Dream - The house in the barren wilderness, the gate that wouldn't latch properly, the coming storm, and the former name of Gabriel Warlock Strange

On Saturday, July 25, 2009, around 4:00-7:30 AM, I dreamed I was going across a largely barren landscape, from one isolated bar to another. The bars were simply made, with furniture simply cut from a powdery dark wood, and straight simple small bars/counters. We stopped there for food, I think. We had started out from some house, I think, that was itself fairly isolated. The land was barren, a wasteland, partly flat dirt and partly extremely low sparse dark vegetation, apparently grass but looking more like some kind of moss. It was cool and overcast, dim, a feeling of bleakness was over things. The whole family was traveling, perhaps in more than one car.

We got to what was evidently something like a farmhouse, though I'm not sure there was really a farm. It was getting dark. We were going to leave there too, it was just a place we were stopping for a little while. Far out in the back, perhaps 80 to 100 feet away, near the corner of the fence, which was tall and made of spaced wood boards, like some country fences, though about six feet high, was a gate. Beyond the fence was more barren land, mostly flat like the rest of it.

The gate had to be latched properly, but it was difficult to get the latch to stay together. We had been out to it earlier and opened it, now I had to check on it to make sure it was staying closed. I found that it still wasn't closing properly. A little girl went out with me, perhaps 10 years old, a relative of some kind. She stayed back by the house, on the small back porch, watching me. It was fairly dark, with a light at the back of the house providing some illumination. We had to leave soon, a storm was moving in fast, and it was very windy. The wind was making it harder to secure the gate, and it kept moving back and forth. I had two sets of gloves, one a dark heavy rubber and one that was white and much lighter weight, and cloth. I had put on the white gloves to do it, but it bothered me because I should be using the heavy rubber gloves instead. There was some problem with them though, either I couldn't find them right away or couldn't get into them for some reason.

I was having a lot of trouble with the gate, and it was taking a lot longer than I hoped it might. The little girl sometimes called out to me from the small back porch, talking to me, and I yelled back replies. Finally, still working on the gate, I told her to tell my mother, who was in the house somewhere, that she needed to hurry up and get ready to leave, because we had to leave soon, before the storm came. I was hoping to outrun the storm, but we would have to move pretty fast because the storm was moving quickly.


The former name of Gabriel Warlock Strange / GabrielWarlockStrange, Charles Brian Smith, came up in the dream, either faintly spoken, like something carried on the wind, or as a faint thought, disconnected from what was happening, back when we were in one of the bars along the way. I was talking to a few people at the time, some of which may have been family members.

The dream had a lot more in it, particularly earlier, and some more along the way, but I don't remember what it was.


In real life, I had earlier been working on a post for my blog that had a gate near the end, "Vanquishing the beast", and the previous day had talked to my mother about our back gate, which had a problem with the latch and it looked like someone had tried to get in, since the board laying on the ground in front of it was pushed back in a small arc.

GabrielWarlockStrange, before his death, was a poster on the unknowncountry.com message board. He died on June 18, 2009, but at the time of the dream I had known about his death for less than two weeks. He had been in poor health for a long time, many years, and sometimes mentioned it in his posts.

Gabriel Warlock Strange was his real legal name, he had changed it to that. He dropped the spaces for his user name on the message board, and other users frequently abbreviated it further, mostly commonly to GWS.

I had another dream about him a few years before this one, in which I was wandering through a large multistory building and came across him busy at work building an elevator that would go into outer space. I suppose that could be interpreted as building an elevator to Heaven, but he had a 12 part theory of how the universe worked, that he sometimes talked about, so it may be related to that too.

There was also another dream with him in it, a couple of years or so before this one. It had robots and people with metal insides and strange demonic things and a ranch and a celebration and presents, as well as shopping at a grocery-drugstore.

In real life, he had been working on a time travel novel involving a couple of characters, an ape and a sentient computer that looked like a briefcase, that were running away, traveling from the future to the past. They arrived in our time, our present, and were getting into various situations with people here. He posted on the message board the part of it that he had written, and then posted more as he wrote it. Then he had computer problems, as well as increasing health problems, and had to borrow someone else's computer to make posts, which tended to be few in number and did not include more of the story. He had written some more of the story on paper, he said, and I think was looking for some way to get it scanned into the computer, but apparently never did so, and was unable to get it posted before he died.