Dream - Past and future pirates, the struggle for the throne, and visiting Rachel Maddow

On Monday morning, June 7, 2010, I dreamed a long dream. There was a long part of the dream, not much remembered now, in which there were carnivals, and people in rooms discussing what to do politically, in what seemed to be a couple of hundred years ago, someplace in England, but it also switched back and forth to the modern day. Sometimes it seemed the people were just wearing period pieces, costumes from long ago, including powdered wigs, though sometimes it also felt that we were really back there. There was some trouble with the opposing side, and trying to get rid of people who might be a problem, and who might be in line for the throne. There was also something about piracy taking place, that some of the people, or maybe the people they were trying to get rid of, were associated with pirates or actually were pirates sometimes. There was some acceptance of it now, but it was something they would have to take care of later, stop it and probably kill the leader of the pirates.

Somebody came back, from Africa I think, perhaps from a ship that had been in that area. He was someone they had caused to be sent out there for a while, through trickery, some kind of military pretense, to get him out of the way temporarily. Now he had returned, becoming aware of recent events, of the deaths of so many relatives, but perhaps also purposely drawn back. After his return they began trying to get rid of him, too, poisoning him so that he appeared crazy. He was evidently the last big obstacle left, before they could move forward with their plans.

Outside, in an empty area near the carnival, just outside and partly under a tent, I met up with him. I saw him there and went to him, feeling a bit sad for him, and wondering if I should warn him. He talked agitatedly and walked around. Other people had been killed and he knew it. They were even trying to blame it on him, though he knew he didn't do it. He seemed to suspect, too, that they were somehow poisoning him, trying to make him seem crazy.

He had a big knife and he waved it around, talking about what was happening and complaining about things, waving the knife in the area of my face and chest sometimes. We finally got into a struggle with it, and though I think I was injured, I finally managed to get it away from him, and we were laying on the ground, struggling, with me mostly on top, with my face very close to his, but off to the side, and my arm folded about as far as it could go. I started to slowly saw through the side of his neck with the knife. He paused, and his eyes were turned my way with a little surprise and apparent acceptance. He talked for a while as I sawed through his neck, getting almost all the way through. I hadn't initially intended to kill him, or wanted to, thinking that I could just stop him, restrain him, but in the end there seemed to be no other way I could be safe. If I had stopped him now, without killing him, he might come after me again later, especially in his crazy state. I stood up, then, wondering what to do next, what I would say. Though I had been defending myself, it seemed possible I might still get in trouble.

A couple of the people who had planned it came, and were talking about it, looking at the body. They got the head all the way off, or maybe I did, and they took it away to a room. I stood there in the room while they walked around discussing it, intending to use it somehow in their campaign. I think his death had come a little earlier than expected, and now they had to revise things a bit. Their campaign wasn't quite at the proper place yet to proceed. The general population wasn't yet set up for it, wasn't prepared to accept them as the leaders without a proper transition of some kind. Some way to prepare the people was needed, so that they would understand and accept them as the proper rulers, accept that theirs was the proper claim to the throne and to the proper advisers to the throne.


Then, later, I was somewhere else, in more modern times, and I was looking at Rachel Maddow, who has a TV talk show on MSNBC. She was in a large room, sitting at a heavy circular glass desk, leaning forward and talking to someone else on the other side of it, someone she was interviewing, possibly a reporter or someone who did opinion pieces. She was hit by a car, then. It was very sudden, the car crashing through the heavy glass outer wall of the room, apparently intentionally. I saw it on TV and they kept replaying it, but it seemed that I was also somehow initially there, off to the side, watching it. She was doing her show, sitting down at the big glass desk, leaning forward and talking to the person, and a car suddenly came in from her right, crashing into the big open room, and crashed into her. She turned toward it as it came, in the fraction of a second before it hit, then she was turning away, her face grimacing as it hit her and the glass desk, breaking the edge of the desk and knocking it and her over.

I looked for her in the hospital, for a long time, through huge rooms filled with beds, separated into little areas with lots of space between them, on different levels of the now uneven floor. Though in the other rooms the floor had been more normal, here, on the third story probably, and in the inner part of the hospital, this big room had ups and downs, with smooth transitions, like it was an outdoor landscape, with hills and depressions, with the low carpet smoothly covering everything.

I finally found her, toward the back, but still a ways from it, in a section out in the middle, with temporary walls partly enclosing it, like office room dividers. She was larger than expected and had a huge head and face, mostly normally proportioned, though her forehead was too large, and she had her hair roughly shaved going back from the middle across the top to near the back, because of the operation she had had to have. The hair was too long to have actually been shaved that way, it must have grown out some, and though I wondered about the length of it in the dream, I didn't think about it having grown out some and the time passing that that would imply. She was smiling and happy and sitting up, wearing pajamas with a sheet wrapped around her from the stomach down. She was talking to someone else, a woman who was also in the hospital. They were evidently playing cards on a little table that was between them.

I got her attention and explained a little of why I was there. I had seen her getting hit by the car, and wanted to see if she was alright. She was leaning forward and smiling broadly at me, and said, "And you came to see me? Awwww, that's nice," and she turned her head and went back to happily talking and playing cards with the woman. She was scary to look at, with her head so big. Her body was a little too big too, like she was a giant, in a mild way, but her head was way too big, especially the upper part of her head. I didn't see any scar on her head, even within the shaved area, though I didn't peer all the way back, and didn't try to. I didn't want to know, it was just too scary, especially when she had her focus on me. It wasn't too bad when she was talking to the other woman.

I had the feeling though that she had a mental deficit of some kind now, that might or might not get better, that might heal completely or might not. She seemed to be doing alright in her talking and playing cards, and seemed very happy, but I still felt that the problem was there. There had felt an underlying blankness in her, like something was missing.


I left her and wandered around the huge room some more, going back the way I had come but on the other side of the room. Someone came and said I shouldn't be there. I was happy enough to go by then, being very tired and trying to find the way out. He went with me. I found I was crawling on hands and knees, slowly. He was looking concerned and finally asked if I needed help, if I wanted him to get someone, meaning emergency personnel, to examine me and try to treat whatever was wrong. I slowly assured him I was alright, trying to smile a little, saying I was just tired, and slowly made it to the door and through it. He watched me go, still looking concerned. I was in fact injured, from the fight before, and it was bothering me, but I didn't want to say anything to him about it.

Then I went out to the back, to another section or another building. A couple of people were there. One, a thin man, had been in the hospital and had gone crazy it seemed, and got something like a knife and started trying to kill the other man and then me, though I seemed to have become someone else. He stabbed the other man or cut him somehow, then was coming after me. He was talking, rambling, looking very nervous and tense. I backed away, into a place where a lot of sheets were hanging around, some over portable room divisions. The area was cramped and a lot of things were there, including, I think, a hospital bed behind me. The other man was back in the short narrow hallway, wounded, maybe dead or dying.

I kept moving around, while I was also somehow a little ways off, watching. He sometimes tried to stab me, but usually got the sheets. He finally did manage to stab me, though, I think on my chest near my left shoulder, or maybe my side. I was bleeding, dark blood getting on my shirt and running down, dividing into several streams. It didn't seem to reach my waist, though. I was struggling with him, and finally another person or two showed up and got control of him. The other man who was stabbed earlier also showed up and helped. It looked like he was going to be okay.


Then the group of us had to get out of there. The detectives were closing in on us because of what happened earlier, the murder of the man who was dressed in 18th or 19th century garb. We went out into a kind of parking lot, a huge one that extended way out, but it contained all kinds of things, including strange futuristic planes and maybe spaceships. It seemed to be mostly a place where old ones were left, though I saw some taking off and coming in, coming down out of the sky in a swoop, going over the water and then into the lot. The parking lot ended in a docking area, with a vast expanse of water, perhaps the ocean, beyond. The lot seemed to be mostly industrial, though there also seemed to be some military presence.

We had to go out further in the lot. The detectives were going to come out, I could hear them talking about it. A police inspector in late middle age was in charge, a short British man of medium build with faded dark hair and mustache. After they came out into the lot, we then went back inside for a while, in one of the rooms. We talked for a while about things, and maybe stayed until the next day, but then I said, getting suddenly increasingly nervous, that we really had to leave.


We went back out to the parking lot, far into it. The girl who was with us was supposed to have prepared a getaway vehicle. She led us to an old Ford Mustang, that was sitting several feet high, above the pavement. It was crowded in with a lot of other things. She had done something with a panel that was put on under the back, under the gas tank, hidden a key there I think, but also something else, something that had to be done to start it, something with the wires I think. She folded the panel down and was looking in the space there, under the gas tank, her head stuck partly in and one of her arms, which went in and out as she tried to do whatever she was trying to do. I stood there with the other man, sometimes talking to him. I was starting to get a little nervous, a little impatient. They were out in the lot looking for us, we had to get going soon. I tried to hurry her up. I noticed too that it was an automatic transmission, which I found odd, as we usually got a manual one, because we usually had to push them to get them started. This was going to complicate things. I didn't think pushing would work with an automatic, and now we had to get into the wiring under the dashboard.

I was rolling my eyes and remarking on it, and the inspector and his men slowly walked up, talking to each other. They paused when they got to us, but then eventually started up again and moved on, still looking for the people, not realizing it was us.

I felt better now, and less in a hurry. We were going to steal one of the big flying ships, one of the freighters. They were odd looking things, like huge worms that were flattened some in the middle, with paneled wraparound front windows. The body was perhaps 40 or 50 feet long, with a small bend in the middle and the back slightly raised. The car was just to get us down the lot to where they were. The police would probably see us take off, and realize it was us and try to stop us, and send other ships after us, but by then it would be too late, we would have too much of a head start. It was like piracy, I thought, and that's what we were, modern day pirates, and we were going to use the ship to carry out more piracy, stopping vessels and forcing them to give us their goods.

Dream - Tomorrowland

On Wednesday morning, April 23, 2008, I had a dream about seeing a place called Tomorrow or Tomorrowland, and then getting robbed, or at least I initially thought I was.

In the dream, I was driving. It was dark, and I was going to Nevada, or already there and somewhere out in the Reno-Carson City-Fernley area or something like that.

Then it was daylight, and I was going toward Fallon from the direction of work, but I thought of it in the dream as a small unnamed town. I was going too fast and the speed limit dropped abruptly. There was a person on a bicycle nearby. A cop was parked facing the road not far in front of me. I braked sharply and got below 25 mph, but the speed kept creeping upward and got up to 30 a time or two. It was worrisome, but the cop didn't do anything.

I parked somewhere in town and walked around. A person who was my lab partner was there. Maybe he came with me. He was going to work there again for a while. I was, too. I guess he was going to work for however long he was there.

I left him at a building with some other people for a while and walked around. I thought I would have to find a place to stay again for the time I was there. I didn't want to have to stay in a place with other people again and wondered if I would find a separate place on the other side of the main road. Both places I had in mind were places from other dreams.

I wandered back to try to find my former lab partner. He was still at the building or had returned to it, still with some other people. I think he had gone off with them for a while.

There was a nearby building, two or three story, that was made of dark brick-like blocks. I thought I saw something along the side of it, a way up. We started walking along by it, looking. There was just a faint representation of a stairway on the wall, though, like something carved in relief, though initially it had seemed like more. I believe it was faintly labeled "tomorrow." We couldn't get up that way. I turned and looked at him, uncertainly.

We went back around the front and went inside. It seemed he was only going to stay a couple of weeks. I thought maybe I could just rent a room for that time, maybe even in this building, which was apparently at least in part a hotel, also part a restaurant and part something else.

We went along one side of the inside. A lot of other people were there. There was some exhibit, perhaps upstairs, called Tomorrow or Tomorrowland or something like that.

We were going to visit it, but then a woman came and said somebody had attacked her and shoved her out of a line and against a wall. It had apparently happened some time ago, perhaps weeks ago. She was looking for the man, trying to find him. It wasn't clear what she intended to do with him, but it seemed that she wanted to get him into some kind of trouble.

She peered closely in my direction, briefly looking at me and then was satisfied that it wasn't me, which was a bit of a relief because I knew I wasn't the one. She talked mostly to my lab partner.

We didn't go toward the Tomorrow section then, and went somewhere else in the building. A long line of people wrapped around the inside, going from the back toward the front. We were waiting to get into the restaurant section now, probably in line with the others. I was wearing a long, light gray lightweight coat, almost like a trench coat but simpler and plainer.

Someone went past me and bumped into me hard and struggled for a moment to get past, then did and ended up going partly the other way, toward the side and back, heading out of the building in that direction.

I suddenly felt for my billfold and couldn't find it. I cried out that he had stolen my wallet, that man had stolen my wallet. I made some halfhearted, uncertain attempts to go after him. I was uncertain I could even catch him now. I kept feeling for my wallet. I couldn't understand how he had even gotten it because I had such a long coat on, and I finally felt it there, still in my back pocket. It was so thin that I had missed it before. Usually it was a lot thicker, having lots of cash and various papers. Now it seemed almost empty.

Dream - A future or other-time self tries to kill me

Around July 1, 2007, I had a dream in which a future or other-time self came in my bedroom, where I was laying in bed, and pointed his hand at my face, with the fingers formed into a gun shape.

I begged him, "No... please... don't..." He pulled the "trigger" anyway.

Nothing apparently happened when the trigger was pulled, but I felt that somehow something did happen, that the effects were or might be somehow delayed.

I realized sometime later, after awakening, that the figure looked more like my younger brother, as he looked twenty years ago, than me. I'm not sure of the significance of that, as I did not feel in the dream that the person was my brother. Perhaps the person was far enough removed from me genetically to have just a family resemblance, instead of looking specifically like me.

Fears

What am I afraid of?

When I was young, there was a time when I was very afraid of the dark. Sometimes I could even seem to see things in it. The closet was a worry, too, in the dark, at least when it was left open.

Oddly enough, I don't seem to recall being afraid of the dark when I was very young. The memories I have of this are from later childhood.

I don't have a fear of clowns, though I know they can be somewhat disturbing at times. I recently wrote about a problem that developed with a Clarabell Clown doll that I had (Clarabell was a character on the Howdy Doody TV show).

I don't have a fear of cloth in my mouth. Indeed, I seem to remember chewing my shirt and chewing the sheet on my bed. They both tasted pretty good.

I used to be afraid of bugs, spiders and praying mantises in particular. I'm still wary of some spiders, but this is only common sense. I don't like bugs touching me, though. Or me touching them.

I used to be afraid of change. I wanted things to always be the same. Some of that is still with me.

I used to be afraid of meeting new people and doing new things. This faded fairly quickly, of necessity, but an aversion remains. In other words, I am more reluctant than afraid, though something of the fear still exists. I can be difficult to know on a personal basis.

I have gone through times when I did a lot of checking locks and things. To some extent it seems to go in cycles, perhaps influenced to some extent by events.

I used to be afraid of heights. It was a fear of falling, of somehow being almost pulled off the edge by the distance. It called out to me in some way, and reached out for me. I had to resist that call, and was afraid to go too close to the edge, or of being in a position where there was an edge.

Somewhere in childhood I developed a fear of failing, of somehow, and maybe in spite of all appearances, not being good enough. Some of that remains, though it is somewhat muted now with time and experience. Still, there is a concern that I could have made or could make a difference. Depending on what I do or don't do, things could go a different way.

I used to be afraid of the Biblical End-of the-World, and of somehow not being Saved. With time, though, I came to a less-than-traditional view of such things. Though I still consider myself a Christian, I do not subscribe to a fundamentalist viewpoint, and many Christians would, in fact, probably disown me.

I used to be afraid of growing up. I could see the future ahead of me, the years stretching away, and it would never be as good as it was before. I also knew that the best times had, in fact, already passed, as my life before I entered school contained the best times I would ever know.

I developed a tendency to worry about the future to the extent that the present could not be sufficiently enjoyed. I used to look forward to getting out for school for the summer. Then I started worrying earlier and earlier in the summer break about returning to school when it was over. Eventually, I started worrying about returning to school before the break even started.


Time changes things. I am over 50 years old, and some of the worries are more distant, now. I'm not afraid of the dark anymore. Too much has happened over the years. The dark can contain dangers, but it seems less important in the face of what has already happened. Changes and new things can also hold dangers, but I am less afraid of them, though I do retain, at times, a suspicion of them and even an aversion to them.

But things are not as bad as they were, or as they could be.

Dream - Possible futures and what came after

Early in June 2005, on a Sunday night, I had a strange dream.

In the dream, it was night and I was at my computer. I was looking at a lot of documents in a lot of moderately small windows. The windows seemed to be part of some larger program that filled the screen behind them. The documents didn't seem to contain much, just a few characters in some kind of alphanumeric code. I think many or most may have had just two characters.

I was puzzling over them, and my mother kept interrupting me. She was wandering around in the house going through things. It felt like there was a real strangeness to the night.

There were two little dogs in the house, and they were up, too, and we finally decided that maybe they wanted to go outside. We let them out back and they seemed happy. When I looked at them a few seconds later, though, they were far, far down from the door, in vertical distance. Somehow, the house had become multi-story and I was on at least the second floor. The door that the dogs went out of now just opened into empty space.

I walked from the kitchen to what would normally be the dining room and then the family room, but the house had grown huge. A few other people were there, too. I don't know who they were exactly, but I think they were supposed to be relatives. They generally looked young, like they might be teenagers. There was a long narrow room along the edge of the house, and it seemed to have a small balcony associated with it. I went and looked out. It wasn't quite so dark now.

I saw the next-door neighbor's house, which was also huge, and much farther away than it had been. I could see the back better than the front, and it had a very large, tall garage-like area that apparently came through from the front. A very large, tall, pointed tent partly stuck out of it, made of black, tattered cloth, virtually in shreds in places. A similar tent was in his backyard. I seemed to be on the third floor.

I turned back to the long, narrow room, which had doubled or tripled in width. I came somehow to understand that this was an alternate future, and I had somehow switched over to it. I was then essentially given a bit of a tour through the long room. I met a couple more young people, and then I came across a very strange person sitting on a small, old couch.

The person looked human, but not quite. His face had some dog-like qualities. The lower part of his face seemed stretched somewhat, and the upper lip projected forward in a bit of a point. I think his ears may also have been long and floppy, but I'm not sure. He didn't move much, he just sat there with his arms stretched out on the back of the couch. His eyes looked at me from time to time, mainly when he spoke. He didn't say much, except brief responses to what was said to him. I knew somehow that he was really a dog, one that had been genetically engineered in this now future (but still alternate future) time. I felt that he knew of his situation and was satisfied with it.


Then I was outside, farther in the future. It was night. There was barren ground, with a rise and a few people standing on it. I was aware of an occasional very large building, very far apart. Dark, reddish clouds were low overhead. I felt that they were toxic, and that the whole Earth, or most of it, looked like this.

I was given the story, in my mind, of what had happened. There used to be a big building, huge, very wide and several stories high. A smaller, square area projected several more stories toward the back. This building was the headquarters of a major aerospace firm. In the smaller area that rose toward the back, there was a conference room where executives from a rival firm had come to talk about merging or combining the two companies.

Everything in the meeting was going fine, the executives were happy and jovial and laughing with each other, but outside the room, some employees had become worried. They were afraid that something bad was happening in the room, and they tried to get in to protect their boss and their company. They knocked and banged on the walls, but they couldn't get in. They finally tried to blow holes into the room with explosives.

The CEO heard the noise and the explosions, and thought the building was being attacked by a rival. Rather than let the building fall into the rival's hands, he pressed the button to self-destruct. The entire building blew up and was completely destroyed. The repercussions of the event brought about a rapid series of events that eventually resulted in the destruction of the surface of the Earth.

I was shown two planes that were planned but now would never exist, except as prototypes (and I'm not sure about whether the prototypes actually existed). One of the planes was by this company and one was by its rival. I remember one of the planes had its whole nose open in a huge intake tunnel for the engines, and had one wing that trailed back fairly normally and one on the other side that was tiny and curved forward and upward. Somehow the shape of the tiny wing was supposed to balance out the full-sized wing on the other side. I don't remember what the other plane was like, but it seemed less visually remarkable. There would have been other planes that would never happen, of course; these were just examples that were shown to me.


Then, somehow, the building was back again. Some of the people had managed to go back through time. They wanted desperately to prevent the disaster from happening. I was with them, but I seemed to be somewhat older than I am now (I am currently 51). Instead of having dark brown hair with just a little gray, it now seemed to be all gray.

The other people seemed to be employees of the company, but they must have been somewhere else when the building exploded. They were all fairly young, probably in their twenties, and not particularly tall. I was not as tall as I used to be, but I was still taller than them.

I seemed slimmer than normal, too, and my face was different in some way. I think it may have had some fine lines on it, but it was more than that; it was like I was in someone else's body.

The conference room was mostly composed of huge walls of heavy glass. We were picking up little odds and ends and throwing them at the walls. The impacts made little tapping noises, but the people inside didn't seem to notice. The people outside desperately wanted to get inside and warn the CEO not to do it, that there wasn't any attack and the company wasn't in any danger.

I started trying to bang on the glass with little objects that I found, but the glass wouldn't break and only little tapping sounds resulted. I moved my hand around, trying to scratch the glass, but whatever I was holding wasn't good enough to do it. I picked up something a little heaver and more substantial, with some strong metal in it, and forced it against the glass and moved it around in a big, tall oval, but it just seemed to be leaving some scuff marks.

One of the people decided to try to blow a hole in the glass to get through. He brought some kind of plastic explosive over and smeared it all over in the center of the scuffed oval I had made.

I stepped back a bit and watched him, and something dawned on me. I told him that if he wanted it to happen as it did, to keep on going. He stopped and looked at it, then he stood there and stared at it.

Suddenly, to my left and around the corner, far down the wall a door opened and the executives came out, laughing and talking. We stared at them. The disaster had been averted.


Then the dream changed to a far future time, perhaps thousands of years in the future. The lifespan of people had been greatly lengthened, to hundreds and even thousands of years. I walked through a strange land, full of distorted little people. They were almost cartoonish, with short, impossibly thin arms and legs. Their heads and faces were human, but too big for their bodies and were distorted, sometimes too stretched vertically. The faces seemed to have a lot of fine lines in them, though the skin seemed tight.

As I walked by and looked at one person, his eye on the far side moved way down his face while the other eye, closer to me, moved way up his face and grew somewhat larger as he looked at me and I looked at him. It wasn't like the eyes had actually migrated, it was like the face had stretched and distorted.

Everyone was very short, probably three feet or less, sometimes much less, and they seemed to be engaged in various serf-like tasks. There were various small structures all over the place that provided a least a small bit of shade from overhanging stiff flaps held up by strong wood stems at one end, but they didn't usually provide too much in the way of walls. I got the impression that the structures were actually plants of some type.

There were also occasional large, fairly normal looking people, but still short by our standards, who seemed to be lounging on large wooden flaps that were shaped and/or grown. I came to understand that the vast majority of the people here in this distant future time were in fact the equivalent of serfs, with the rare large person being one of the extremely wealthy owners who lorded over the serfs. Everyone was even dressed in a vague, medieval kind of way.

I could see, a ways off, some actual buildings. They looked something like adobe structures, with tiny, dark windows.

Then, suddenly, two police or military type people were there. They were larger than the serfs, but still very small. They seemed to be wearing some kind of hugely padded armor, with an enormous rounded chest area and huge rounded areas on the shoulders. Their arms and legs were still short and skinny. The color of the armor was pale, washed-out bronze. They were each holding some kind of large futuristic weapon in their hands.

They fired their weapons, then, at some of the serfs who evidently weren't as docile as they should have been. I went over and ripped the head off of one of the police/soldiers. He continued to stand there, and no blood flowed. The other stood there, too, as if frozen.


Then I was in some large building, apparently one-story, in which some kind of party was taking place. The people seemed to be mostly young and fairly normal looking, but not very tall. I didn't seem to be very tall, either. After a while, I followed some people who went out some glass double-doors to a side area of the building or house. It was dark outside.

There was a small metal shed a little ways from the doors. The people went into it, and I followed them to the doorway of the shed and looked inside. The knowledge was then given to me that this was death, and that once people came into the shed they could never leave. In fact, since I was under the roof of the shed, I couldn't leave either. So I reached up with my hand and pulled on the lip of the roof of the shed.

I walked back to the house, then, pulling on the roof of the shed, which extended over me and continued to cover me, expanding like a telescope does. I reached the doors to the house and went through, the roof of the shed passing through things with no trouble.

I tried to call out and talk to some people I saw, but they didn't seem to see or hear me, though they seemed to sense something. I managed to pull the roof some more and got closer to some people and tried again. This time they seemed to hear me, at least some, and talked back, but when they turned to me, their eyes didn't seem to focus on me, like they couldn't quite see me and didn't quite know where I was. I was definitely getting on the end of my tether, though. I could feel the shed pulling at me, and finally retreated back to it.

I went all the way back and into the shed, which had quite a few other people in it, more than just the few that I had originally seen. After a while more people came, in groups, through the doorway and more groups faded in through the walls. The shed had a sunken floor, which was becoming much more sunken, and people were several layers deep. Some groups of people continued to stand, though, even with layers of people on top of them, as the weight didn't seem to be very much.


Then, suddenly, the shed, or at least it's interior, was going down like an elevator. After going down several stories, it deposited the people in a large underground area already full of people, all of which seemed to be having a good time. There were tables and bars and open areas. Everything seemed to be crudely constructed out of wood. The people seemed to be wearing some type of medieval clothing, for the most part, although the people at the house had been dressed more normally. I had noticed earlier that the people in the shed had tended to wear medieval-type clothes, though, some of them almost looking like pirates.

Some of the people here were drinking and some were talking and some were fighting each other, sometimes with weapons. Everyone seemed to be having a good time. I sat or stood at a small table/bar and a friendly man with a small beard talked to me for a while, though I think he may have partially or mainly talked with his mind.

He said that pretty much anything was allowed here, but it was possible to get too extreme. In the rare cases where somebody did do something too extreme, they were sent a few stories further down the elevator, and their soul was then dissolved. I could see in my mind the soul dissolving and spreading out and soaking into the earth.

He also said that a lot of the people didn't know that they were dead yet, and when they found out it could take some adjusting.

After a while I saw my mother come into the room, not from the elevator but from some other rooms that extended from the side. This underground area apparently had rooms and offshoots that went on for a great distance. She was much younger than when I had seen her last, and she didn't seem to notice me, though she wasn't really looking much in my direction. She seemed to be having a good time, but then she got a little frown on her face, and I felt that she had just found out that she was dead. She moved quickly off in a direction that was away from me, talking to people and wearing a little smile but still frowning.

I followed, trying to catch up with her. A lot of people were in the way, though, and I lost sight of her. A few people were on a small wooden platform, acting as entertainers, and the area was particularly crowded. I asked various people if they had seen her, finally even giving her name to them, but no one seemed to know anything.

I continued to go where I thought or hoped she had gone, and I came around a little corner and another small group of entertainers were in a raised area in a recess. They had some kind of musical instruments and were singing. They even seemed to have microphones. The one on the far end looked like Lurch from the Addams Family, except that he was made up to look like Frankenstein's Monster, with green skin and huge red cuts that were crudely stitched together. He looked at me and smiled as he sang.

Someone, maybe him or maybe someone else, it just seemed to hang in the air without a source, was saying, "You know, there might be a way out." Somehow, it was indicated to me that I should continue on off to the side and then go forward through some rooms. The area in question looked much dimmer than the area I had come from, which was brightly lit, though I didn't think about it at the time.

I started to go in the direction that was somehow given to me and all of a sudden I was outside, and alive again. I was in a wide open space that seemed to have a lot of low clouds and even some fog, in a body that was unfamiliar to me, a short young person, but still an adult.