Dreams: The Labyrinth
Jun. 8th, 2022 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kimberlysteele
Stephen King's Rose Red
When I was a kid, Dungeons & Dragons was all the rage. I didn't play it, but I was friends with kids who did play it. I believed that D&D was a kind of gate-opening for me despite not being a player. The structure of the role playing game (as far as I know) involves traipsing down hallways and opening doors to rooms where various monsters are found. I became aware of D&D and my own recurring dreams about hallways filled with monsters at approximately the same time. My young mind jumped towards a causal relationship between the two events, though now I believe it to be a matter of coincidence.
Recently I had a dream about leading a small group of people through a labyrinth of haunted rooms in an old, decrepit building. I cannot remember a time in my life when I have not dreamed of hallways punctuated by shabby hotel rooms, mammoth apartment buildings, endless warehouses, haunted mansions, and cavernous schools. These collections of rooms are often presented in dreams as a puzzle or a game, and not an easy one. They are full of dead ends. I frequently find myself digging out layers of drywall, plaster, and lathe in an effort to escape from one room to another. One particularly amusing dream featured a monster who I distracted by enticing her to use her big, pointy teeth to eat through a wall I was trying to demolish. Rooms in my dreams have cupboard sized escape doors. I am the only person competent enough in the dreams to find or excavate the doors. Every now and then I get lucky and they lead to a true escape to the open sky outside.
A random scene from one of the many Resident Evil video games.
I believe that the labyrinths I dream about are real insofar as they are actual places in the astral plane. For this reason, many others have dreams about similar labyrinths of endless rooms. The Jim Henson cult classic movie Labyrinth is a lighthearted spin on the theme, with an actual labyrinth made of hedges and a castle instead of a series of dingy buildings. Monsters are present but they are child-friendly and comical. Stephen King constantly returns to scenes of hallways and escape rooms in his fiction -- The Shining and Rose Red spring to mind, among others. Resident Evil is a zombie franchise with modernized, electronically booby-trapped hallways and the undead playing the part of monster. The Cube is another booby-trap/monster hallway movie, and in it the maze is presented as a deadly game. Silent Hill is about a haunted town with a haunted school. Of all the horror movies out there, Silent Hill resembles my dreams the most with its gray ash rain, its use of time intervals to terrorize its characters, and its faceless monsters who chase characters into dead end rooms. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is a stellar example of the labyrinth trope. Edgar Allan Poe may be credited with the invention of haunted mansions as a fiction genre, but H.P. Lovecraft deserves equal recognition for his contributions.
Dreams as Reality
A dream place such as a haunted hotel is real in its way, but it is also symbolic. The symbol precedes the place and gives rise to it. Mortality is fraught with dead ends and failed investments, and mortality during this particular era is especially full of both. I live in the far western suburbs of Chicago. All around me, I see failure and bad investment. A brief walk will take me to a forbidding, car-dominated landscape of half-empty retail complexes. If I get in my car, it's only a few minutes drive to a huge array of useless and under-occupied office parks and malls. In the "good" neighborhood twenty minutes away, there are hideous McMansions that stand as obscene edifices to mindless consumerism. A sensitive such as myself has a hard time shutting out the vacuous mental chatter bubbling from inside those unholy places, where Progressian believers wear their masks indoors while alone and deny-deny-DENY that their banquet of newly arrived health problems has anything to do with the MRNA shots they took at the advice of their doctor.
A scene from the Silent Hill 2 video game.
We are all trapped, horribly trapped, by the bad decisions of other people as well as our own guilt in having to participate in the mess we've made. How appropriate that I wander through ugly, badly lit and nonsensically built warehouses, schools, and hotels at night when by day I drive through streets filled with the same sort of collective mistake. When I have to run into a room because a monster is chasing me down the hall in a dream, it is a symbol for being forced down a path I would rather not take yet I have to because it is the lesser of two evils. I went to musical college when in truth I only wanted to compose and record music. Musical college was remarkably unproductive for those purposes and though the skills I gained there helped me later, I had precious little time for composition and even less for recording while in college.
Dreaming Their Own LARP
Lucid dreamers piss me off because dreams are not an escape for me. Lucid dreamers, in my opinion, tend to frame dreaming as a sort of mental vacation where they can play their dreams much like a virtual reality video game. Dreams are anything but a vacation in my case. I'm always facing off with darkness in my dreams, both the darkness of others and my own. Those who have fun lucid dreaming strike me as control freaks who are practicing avoidance which only leads to a pile of karmic hurt. To me, lucid dreamers are on the level of idiots who consort with demons evoked from the Goetia. Those who commandeer their own dreams to be universally pleasant or entertaining make a subconscious agreement to be tricked into believing the world is whatever they want it to be. The price may not arrive until later, but it is costly to the tune of several lifetimes. I suspect I may have made that deal myself a few lifetimes ago, and maybe that's why I wander endless halls during this one.
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Date: 2022-06-09 12:13 am (UTC)—Princess Cutekitten
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Date: 2022-06-09 05:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-09 02:19 pm (UTC)The other labyrinth, for me, is an endless public restroom. Rows and rows of stalls. Sometimes showers. Often strange plumbing fixtures whose use is not clear. But I think this is just what happens when my astral is exploring "the labyrinth" and my bladder intrudes on my consciousness ;)
Had a weird one last night, where I met the current president looking lost and eating an ice cream on a sidewalk in Boston. He was listlessly following some random teenager walking a dog. He followed me back to my sister's apartment, and we let him stay for dinner, since he wasn't talking and just looked totally vacant and it didn't seem safe to let him wander around alone. We figured his security would be by to collect him eventually. Soon, we noticed the security surrounding the house menacingly. So my mom, my other sister, and I left and drove around town until we lost any pursuers and wound up... in a public restroom. Because that's my cue to wake up.
In my personal dream mythology, this means the president is dead, but hasn't moved on. He's trapped and lost... just like my sister, whose apartment it was. Ever since she died, when I dream about her, she's amnesiac, and inhabiting some kind of weird liminal space: a summer dorm, a yard sale, a roadside cafe... and now an undecorated first-floor apartment. I think this is my subconscious telling me she's stuck in a temporary holding pattern. The fact that we left the president behind at my late sister's apartment with her... I guess dementia's not all that different from being already-dead-but-not-moved-on.
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Date: 2022-06-10 05:18 am (UTC)The mint green carpet and artificial creek sounds like the kind of dream I have where I marvel at the waste of modernity. I would not be shocked if someone had a real Willy Wonka style creek in the middle of an 80s mansion. Tacky. For me, I believe some of my house dreams symbolize my fears about money and security that are intimately tied to a place to live. Once I realized this in my waking life, the tenor of the house dreams did change a bit for the better.
LOL that's an accurate astral sum up about the Prez. Yeah, he's Weekend at Bernie's undead at this point. Dementia and liminal spaces... that's worthy of lots of meditation.
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Date: 2022-06-10 03:42 pm (UTC)In mine, there's always something wrong with the stall. The lock is broken, the door is missing, there's no TP, the toilet's broken, the door is installed too high up so there's not actually any privacy, the toilet is too ridiculously tall to use, the plumbing is so ambiguous I can't tell if the thing is a toilet or some kind of bidet or washbasin. I recall one memorable dream where, going down the row of stalls, the thing wrong with the stall just got progressively more absurd until I reached the end of the room and there, on a stepped dais that rose above my head, stood a shiny stainless-steel toilet with no stall around it. I had to pee so bad I was seriously considering it. There's never anybody else *in* these bathrooms, after all...
I very occasionally end up running through these endless bathrooms in dreams where I'm being chased, but when that happens, I always lose my pursuers in there. I guess because I know more about that crazy restroom than they do :D
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Date: 2022-06-10 06:53 pm (UTC)My usual labyrinth dreams, however, typically involve endless subway tunnels and train lines.
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Date: 2022-06-14 12:10 pm (UTC)—Princess Cutekitten
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Date: 2022-06-09 05:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-10 05:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-09 11:08 pm (UTC)I too, have dreams that I can only summarise with the word "gloom". There is an ever present atmosphere of menace and melancholy to them. I'm not necessarily trapped, but there is always an unpleasant situation looming which I am trying to escape from. For a period of about 10-15 years, and which only stopped when I started banishing, I used to have dreams at least once or twice a week of being chased by "The Men" - a name I gave to the faceless, nameless, unseen group which was pursuing me relentlessly for unknown reasons.
I have no evidence to support it, but I have a strong suspicion I was a Cold War spy in a previous life, who was captured and shot. It would explain a lot, and I was born in the late 80s, so the dates would work.
The only dreams I actually enjoy are the ones where I have incredibly powerful legs that can run indefinitely and can (Superman esque) leap a building a single bound. However, I usually only discover I have this ability because I am trying to run away from things...
Sometimes my dreams are mildly phophetic and even amusing, but this is rare.
Oh, and final thing - don't use VR headsets,they really, really mess with your dreams. I had zombie dreams for weeks... There's some bad juju with those headsets.
Mr Crow
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Date: 2022-06-10 05:34 am (UTC)I have not heard of the creepypasta 'the backrooms', but thanks for it, it's a fascinating rabbit hole! Sometimes I dream of office buildings like that. One thought that makes me shudder is my karmic hypothesis that people who got the MRNA shots got them in an effort to be part of a dying salary class behemoth. The endless offices with moldy carpeting and flickering overhead lights were invented by the salary class. Wouldn't exist without them. So I do wonder if their hells (and I do believe all who volunteered for the quaxxines as I call them will do at least one short turn in hell) will include thousand year stints in the Backrooms? Gods help them. How awful.
I was killed a few times in my past lives. It's so funny how the way you died before shows up in the current incarnation. I starved to death at least three times. Like you, I have no hard evidence, only weird and violent memories, hints, and synchronicities I have explored in meditation. Cold War spy seems reasonable.
I can often fly in my dreams and I use it to escape the mazes sometimes. The best dream I have had lately put me in a forest where I got to hang out with Druid angels.
No plans on ever using a VR headset! Normal first-person video games, Second Life, and the Google Map zoom feature give me motion sickness, so I'm the last person who will ever do VR.
Dreams
Date: 2022-06-10 12:38 pm (UTC)Lately though, there have been dreams of a new character. Most recently I was touring my brain as in and MRI, color coded by structure type and I had the distinct impression I was seeing the images produced by an examiner, an other
Aarrgh
Date: 2022-06-10 12:52 pm (UTC)https://youtu/
Gawain
PS many thanks to JMG and his programs that have improved my dream quality and sense of protection during the Great Wierdness underway
Endless Mall
Date: 2022-06-10 08:53 pm (UTC)At this point I'm fairly certain this is a place on the astral, and it's the place a majority of people will end up between lives. Not sure if it's the same as the labyrinth/mansion places everybody has dreamed here.
I was really into lucid dreaming as a kid, until my parents made me stop for some nonsensical christian fundamentalist reason. Lucid Dreaming as I understood it back then was not about turning dreams into fantasy video games, but about "waking up" and becoming more aware about what you're experiencing. Most of my lucid dreams took place in the trailer on the edge of the woods where I grew up, or else in some natural environment. The sheer level of detail in the natural features and the terrifying beauty of nature in those dreams still sticks with me. I once sat in a little rowboat with an old man and saw the light glistening off the ripples in 200 foot ocean waves and felt the chest shaking thump of them rising and falling around us.
Come to think of it, lucid dreaming (as I learned it off 2011 youtube) seems like an analogue for ceremonial magic - by using reason and willpower, you wake yourself up to the true materiality of your experience, and from there you learn to have a modest effect on shaping your environment, although the most meaningful experiences come from simply observing it and interacting with the beings within it while fully aware. Makes sense since dreams are on the astral, same as GD/AODA ceremonial magic. The real problem comes from treating the dreams as simulations inside your head over which you have total authority, rather than a shared environment between human and non-human minds that is filtered through your own psyche.
Re: Endless Mall
Date: 2022-06-11 04:54 pm (UTC)Thank you for your insights about lucid dreaming. I have been able to have them as well, but I didn't have the wherewithal to control them. If they are an analogue for ceremonial magic, they are a poor one because of the "treating dreams as simulations over which you have total authority" issue you mentioned. Though I suppose some people treat ceremonial magic the exact same way, don't they? Cacomagic everywhere!
no subject
Date: 2022-06-13 05:45 pm (UTC)I don't really have those, exactly. My scary recurring dreams are always dreams of fleeing and/or being left behind.
In the first case, something is chasing me, but I can never see it, and I never know what it is, just that it's scary and dangerous, and either I'm paralyzed, running too slowly, or can't find a good place to hide, and I'm terrified of the thing closing in on me. Sometimes other people are there, but they don't listen to me about what's coming. But I'm not usually in anything like a labyrinth - usually it's the opposite, with me being outside or otherwise exposed and having no way to get away or get to cover fast enough.
In the second type of dream, I'm trying to catch a bus or other conveyance but I can't get my act together and will miss the bus (literally). I know it's vitally important that I catch the bus (or train or boat or plane or car ride), but I can't find my bag with important things, or I haven't finished packing, or I have to get the cats, or I can't find my clothes/shoes/coat or my wallet or ticket or whatever. I know getting left behind will be very bad, but I'm stuck in a loop trying to get myself ready to leave, often half-dressed, barefoot, and frantic.
Those have always been my two scary dreams, and they can be very vivid. No idea what I'm seeing or why, though.
“I dreamed I dwelt in marble halls”
Date: 2022-06-25 12:24 am (UTC)