Tag: church

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Dream Journal

Throwing Knives at Me

Chicken John needs my help to pull a trick in some deal he’s trying to pull off. He’s allowed me back into his circle of trust for this purpose. It’s the friend group I had a decade ago. He doesn’t realize that I don’t care about the social pressure anymore, and that when I’m asked what I think of the deal I’ll just tell the truth. He gets publicly furious at me and starts throwing knives towards me — he’s somehow allowed to do that, since no one will stop him. The knives land point-on, pinging into wood and vibrating with their impact. One lands above my head, another clatters off a low wall. I grab one, not sure what I mean to do (perhaps use it as evidence) but it feels more dangerous to run with it than have something to defend myself with.

This dream wakes me up early and I have to get myself back to sleep. The next few dreams share a similar setting, without any of the plot elements.

Chicken is living at a remote rural compound which is a former hardware store. It’s large and feels like it’s open air, though not having a roof doesn’t seem to matter. It’s down a straight hilled slope and a concrete drive, as if the land was cleared long ago. It’s big enough that various aisles feel abandoned even with the scattered projects and improvements people have done. I sense that there are frequent visitors but few besides Chicken that will commit to living there. It seems like he’s still operating like it’s ten years ago and the transformative power of the art will just carry through on whatever big project he wants to do.

The same area becomes a Mormon church — no Chicken, no rural art colony. I’m part of a team which conspires to steal a ritually important object from the church. This is actually a set-up conspired with the church leadership to boost congregation morale and brief that the object (a book, a breastplate?) actually is mystical. We’re a bunch of urban occult-y weirdoes so we seem perfect for the task. My school friend Robby T. is one of the churchgoers, which makes sense because he was Mormon. The heist does work, but we end up hiding the object within the big church, in one of the windows, facing the non-usual direction. This feels almost like a prank, since the churchgoers don’t recognize it that way.

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Dream Journal

Encouraging A Young Girl’s Campground Waterfall Recitation

I’m in a house with my brother Patrick. The house is built with half walls, quarter walls. It’s modernist but neglected, and we are guests without a host. Reminds me of darkened apartments from other dreams, places I’ve lived where I’ve discovered unused rooms. Patrick takes up the task of picking a new animal to represent the Inca Empire, to replace the llama.

I’m later flying around the neighborhood, skipping along a narrow brick wall at the edge of a religious building’s property. Idly I fantasize of visiting each and all of the different denominations nearby. Reminds me of my childhood street in Eureka, California between ages 4 and 8.

I fly back to a campsite where we recently stayed, just off the road. I have to retrieve three items my group left behind because they “couldn’t pack it all” without my help. I have a view through pillars at the edge of the camp, and spot my mentor and his young daughter approaching. Unseen, I wait behind a waterfall window between pillars. The daughter begins a classical poetic recitation to an audience. I’m able to crouch/slide onto the floor in front of her mid-performance, giving her a reassuring nod and encouragement that steers her performance toward success. I can’t tell if her dad was withholding this kind of approval until the end, but I’m able to swoop in and give guidance she was lacking.

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Dream Journal

Suzie the Mechanical Brass Goat

I’m playing tuba in a marching band. Have to haul it back from the field in pieces. When I get to the enclosed, beige, semi-circular practice room I have lengthy difficulties assembling it — the band has already started playing. The pieces for a brand new percussion drum the size of a person are laid out on the floor. Since those are clearly present, I consider playing that instead.

The brass of the instruments reminds me of a friendly goat, Suzie. She’s mechanical, also brass, and we amble together down a tree-lined sidewalk in a archetypical sunny American suburb (away from the band). I spot some Halloween stuff in the branches of a tree between the sidewalk and the street, forgotten so long ago that the tree is now growing through the plastic decorations. Reminds me of an image I saw recently, of a Barbie doll placed by someone’s granddaughter being engulfed by branches. Even though it’s enjoyably bizarre, I climb the tree to retrieve the spooky plastic junk. Suzie watches (perhaps giving commentary) and it’s a shiny, fresh, sunny experience, abnormally wholesome.

I’m later cruising on my motorbike down a curvy dirt road, fast. Hand-tilled grain fields border it. I narrowly dodge Indian pedestrians carving around corners, following the road’s course between blocky grey utilitarian buildings (like the setting from a fair dream on Feb 19, 2021 at 11:29 am). I get as far as a narrow corridor whose walls are made of train cars. I can’t reverse, and have to navigate back through twice. It feels like I’m towing a trailer or three. Headed back where I came now, I pull off a few wheelies — having the thought that I’ve only ever done that in dreams before (this is true). I soon notice (due to another person’s recent use of it) some pieces have shaken off the bike as I’m riding, importantly 3/4 of the front instrument panel. I manage to see a bit fly off over a fence and decide to hunt it down.

This neglected industrial area is officially off-limits, but also officially abandoned. I suspect it’s still quite inhabited though and used for all sorts of under-the-radar activity. This seems confirmed when I discover rows of diagonal pews inside one decayed warehouse, carefully draped in elegant purple fabric. I hide between these pews as I hear fumbling at the bolted front door. A few furtive-looking priests enter, and I consider announcing myself to avoid a potentially worse situation startling them. Yet I seem to overhear them talking about me without using my name, wishing perhaps to recruit me.

I do volunteer for some project cleaning up a diesel locomotive covered in grass. I scrub it’s side skirt clean of flecks and debris, leaving tall stalks of grass to grow proud and green over the engine’s back/top. It’s taken on an expedition up a marshy stream to study dinosaurs living nearby, blending in with the flora. Back in the yard we hide as a few mafia guys come to inspect the locomotive. A goon tears off the grass in one cohesive layer, saddening me even though I’m still proud of how healthy the greenery I helped grow turned out. We’re trying to trick these mafiosos somehow, and I know all my plants were integral to the plan.

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Dream Journal

Family of Church-Neighbors, Destroyed

An abandoned pioneer-era church at edge of the freeway in my hometown, a place I’ve explored in a dream at least once before, in the form of a small kid. My wife and I are able to explore it a bit — but some family has built their home right against it, with big windows facing the rustic interior. They threaten us, accusing us of trespassing, and in impulsive righteousness I use special powers to electrocute them. My wife does the same, wiping out this entitled family who constructed their modern ritzy hellhole against sacred ground. As we leave, my wife points out a security camera DVR — I fry it to hell, too. I note the time I wake up from this dream as exactly 4:44 am.

In Disneyland, I sneak up a narrow obscure trench up the side of a hill. From my vantage, I can see broad open walking areas where people mill about, fairytale mountains seeming more like Middle-Earth than The Matterhorn. I reach the top and can see through a triangular gap into an exhibit of animals — gorillas, flamingoes, perfectly sculpted fake natural surrounds. As I lie prone in the small area where I can peek, I realize the park staff must somehow know I’m here — so many security cams, so much well-preened presentation. But they let me gaze secretively nonetheless, enjoying a view someone, sometime must’ve made on purpose.

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Dream Journal

The Boss, The Barbarian, The Beast

Sharing a bed with a female boss, and a kid who joins us. It’s quality snuggle time but I have to be a good sport on account there’s an orange-lighted lamp behind us, one I just barely can’t reach while we’re ensconced together.

Female boss and I leave the relative comfort of this bedroom, a place which has the sensation of a single-room ground floor unit of a multi-story underground parking garage. The neighborhood is the dusty, sunny, oldest part of my hometown (although I don’t think of it as Cathedral City at any point, the architecture and streets are no other). We’re leading a class single-file while we roam the near-empty streets, searching for even one business compatible with ours. Finally, in a wider old-west-ish double collonnaded warehouse area, I suggest that the business there — in publishing — is close enough to journalism that it’s worth pursuing.

Unfortunately there’s a brutish barbarian who guards nearby; he manages to kill all of us before we even realize what’s going on. We’re left — not quite dead, but as good as dead — to perish slowly in the sun strung up on a tall post, like a ship’s crow’s nest. But there’s a saving grace — we’ve got a Brock Samson bodyguard just for such an occasion. He hides under a bridge until the hulking brute passes overhead, stabbing his machete through chipped slats and impaling the aggressor in brutal revenge. We’re taken down from our gallows and recover with no ill effects.

Going a little further in the small near-deserted town, there is a wide shallow lake to the right (something like I’ve seen before in dreams, a wistful view with balconies worthy for gazing in reflection) and to the left, what looks like what could be an ornate orthodox church. I’m pleased to go and explore, knowing I’m versed in how to behave in almost any religious building. Turns out it’s a Hindu shrine to Ganesh, one with specific obeisances to enter. My dad advances too quickly through the entryway crowded with votives. I watch him try to balance on two upturned djembe drums, not quite successfully.

Inside the building, I chat with a few close friends as we sit on barstools. Idly we gaze toward the adjacent wall, the only light in the room, adorned with a massive floor-to-ceiling aquarium — and at least one monstrous inhabitant. It looks like a swimming centipede, maybe a polychaete worm, as if from the Ordovician era. My sibling Patrick seems quite concerned — it’s large, aggressive, and very near. Yet I know something about the tank, reassuring him “that glass may look only 10, perhaps 12 inches thick, but it’s not. That’s what we may I’m call ‘arcane glass’, and for that thing it’s actual measure is [literally] infinity inches.” I’m quite serious with this assessment. As if to punctuate my point, the thing winds up to the glass again, bigger, meaner, with a frightening face, and hits it full speed — which makes a satisfyingly tiny donk sound.

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Dream Journal

12 Elements, 12 Deities, 12 Powers

Heritage church out forgotten in the desert of my hometown. A screen of tamarisk trees hides it between my middle school and the mountains beyond. No one has visited in years. I climb the rafters inside, feeling transported to an earlier time. Perhaps the reason I wasn’t reported to the authorities exploring such a place is because I was just a lone kid. I hope they preserve this place, even though no one seems to love it but me.

An airplane journey, within a strange morphing and expanding fuselage. At the beginning several portal-making objects of power are released to 12 special passengers, forming the side of good. They are hunted by an evil master witch with broods of alien slave dogs, zergling-like. Some good-siders hide behind doors, some in hidden passageways, some in other time periods, some in other realities, all enduring attacks from the witch and her brood.

Each object they are blessed with are aligned with certain elements of the periodic table, and certain deities of the Greek Pantheon, granting them unique powers. They learn to wield them one by one — the dream is broken into chapters and has an unusually sophisticated structure.

Finally in the last chapter it’s revealed that Element № 1, aligned to Zeus king of the gods, has all the while been overseeing events unfold with their sublime omniscience. The left side of the movie theater inside the main fuselage has remained mysteriously empty during the pitched battles. It turns out to be a staging area for those special objects-holders who reach the last step in their training, now hiding in plain sight. They take their seats wordlessly, building anticipation one by one with each assembled conspirator, and finally together open the small sealed chamber to the right of the screen — that the witch and her hunters never even noticed. The supreme holder is revealed, having learned his training instantly, observing all, but withholding his omnipotence until the time was ripe.

The witch is gobsmacked, the energy in the room electric. She is defeated without a battle, finally seeing what has played out.

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Dream Journal

Stalker’s Ridge, Tabernacle Airship

Driving in a rented sleeper van southward from San Francisco with my family group, a brother and sister. We pull off at twilight onto a barren peninsula jutting into ocean. While the campfire we make is pleasant enough, the van becomes trapped and our dark environs become distinctly spooky. We clamber up the side of a sharp rocky ridge. From the chipped line of its knife-edge peak, I spot the shadowed outlines of enemies stalking us, nearly surrounding us. I don’t have an end for this dream… sorry.

As a kid I famously broke into the Mormon Tabernacle Airship. Now, as circumstance would have it, I’m being asked to do so once again. I make my way through a side entrance, timing events so I blend into a large crowd just filing in for a special occasion. For a short while I wait in a winding line, then matter-of-factly jump the square barricade into a reliquary with the appearance of a backgammon arrangement. I deftly pluck a hollow pin hidden in a scepter which grants me the power to skip around short distances. Mischievously I hop from alcove to alcove in the labyrinthine line, confounding the sleepy crowds attending for flat religious duty.

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Dream Journal

Unwieldy Car, Stealing from Church

In the big backseat of car, one practically too big to drive. A big sunroof, which is actually the rear window. From a driveway out, going up a slope onto a ramp, the engine isn’t quite powerful enough. It even takes a long time to brake.

Onward. Stealing from a church gift shop, inside the church itself — an elaborate English Gothic style cathedral. I look out the back window with my wife as we leave, not feeling too bad about it honestly.