Dream - The descent: Witches, flying reptiles and the tall tree-like man

Starting around February 12, 2008, and very bad for a week, less bad thereafter, I was very, very sick, with a bowel obstruction, kidney stones, and a bad case of the flu. I didn't get much sleep for a week, because the pain in my side was too much when I lay down. I didn't spend much time laying down, though I did catch a few minutes of sleep that way. Sometimes I caught a few minutes of sleep sitting down and sometimes even over an hour, sometimes even a few hours. Some days, though, the total sleep was measured in minutes rather than hours. I spent long periods of time standing, sometimes assuming different positions, sometimes even bent over double, trying to relieve the pain in my side somehow.

The day before this started I had worked for about five hours on my sister's yard, starting late in the afternoon, stopping long after dark when I was too cold and sick to continue. I wasn't even wearing a coat.

For a few days before this started I had been feeling bad, and had noticed that my lips were sometimes very pale.

I had a few dreams during the time I was sick, some of them with very disturbing elements. One of the most disturbing ones happened around February 20, 2008.

In the dream, I seemed to be at a house we had lived in in the early to mid 1960s, though sometimes it seemed to be my grandmother's house instead, the one she lived in a little later on after she moved to Arizona. The houses were on the same street, but not close to each other. A lot happened earlier in the dream that I don't remember.

At some point I went out back and toward the side yard to the east. It was dark. A large number of people were there, even out in the alley and other yards. I also felt they were all over the place, even down at the end of the street. I wanted to fly, and went toward the side yard. The people, who it seems had already been witches of some kind, started to become witches in appearance, and some of them turned into flying reptiles, with some of the people riding the flying reptiles.

I was someone with magic powers, like the others, and part of the group of people. I started to change into something else and flew for a while, though I'm not sure if I changed into a flying reptile or into a more traditional witch appearance and rode a reptile (or rode something else). I flew around for a while, east toward the end of the street and back.

The dream turned darker, and it seems the witches were now out to get me, and were apparently also vampires of some type. They were also changing into various monsters, often or usually some variation on the flying reptiles theme, with huge claws even on their elbows and other places. They wanted to get me with the claws, to cut and stab me.

The houses were gone now, the scene changing to uneven ground with different places at different levels, kind of an outdoor scene except it seemed to take place inside an enormous cave. At some point I seemed to have returned to my normal appearance. I kept trying to avoid the creatures, who seemed to be in almost a continual process of slow change. They seemed only marginally aware of me, occasionally turning toward me with an evil look, especially if I got too close.

There was a tall tree-like man with fingers like long branches or roots and legs turning into trunks and roots. At first he was on an area of higher ground in the cave, a place to the side where it narrowed somewhat and then went on. The winged creatures seemed not to be concerned about him and did not pay a lot of attention to him, though there were frequently a few in his area. I went toward him, but as I got closer he raised his arms and started to try to move his legs, to try to come toward me, and I backed away.

Sometime later I noticed that he had managed to move thirty or forty feet, and was now on a lower area but still a ways out from the middle of the cave. I kept feeling that he wasn't really my enemy. I went toward him again and got pretty close, but then he raised his arms with the long root-like fingers that could stretch all the way to the ground and tried to get me again.

A winged creature was passing by behind the tree man, stopping every few feet, seemingly unaware of what was happening or that we were even there. It was bent over in almost a crouch, with extremely long arms and legs and torso. It was slim but muscular, and had big shoulders. Its head was raised up and pointing forward, and was large and bald and somewhat thin, with a greatly exaggerated nose and chin. Its eyes were large and had somewhat wavy slits for pupils, pupils that were a pale yellow in color. The eyes themselves were an odd color, slightly dark and almost clear, and tilted a little with a curved under part and an almost straight top part. The mouth was pulled up in a huge grin. The skin of the creature was a kind of pale greenish-brown, and even bent over like it was it was still about the height of a man. As it paused behind the tree man, its left elbow went through his back and out his chest, splitting it open, the elbow with its huge thick gray claw sticking out the front. There seemed to be no blood, just a big split in the chest.

The tree man stared at me in pain and sorrow, and seemed to somehow be blaming me for what happened. He was not stopped by the injury, and still reached out for me, partially changing into something else, one of the clawed creatures. I pulled back and away. The original winged creature moved on, pulling its elbow out of the tree man's chest, never once looking at us.

There were other creatures everywhere but they seemed to not be paying attention to me, just milling around. Raised areas in the ground went around the middle section of the cave in a kind of square path, or paths. Sometimes the creatures followed the paths and sometimes they didn't.

I could also see a path that led up and down along the far wall, with a creature slowly coming down it. Others had gone up and down it earlier. I felt the creature had come back from someplace higher up, out of the cave or at least a different section of it. I wondered if it had gotten orders of some kind, and was on a mission. I made my way toward it, coming from the side. As with the others, though, it seemed to have no real purpose or awareness unless I got too close, and then its head turned toward me and its eyes got slightly bigger, and long clawed fingers reached out, and when I pulled back the awareness faded, I could see it fade from its eyes, and it turned back to what it had been doing, walking slowly along the path.

In retrospect, the situation in the dream seems to have turned into some kind of a representation of Hell.