The Landscape of My Dreams
It seems to coincide with my performance of the LBRP and how often I do it. There also seems to be a connection to the performance of The Bornless Ritual, which I have not done in some time, but my dreams become very vivid. I'm talking vivid like watching movies. Because of this, I've noticed that I tend to dream the same locations again and again. I dream about a particular shopping mall that doesn't exist but it seems to be an amalgamation of malls that I've been to throughout my life. I also dream about a high school that is a weird, labyrinthine version of the high school that I went to as a kid.
What's most interesting to me about this is that there seems to be a consistent geographical logic to these dream locations. I could draw maps of each location. Sometimes they have a character similar to the Winchester Mystery House where doors suddenly open to new, undiscovered locations, but for the most part, it's the same location again and again. H.P. Lovecraft seemed to be tapped in to this as well as his Dreamlands were a similar sort of thing with his terrible nightmares taking place in the same places again and again. To such a degree that he could draw a map and then write a series of stories taking place there.
Unfortunately, my nightmares share a similar quality.
Last night I dreamt that as a teenager, a friend of mine had been killed in a car accident. A car full of teenage girls hit him and he died on the spot. In recent days, he had been taken with a dark personality. I guess you could say that he had become a school shooter type. He had acquired a large collection of guns and such. My attempts to call 911 were unsuccessful as every attempt with my phone connected to a dead line where nobody answered. So there he lay. A disturbed teenager, dying in the street.
I was remarkably nonchalant about the whole ordeal. This happened right outside of his house, a decaying three level colonial home under a dark gray sky at dusk. Inside, the dusty old house, sagging on its foundation and falling into disrepair contained his mother, who couldn't seem to be roused from watching television. The girls that killed my friend were brought inside where they freaked out, imploring me not to call 911 because they'd get in trouble. There were other friends with us at this time as well and everyone was angry.
In his bedroom, I began ransacking his belongings, trying to get rid of all his weapons. There were dozens of guns in pairs and I noticed that none of them seemed to be loaded. Some of them even seemed to be nothing more than toys. One gun of note was missing, though. Earlier in this nightmare, my friend proudly showed off a Squad Assault Weapon, an imposing machine gun fed by a box of belt ammunition. It could not be found.
Then the setting changed as happens in dreams. Myself and my dream friends were now outside our dead friend's home. The neighborhood was a frightening place, characterized by dead, leafless trees with twisted branches around a crumbling neighborhood with a labyrinth of streets winding in all directions. It seemed like a poor community, gutted by poverty and abandoned. We emerged from a bit of the forest into this neighborhood where in one of the windows, from within the darkness of one of the homes, only the expressionless face of an attractive woman stared out at me. Something about her seemed to be beckoning to me while at the same time leaving with a feeling of being threatened. I moved around the house to the side and inside the shadows of the house, through another window, I saw a massive writhing shape. A monstrous thing that left me with the impression that it was somehow attached to the woman I saw in the other window. When I returned to the front, she now had blood smeared across her mouth.
From out of the woods, and out of every house, a shambling mob of deformed people emerged. I still had my deceased friend's guns in my pockets but upon taking them out I found that they were all, in fact, toys. Desperate to get away, I entered a nearby house and found a young family cowering in the shadows. They invited me to hide with them until the danger passed but I woke up.
I've dreamt of this neighborhood before, but only in nightmares just as the high school only ever seems to factor into dreams drenched in anxiety and the mall seems to be a place where I'm constantly lost or looking for someone, this neighborhood seems to be connected to the feeling of being overwhelmed or seeking some kind of escape,
A while back I gave myself a suggestion during a self hypnosis session that I would remember my dreams in vivid detail. These recurring locations seem to serve some kind of purpose but the degree to which I experience my nightmares leaves me wondering if that was such a good idea.