Dream - Superman and the two Superboys, and the superhero hideaway in another dimension

On February 21, 2009, I had a dream about Superman and two Superboys, and a superhero hideaway that was created in another dimension.

In the dream, I was with some other people, in the parking lot of a large shopping center. I think some of them were relatives, family members. My mother and father might have been there, not necessarily together, and perhaps a brother or sister. The light was dim, either evening or very early morning. A lot had already happened, but only vague impressions of it remain.

I went across to the other side of the shopping center, past a road going through the parking lot to the shopping center, past the landscaping along it that had small trees, into a smaller area of the shopping center that was surrounded by landscaped areas with small trees. Perhaps trees were even being sold there, maybe even Christmas trees. Some other people were there.

We had been about to leave earlier, but I felt called over to this area, that I had to go there. Maybe I felt I had to check on something or there was something I had to somehow do there before we left.

It seemed then that they were doing some filming there for a new Superman show or movie. I watched, but also became associated with the Superman character. He probably looked more like the one in the new "Superman Returns" movie than any of the others, though he didn't look precisely like him. I think I might have said something to the people there, or at least one or more of them that I was with earlier, or tried to do so or at least thought about it, about the Superman scenes they were filming.

They lifted the Superman actor straight up in a standing position with a bunch of strings attached to him, then he turned so that his body was more face down and flew around a little bit, but the area was criss-crossed with low power lines and they kept getting in the way. He had trouble and kept having to go lower to get under them. Sometimes he was beside them, even sometimes touching them, even sometimes with his hand resting on them. I was concerned, but he seemed to be unaffected by them.

Then the strings weren't attached anymore to the equipment, but just trailed off behind him as he flew, streaming back from his fingers and probably other parts of his body. They were thin and light in color, almost transparent, almost ghost-like. They seemed to be magic somehow, and were helping him fly that way. He flew off over and partly through the trees to the other side of the road that went through the parking lot. Though earlier the shopping center had seemed to be in another state, perhaps Nevada, it now felt like it was in Arizona.

There was a Superboy then, not looking like movie or TV representations of him but probably something like depictions of him in comics in the early 1960s. He was probably mid-to-early teens and was evidently Superman's son. Superboy flew up but had trouble getting past the trees and the parking lines, and had more trouble flying. Superman watched, sympathetic but with a little amusement, hanging in the air. Superboy finally got past the trees, tending to fly low and then back close to the pavement when he got past, maybe ten or fifteen feet above it. He was flying with the pale strings pushed in front of him, in somewhat rumpled streamers, apparently maintained in that position by his will. There was also a smaller Superboy, perhaps around ten or younger, who also then flew up from the same place in the parking lot as the others, and more or less joined them, going to their approximate area.

The teenaged Superboy flew off away from the shopping center, crossing a main road, perhaps twenty or thirty feet in the air now, sometimes more, and headed across relatively undeveloped areas toward another shopping center, approximately where Woolco in Tempe used to be. He was dipping down and flying much lower now, going over some cars and then back up some and over and through another clump of trees in the parking lot, nervously trying to remember to keep the strings up and ahead of him, to help him fly. Superman and the younger Superboy had flown out some distance behind him and to the side. Superman had gotten a little ahead of him now and hung in the air, watching.

They came across Lois Lane, coming out of the shopping center, where she had been shopping or doing some assignment or maybe even worked there. She had had a break-up with Superman some time back, and was still somewhat mad at him, mad enough that she hadn't forgiven him. She looked something like the newest Lois Lane, but also some like the earlier Lois Lanes. He tried to talk to her but she rebuffed him, talking only briefly, basically keeping her nose in the air, though she had to anyway to even look in his direction, since he was probably twenty or thirty feet above her and a similar amount away from her, though sometimes he was closer. She tended to purposely look away from him, though.

Superboy flew off to the side, going across the road again and off to some place else. Superman finally did the same, though the scene repeated a few times and finally ended with him flying off too close to the shopping center, scraping the edge of his hand along the upper edge of the building, leaving a long dark line of damage in the pale stucco, perhaps over a hundred feet long. Then he turned more and went out over the road, perhaps fifteen or twenty feet up, flying under some low power lines but going too low, seeming to have trouble maintaining elevation but also seeming not to care too much, and crashing through the upper part of a stuccoed wall that was either a tall ornamental wall enclosing another area, perhaps another shopping area, or was an actual part of a building, an ornamental edge projecting up. Then he came back and was going down the road between the two areas and past them. It was darker now.

He came to an odd pale elevator set low over the road. The road either was blocked by it or that part of the road ended there or the road went under it. The elevator went to another dimension. It was where superheroes went when they were not out doing things. It was a place of safety where they could be away from the world and no one could get them. Lois Lane followed after him down the road, evidently having second thoughts.

At least a couple of other people were already in the elevator, people from the other dimension, acting as operators for the elevator and escorts to the dimension. They were dressed casually in normal, inexpensive clothes, darkish pants and pale shirts, perhaps with open vests or jackets. Superman got in the elevator with them. Lois Lane came up to the open door of the elevator and wanted to get inside, but they kept turning her down.

The door finally closed and the elevator started going down, but one of the men's fingers got caught in the door, along with some cloth, and the finger was stretched as the elevator went slowly downward. They halted the elevator and finally had to go back up at least part of the way and then open the doors, at least enough to get the finger out. They then went back down. At some point, either when they reopened the doors or at another time, Lois Lane got on.

The other dimension was a strange place, looking like it was an entirely manufactured place, like it was initially lacking everything, maybe even form and substance, but was forced into its present configuration. Things were mostly gray, and the light was pale, almost sourceless. The area was a large space perhaps hundreds or more feet across, with a concrete floor and with walls of what looked like huge heavy pieces of canvas sewed together, that went up maybe fifty feet or so and turned to form a distant ceiling. I got the impression that beyond this area, on the other side of the walls, was basically nothingness, like a formless fog, that what I was looking at was the whole dimension, and that as it was worked on and expanded, it was done by working with the formless possibility that existed there. I was there also, sometimes as Superman and sometimes as a watching presence, and was told, perhaps through explanations to Lois, that the area was still under construction, evidently continual construction, and that the walls got pushed out as the area grew.

The area was mostly covered with rows of widely spaced long tables. It was very thinly populated with people, some workers and a few other superheroes. The tables had shelves underneath them and sometimes a little ways on top of them. The shelves held various strange artifacts, not generally very big. They seemed to be made out of some kind of copper alloy, at least in some cases, though I think some looked a little more like stone or even wood. They seemed to be very old and had a rough, light grayish tan coating on them, though I wasn't sure that they hadn't been made recently and had been created that way.

It seemed sometimes that they had in fact have been of recent creation, at least some of them, though I'm not sure that it was a case of faking something. It may have been more like creating exact copies, indistinguishable from the originals even at the atomic level, and actually at least partly pre-aged, like the aging was really aging done by time that had somehow been placed upon them without them actually having to have existed throughout that time.

I got the impression that some of them were supposed to be from Krypton, or rather made new as objects from Krypton. Some of them appeared to be single-piece machines or parts from machines. A lot of them had strange markings, evidently Kryptonian, though they looked like runes.

Superman, showing them to Lois, picked one up and bit into it, leaving marks on the soft metal. Superman seemed to have lost a lot of his powers here, though it seemed initially that he hadn't. He seemed now though to be only a few times stronger than a man, at most, and could fly a little and was evidently still hard to hurt.

Then Lex Luther was somehow there. It felt like he had been there for at least a little while. He may have been taken there earlier by Superman or one of the other heroes, or he may have made at least part of the way there himself. I got the impression that he had wanted to get into it, thinking that he could get something from it, some kind of power maybe or technology and maybe do something while he was there. I was under the impression though, that someone had to take him the rest of the way, that he couldn't actually get in himself or even come close to it, that all he had done was just get into the general area of the elevator. Once here though, he was helpless, he couldn't do anything and I don't think he was even restrained in any way, he was trapped simply by being here.

He talked in a hard, angry voice to Superman, perhaps from fifteen or so feet away, aware that he couldn't hurt him and intimidated by his power. He got a little closer, perhaps half that distance. I'm not sure whether he moved or Superman gradually made his way in that direction. Superman had been moving along and among the tables with Lois, showing her things. Finally he picked up both Lois and Luther, Luther still complaining, and flew with them to the other side of the area, to where it narrowed to a smaller room that was almost an offshoot, where he landed and set them down.

It felt like the section was newly built and was still unfinished, and not quite as solid as the rest of it. There were a few tables here, and an occasional worker. The canvas walls, not far away, hung a bit loosely, without much tension. Superman sat down at a bench in front of one of the tables, with Lois sitting to his left and Luther sitting several feet to the left of them.

Superman quietly talked to Lois, with periods of silence. The area felt quiet, and seemed to promote silence. Luther, still somewhat angry, still sometimes talked, but in a lower, more subdued voice. Voices tended to be more hushed here anyway, and paler, like they were partially lost in the vast nothingness that lay nearby, just beyond the canvas.