Dream - The mall, the man in the devil mask, and the storm

On Saturday morning, November 20, 2010, in a period of sleep ending around 11:00 AM, I had a long dream in which I ended up at a large mall, apparently where the old Osco/Bashas' stores were, at 74th St. and McDowell Rd., then left and wandered off north, possibly to Plaza 777 where the radiator shop used to be, then I went back to the mall again. I was talking to some other people sometimes, at least some of them family members. It was afternoon, a pleasant temperature, mild, the sky clear but kind of a gray tone. I went back in the mall and was wandering around. Besides little shops, it had layers to go though. Some of the mall was to the right, like at Fashion Square, but I went to the left, and it seemed like I was going through layers of primarily the same store, to different departments, with walls between them. I also found some candy by little walls, in glass jars. I ate some of it and was looking for more.

I finally left, taking a heavy white plastic trophy I saw on a shelf by the free snacks. It was a statue of something, heavy and compact and styled, with just the suggestion of an animal form. Out in the parking lot I began to wonder if it was really free, and decided that it probably wasn't. I looked around it for a price tag. At or near the car, the gold 1989 Olds, I finally found a small white sticker with something written on it. I turned it up toward the sky to try to get more light on it, but the light was dim, it was late in the afternoon and the sky was somewhat overcast. A little sunlight came through, though. At first I thought the price was other things, then finally resolved it as $9.00. I decided that I had to take it back. I walked back in with it, hoping that no one would bother me about it. Some people frowned at me, and I eventually set it down somewhere, not where I got it.

I saw my sister, the oldest one, who was several years younger than me, and we walked through the mall together.

It was starting to get late and things getting ready to close. We went back toward the entrance. We passed some people from the store at a minor side entrance, doing a strange dance, one or two dressed in strange clothes and wearing strange lifelike almost devil-like masks, but without the horns, doing a strange acrobatic dance over a large broad mattress-like thing close to the floor, entertainment for the people. A woman showed up with the mask after a while and did some of the tumbles, but it was like they shared the same mask, that the other guy had taken it off while he was gone and then she emerged wearing it, though I think I eventually saw them together with masks on.

Approaching the main exit, I lost my sister and went back into the mall looking for her. I got to where it turned a corner, and there were other little stores, some of them selling food, but they were pulling down their roll-up covers over the fronts of the stores.

Going back, I passed the man with the devil mask and strange costume. He had his shoes off and his feet were covered with fake feet too. The mask was tight fitting and had no seams, and looked natural, though still somewhat rubbery. He had a reflective expression on his face, sitting and looking off into the distance to the right, toward the short exit, rubbing his foot. He talked very briefly. I moved on. Near the main exit, my sister came up behind me. She had been following me for a while, and seemed amused by it.

She had been for a while at a side room across the aisle, too, a place where food was served and also where everyone sang and played musical instruments. I could see them from here. I went over and went in for a while. The place had a tropical theme, which became more manifest deeper into it. At the other side of the room it blended into an outdoor area with plants and palm trees, and round concrete tables among shrubbery. Inside, everyone sat close together. I wandered outside for a while. There were worries and warnings about a storm approaching. It was still light outside, late afternoon, near sundown, still with some sunlight. A strange cloud was there to the southeast though, gray brown, boiling, churning at the edges, on the ground, wider at the top than the bottom, and with a flat top. It was coming this way, visibly so, though people didn't know if it would dissipate before it got here or not. People were running around, though, trying to get away. I kept looking back at it. Each time I looked it was moving this way, but didn't seem to get closer between looks. I wandered off to the southwest, into the parking lot. Large areas were flooding, with tall palm trees sometimes at a slant, sometimes with large areas of sodden mud over the parking lot and things. It had evidently gone through here already.

I went back inside and went over to the main exit. The various things lining it, little stores and various activities, had closed for the most part, and were covered up, but now they were starting to reopen, a late night thing. Things seemed more sinister. The man in the evil mask was back again. A place there was also offering odds at things, like odds on how TV shows would do, and odds on other minor things, and I thought about placing a bet, but wandered back to the main section and was trying to find the board/sign I saw with odds on it. Looking at it, I realized I had misunderstood what I had read before, and the odds weren't good. I decided not to do it. The man with the devil mask was going over a raised, long rectangular area with concrete edges, and a cloth placed over the middle. Underneath it were a series of crosswise rods and large beads. Before, when I was going to leave, he had been on a slanted one, like an escalator, with things in the middle that weren't moving but with bands on the edges moving down, with little rough things on them and around them, like tiny broken rocks. He had been cavorting in the middle and maybe singing. I had tried to grab onto and slide down one of the bands. As I made my way toward the direction of the exit, I saw him looking my way, not entirely happy at it.

It was night now, had been for a while, late, and I went out the exit to leave. It was cold, and the parking lot was covered by cold mud, with snow dusting it in places. Some areas just had a little mud, and some areas were very diluted, almost water, some just slightly dirty water, and some not much of that. It was daylight still then for a while. I went to the car. It was looking normal, but as I got there, or soon after I got there, it changed to a much smaller and lighter electric car, still with front wheel drive. Some other people were coming too to their cars. We passed by some tiny wooden guard shack type things, damaged by the storm, sometimes sitting at angles there between the rows of cars, wet inside. I walked through one and out the other side, wondering a bit if someone would object. The others seemed more afraid to do that. I got to my car, which turned out to have my mother's purse there on a small white table behind the passenger door. I guessed I must have left it outside the car. I was glad no one had taken it.

I got in and drove, not toward the exit at 74th St., but down the row toward the north, then toward the east and into another row going back south, where conditions were much worse, heavy mud covered the pavement. A delivery type truck was backing out down the row ahead of me. It slowly backed out, but there was some kind of trouble, and it finally got going and moved away. There was another big truck on its side at an angle, that I had to go around. In the dream I didn't know why I came back there, it was a lot harder to get through and more dangerous. The small car with front wheel drive that I was in, though, pulled through and over the mud.

I got to the front, by the mall, and turned to the west, toward 74th. Other cars were going out through the exit near the intersection, across from the bank. I didn't like that though. I thought it was too close to the intersection, too hard to get out, although it had a traffic light. However, there didn't seem to be one earlier, and at times, and I tried to go to the south, to another large exit, further away from the intersection. People on the walk around the mall were calling out to me, not to do it, it was too dangerous. It was fully night now, late. I tried to go south, but ran into increasingly heavier, deeper mud, and there was also worry that I might heading into the storm, that it would come through here. I turned around and went back. A little Mexican-type kid, possibly part Indian, had been following me, a little girl. She was associated with someone, a couple of people mainly, but had been following me, and I agreed to let her go along. The car was so tiny now, that she was riding on the back. It was rainy and cool, even chilly. The car seemed to be a two seater with a small wooden platform on the back, even some wood rails going along the sides, and a very short front.

I waited at the light for a while. It turned red just as I got there. Across the street, there was just the sidewalk with landscaping along it. Everything was wet and cold, and rain was softly falling. Water was running in the gutter in front of me, and it was a sharp short slope to the street. I couldn't see the traffic light from here. I had to lean forward and tilt my head to look up, then I could see a tiny curved dark metal tube coming down from it, with the end glowing the color the light was. Off to the right was the intersection with its own traffic lights, and I thought it was going to be a long time to wait, to get them both coordinated properly. There was only a very short wait, though, before I saw the light in the tube above me turn to green, and I pulled out into the street, going south, the girl happily riding along with me, and sometimes running beside me holding on. I had no idea really what I was going to do with her, whether I could drop her off at her house somewhere along the way, maybe on a small side trip, or at somebody else's house along the way, or just a a place where she could make it home from or be picked up from, an intersection in the neighborhood, or if I even had to take her to my house for a while. Her parents seemed to approve her going along with me though, so I guessed it was alright, whatever was going to happen.

Dream - Beating the Devil, maybe

On the night of Wednesday-Thursday, August 19-20, 2009, I dreamed I was in a large dark house, probably two or three stories, squarish. It was night. It was a huge house, but simply made, with a fairly stark interior, probably concrete or tile floors, and sparse furniture. It was similar to houses in some other dreams. Some other people were there, probably less than ten in all. Perhaps some were family members, but probably most were not.

I went from a room at one corner to deeper into the house, but a few other people came and got me, wanted me to see something, some kind of strange old book I think, maybe with a little dark box of some kind, perhaps eight to ten inches across. It was about something that had happened in the past, maybe 100 years ago. Somebody had either sold his soul or gotten in so deep into evil magic that it was hard to get out. Near the end of his life, which evidently occurred when he was middle-aged, he was having some regrets and didn't want to go to Hell, but the Devil was coming to get him.

He went toward the front door, through the dark living room. Someone who was apparently the Devil, though he looked like a man, was there, and took him outside, to a large square room with open walls, like a picnic area. It was some distance away, but it's hard to say how much, it might have been a few hundred feet or it might have been much more. It had low walls and a roof held up by pillars. The walls were of ornamental brick along the top, which might have been three feet or so, with either stucco under that or more brick or even stones cemented together. The pillars were probably of brick, and were set at wide intervals along the walls.

The Devil spent a long time on a cell phone, talking to someone. The man wandered around the area. There was some thought of trying to escape, climbing over the wall when the Devil wasn't looking, but the man didn't; it didn't seem likely to work in the end.

There was a broad lake to one side, pale brown, dead. Eventually the Devil took the man and was flying out over the lake. It was me living it, though, I had become the man, or was in his body. The change had happened earlier, back at the picnic area probably.

Then it was my grandmother flying me, but a disembodied voice, maybe two or even three, was saying to me that it wasn't really her, that it was really the Devil, and to poke out her eyes. It seemed it was important to inflict as much damage as possible, that it hurt the Devil somehow. As they told me to poke out her eyes, I had a vision of my thumbs going in and black goo squishing out, and I recoiled from it. I didn't want to do it, it might somehow really be her, and even if it wasn't I didn't want to do it. I felt that the Devil was trying to trick me, too, that he was trying to tempt me into doing something terrible.

A little later, we landed on a narrow spit of land sticking out on the other side of the lake, where it divided into two other lakes. Before we landed, it was no longer my grandmother but the Devil again. He went off a few feet and was talking to someone on his cell phone again. He came back and I somehow managed to shove him into the sand up to his neck. The voices were saying again to hurt him, to do various things to his head. The Devil kept on talking, to someone off somewhere far away that I couldn't see I guess. I hit and/or kicked him a few times, though I didn't do what was suggested. The Devil ignored me and kept on talking. I kicked his head off, which had momentarily shrunk quite a bit. It went a few feet off and returned to normal size. I went and stomped on it, smashing maybe half of it to dust, then started to try to smash the rest, but I turned around and the head had grown back, looking slightly younger, still talking.

The Devil then took me back to the picnic area. He went back to talking on his cell phone, wandering around a bit. It seemed the man tried to sneak out then, going under a pale net curtain, on the side away from the lake. The scene seemed to be condensed a bit, like it was more something in memory, and I was some varying distance from it, watching it.

After a while the Devil noticed that he was gone, but the man, some distance away now, said that since he out gotten out that the Devil didn't really have him anymore. Apparently there was something in the rules about things like that. The Devil seemed to accept it, but objected that he was still dead, and couldn't go back to his body, and apparently not to Heaven either, which was off somewhere in the direction of but alongside and past the lake.

The man went back to the house. There was some ritual that could be performed with the book, or a book, that could free him from his connection to Hell. He would evidently be alive, at least for a while, once he got inside the house, but the ritual had to be performed to solidify it, to make it permanent, though I had the feeling it wouldn't be a terribly long life extension, just a brief one.

Then I was back in the present day, and got caught up in it. The Devil came and got me; apparently just being associated with it had drawn him. I was taken to the picnic area for a while, then he flew me out over the water. I think he tried briefly to fool me with my grandmother, and even my mother, but it wasn't working and he didn't try very hard. Then we were at the spit of land for a little while, and then he flew me back. He wandered around the picnic area, then, talking on his cell phone.

I finally sneaked out under the curtain, and was a little ways off, perhaps eight or ten feet, when he noticed. He came and told me I couldn't do that. I went around the corner of the picnic area, getting on the side toward the house, and getting perhaps half the distance from the picnic area that I had been. I told him that since I had gotten out, then I was no longer under his control. The situation was the same as before; I couldn't go to Heaven and the Devil couldn't take me, but I wasn't really alive either.

The Devil took me back to the house, while explaining about the book and what had to be done. He seemed to be trying to be genuinely helpful. I think he was hoping that he would still be able to get me after I died, that though I might be temporarily saved from him, he could eventually degrade me enough that he could come again and take me when I was dying.

I went back in the house and told the people there about what had to be done. Not as many people were there as before, but some may have been in other parts of the house. Probably most of the ones left were women, young women I think. There was some talk of trying to get a priest to do it, but it was felt that there wasn't time, so the ceremony was somewhat nervously begun. I was lowered to the floor, or mostly so, my head and shoulders were held up a little, and a man began nervously reading from the book. It was in another language, Latin perhaps. As he read, the atmosphere seemed to change a little, with drifts of fog inside the dark house and unseen, but felt, presences. It seemed to be vaguely like an exorcism, but more of a dark ritual, one that was in some sense drawing spirits. Whether they were good or evil or something else, I couldn't yet say.


The dream seemed to end around there. It had a lot more earlier, but I don't remember it anymore. I had been listening to the radio that night, to the Coast to Coast AM show, which was on both before and after the dream. The show had something about lucid dreaming, and also something about spirits and maybe astral projection. Though I missed most of it, probably some of it got incorporated in the dream.