something inhuman about her. Her perfect skin, magenta colored hair and flamboyant, flitting mannerisms reminded me of a fairy (and I think she may have been animated). I can't remember what she said to me, if anything, but I recollect her having a tea party with Will at the kitchen table and humoring Will's senile belief that there was another person at the table when there was clearly no one there. This fairy woman somehow conveyed to me that I must go on through the tunnels or suffer a fate of delirium and insanity like Will.
I then had a fuzzy, dream-sequencey vision of sitting around a table with a host of colorful characters and this fairy woman at the head. In front of everyone was a plate with a green branch and a half dozen round, red berries. We were full of mirth and joy as we all chewed and feasted on this seemingly meagre meal. As we ate, the fairy woman said that since we managed to bring her these plants from the far side of the tunnels she could make this special meal and that by eating it we would live forever in perpetual youth, just like her.
I "reawoke" from this vision back at Will's house. It was dusk and the tunnelling machine was moving again, heading for the next tunnel opening. I suddenly remembered Rukia and the others were waiting for us. Dave and I ran to get there, but the machine was ahead of us. It started moving into the tunnel and, try as I might, there was no room to slip past or even see if the others had moved on ahead. Dave and I decided now would be the best time to attempt to get through the tunnels and it didn't seem to be a hard trip. There were more potholes, soft ground and rocky hills but we seemed to make it through rather easily. Around the last corner, we could hear wind, and dark sea water lapped into the tunnel around our ankles. I walked out of the tunnel alone, Dave had disappeared on ahead of me.
The tunnel did open into an ocean, close to shore. The water was only knee deep and dark. Everything was bleak and color seemed washed out. The water was driving to shore, little white caps on the edges of waves despite there not being any wind, although the sound of the wind was present. The sky was full of black, rolling clouds. Flashes of lightning lit up their interiors, though I never saw an actual bolt. No thunder came. I walked ashore to where the land met the beach in a grassy hill. I saw the berries further up the slope, although they didn't look fresh and delicious. As I drew closer I saw they were among the sickly, near-black, oily looking grass. The stems that previously were green and delicoius were now also oily and black. The berries were shriveled, dark globules. Exhausted from my travel and unwilling to face the danger of the machine again, i took a handful of berries, swallowed them and fell asleep.
I awoke staring at the sky. Black clounds lit with the occasional silent flash continued rolling over head. But I felt.. different. My body was smaller, like that of a very young child and I couldn't feel my legs. I looked down and saw, to my horror, that my legs were crippled, contorted and my feet bunched up resembling hooves. My toenails were thick, oversized, cracked and yellowed. My skin was jaundiced. My point of view shifted outside the body and I saw the child (me!) about 3 years old lying on the rocks nude and without sex organs or body hair of any sort. My gaze moved up and I saw purple veins in the skin around the hairless head and the eyes. Worst of all was the eyes. The child cryed and screamed and it's shiny, entirely black eyes stared helplessly.
I was suddenly back in the child's body when hooves crashed into the rocks beside me. I tumbled forward in surprise and saw a jet-black stallion snorting, neighing, rearing up and crashing down into the dirt trying to crush me. I crawled forward as best I could without the use of my legs and fell forward over a precipice. Somewhere off in the distance I heard a woman's voice scream "no! my baby!" and it was gone. Somehow I crawled to the beach with the horse always raining hooves down around me. As I struggled through the shallow water the black horse stood on shore neighing and bucking in case I made any movement to return and so I made my way into the sea...
And the next thing I remember is my point of view drifting down to two figures on a beautiful sandy beach. The sunshine is bright and everything seems warm on this tropical paradise. The view draws close to a woman wearing flowing white robes standing by the small, lopping waves talking to a centaur. I don't know what they say, but I gather that the centaur has just finished exlaining the story of how he came to be half horse, half man. He was the child who fled to the sea and his story was the one I have just told here.
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I'm surprised I drempt at all last night, given how hard it was for me to get to sleep. But this just seems weird to me. It's sorta long to write it but it didn't seem that long to think about. I left out a few minor parts because this dream was pretty disjointed in many places. There was one scene with some other Bleach characters that had me throwing colored crystal balls from a sling at one of these characters to show someone how to defend themselves against something. Pretty vague eh. Another scene had my brother playing an arcade game in order to fight real ninjas.
Any thoughts on this? I'm getting a sort of afterlife, reincarnation, purgatory feeling from it. I dunno. I wanted to record it since it's another of my infrequent, detailed and different dreams.