Dream - Getting lost

Somewhere around April 2006, I had a strange dream. The first part of the dream seems to have been some kind of nighttime adventure involving dimly-lit warehouses, and is largely forgotten. The second part of the dream dealt with the afterlife, and remains clear.


At some point in the dream, it was dark, and I was outside, with some buildings behind me and slightly to the left, but not far away. Someone was standing near me, also behind me and slightly to the left. Someone who was unseen and perhaps invisible, and not actually human.

The entity was telling me a secret about what happens after people die. He said that people get caught up in doing a series of tasks. There are always more tasks, and they are drawn in deeper and deeper, until they get lost in them. And I had a picture in my mind of going through a series a small, brightly lit rooms, filled with various things, and doing something there and then being drawn somehow (or told) to go through a door into the next room, and on deeper and deeper into the building. I felt that this was what hell actually was, to get lost in the endless series of tasks.

The unseen entity standing by me said that all a person needed to do to get out of this or to avoid it was to call on Jesus Christ and the person would instantly be removed from it.


Previously, I had been dimly aware of a long building in the distance in front of me. I had now moved somehow, and was standing perhaps 10 or 12 feet in front of it. The building was low and white, and almost endlessly wide. Double doors, like elevator doors, were evenly spaced across the front of the building. There was also a sidewalk that ran in front of the building, and I was standing on or near it, and there was a broad walk that ran from the sidewalk to each of the doors.

A young girl came up beside me, a few feet away to the right. She was thin and perhaps in her late teens. She was wearing what looked like old, inexpensive clothes, some jeans and a jacket or a sweater. I think she also had on a knit cap. She paid no attention to me. She stood looking at the double doors in front of us for a moment, her hands in the pockets of the jacket or sweater.

At some point the doors in front of us slid open, perhaps even before she arrived, and featureless white light poured out. She walked forward into the light and disappeared, evidently feeling that this was expected of her, her face looking a little strained and uncertain. Her eyes were always pointed straight ahead, though, and she never looked at me.


I felt that the building and the light were the traps I had been warned about. I felt certain that the building was not real. I went up to it. The doors were closed now, but there was a big button on the recessed area surrounding the doors that could open the doors again.

I poked at the building sharply a few times with my finger. The building gave slightly and bounced back, and finally seemed to separate slightly at the seams. It appeared to be made of a stiff, paper-thin plastic.

I went back away from the building, slightly past the sidewalk to where a small, gravel path was. Some other people arrived, not all at once. They were of various ages, and were all much shorter than I was. Like the girl, they tended to look thin and poor. Unlike the girl, they seemed to be looking to me for guidance, their faces worried and uncertain.


I led them to the left, along the gravel path, walking with the building at my right. We walked along in the darkness for a long time. Eventually, the path deteriorated, becoming more dirt than gravel, and going through a series of small rises and dips. The path finally ended, fading into the land, just before the building itself ended.

Moving past the corner of the building, we could see it stretch away from us until it was lost in the distance, continuing on indefinitely. Ahead of us, beyond the end of the building, the land sloped down for a ways, and leveled off and then rose again, like the banks of a dry riverbed. Beyond this was a vast barren plain, at a lower level than where we were.


On the edge of the downward slope in front of us was another structure. It was low and at a right angle to the path, and appeared to be partially buried in the dirt. It was also very dark in color, and at least part of it looked like cast iron. The end of it was enclosed, like it contained machinery, and was lower than the rest and more rounded.

I pounded on the enclosed portion for a while, trying to loosen up some seams like I did with the white building. I did manage to make a seam visible, though it remained tightly closed. Some broad, shallow rivet heads, perhaps three inches across, also became more noticeable, and took on a cloudy, waxy look.

The dark structure had a series of rooms that led away to the right, paralleling the end of the white building but a little ways from it. The rooms had the roofs mostly cut away, leaving a smooth overhang along the inside of the walls, an overhang with rounded corners. I also felt that doors existed that could be used to go from room to room.


I led the people through the cut-away roof down into the first room. The room had a sink and various devices and objects hung or attached to the walls. There was also a table. The devices and objects seemed to be simple in nature. Some had mechanisms to operate, and some didn't. There seemed to be nothing, aside from perhaps the lights, that required electricity, though I'm not sure about this. Some of the devices were actually the controls for some very advanced equipment, advanced even beyond what we have today. Even so, the room in general had the feeling of an earlier time about it, and seemed almost like a kitchen, though some items had more of a business nature.

I seemed to know in my mind something of what would be required of us. I could see, in my mind, that a horde of people would be coming, from the direction of the riverbed but at an angle. We had to fight them off as best we could, using the various objects and devices in the room. I saw also, though, that they would overrun us and continue on, but we had to continue to fight them as they went past and over us, at least partly simply to protect ourselves. I knew, too, that this was but one of a series of endless waves of such people. We were to handle just this one wave, though, leaving the others for groups that came after us.

I went to the far wall, then, where a tablet of paper was mounted high near the door. I looked at the pages briefly. Someone then took the tablet down to examine it, but I held it soon after and looked through a lot of the pages. They held instructions for us, printed in large letters, a few lines per page. The paper felt old and soft, and tore easily. I think a page or two may actually have been torn off by me or someone with me.

I became very concerned, then, that we not damage anything, at least as much as was possible. I felt that neatness counted and it was very important to put things back the way they were for the next group, that we had to do this before moving on to the next room and the next task. I tried to emphasize that to the others.

While I was doing this, though, part of my mind was saying to me that I was being led off into the endless tasks, and that all I had to do was call on Jesus Christ and it would all be taken away. I was leading the others astray as well, and failing in my duty, having not told them of what the entity had said.

But still I hesitated, wanting to continue a little more...

The cactus came through

My family moved to New Mexico just before I started second grade, in 1960. We then moved to Arizona early the next year, probably in February or March. While in New Mexico, we sometimes took trips in the car to look at the scenary.

One time when we were driving through the desert, we saw a very small mountain that abruptly rose up out of the flat desert. The mountain, small enough to be called a hill, looked so odd and out of place, surrounded by flat desert, that we stopped to have a better look.

The mountain was covered with rocks and boulders and had lots of plants on it, including several types of cactus. One of the types of cactus was a prickly pear that grew close to the ground, its broad, flat lobes having clusters of long needles.

I walked up on the mountain, along with my father and younger brother. I think my mother stayed further behind, and didn't actually get up on the mountain. I moved by myself among the rocks, away from the others, and was careful not to step on or brush against any of the types of cactus that grew there among the other plants. As I moved forward in my irregular path, I noticed that one of the flat prickly pears was not too far ahead. I kept that in mind as I wandered along between and on the rocks, and I purposely steered to one side to avoid it.

All of a sudden, I looked down and saw cactus needles, long spines, sticking out of the top of one of my thin-soled canvas shoes. I had somehow stepped on the prickly pear, even though I had tried to avoid it. And it was that same prickly pear, for I looked around to try to see if I had somehow stepped on a different one, one that I had been for some reason unaware of. There were no other ones near me. It had to be the same one, though I could not understand how I had managed to do it.

I looked down at the spines coming out of the top of my shoe for what seemed like a long time. There were at least three or four of them, and they were all in the front section of my shoe, probably within two or three inches or so of the front. While I could accept that perhaps one or two of them could have been in front of or between my toes, at least one was so far back that it had to have been very close to and perhaps past the point where my toes joined my foot, and one was so far back that it had to have been through my foot.

I didn't feel any pain, or anything of the spines at all. There was no blood. I didn't know what would happen, though, if I tried to pull my foot off the cactus. Perhaps it would start to hurt, then. Perhaps everything would get very bad. I continued staring at it. I was hesitant to call out to my parents, because I felt kind of stupid for stepping on it, especially when I knew about it and was trying to avoid it.

Finally, because I knew I couldn't stay there forever, and having no other solution, I lifted up my foot and the needles came right out. I still didn't feel anything, and I didn't seem to be injured. The whole thing seems very strange, and I've never understood it.