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The Library dream
Aug. 30th, 2009 10:55 amI've heard that the actual time span of dreams is only a few seconds, but when you're in them it seems that they can go on for the whole night. This... is a remarkable one.
Though this place was almost irrelevant to the rest of the dream, it opened on the inside of a gloomy tower - there was a man standing on a rickety wooden platform in its centre, and the walls of the tower dropped down into seeming eternity. A monster (which I called "the monster", even though it took the form of a large blue stuffed-looking dinosaur) dropped a woman down the pit and he dived down after her, catching her in mid-air and speeding down the way. After a long fall, the walls turned into prison bars, and he reached out and tapped his free hand on them, trying to slow himself somehow, eventually catching them in a good way and slowing them both down enough to collapse on to the floor at the bottom of the pit. Suddenly, instead of a nameless man and woman, it was me and Whitney, and as we lay on the stone floor looking up at the spiral stairs that led back to the top of the tower, we decided that it was time to go home.
We were staying with her family, somewhere. It could have been meant to be their actual house, but people never live anywhere like where they actually live when they're in dreams. I remember that there was a long driveway over a number of hills, and that it eventually led to a beachside town - a road with a lot of shopfronts on it, and then a sharp slope down to a beach that stretched off into the distance about six feet below. On the beach was a runway for incoming planes - it seemed that this was an island and the people who lived there used personal planes to get anywhere, which makes me wonder where the long driveway led to.
As I mentioned, it was time for Whitney to go home (not me - just her, for some reason) so her dad brought out his little plane and began to pack it. Throughout me watching this scene the thing he was packing actually varied between a biplane and a white Lotus of some sort, and a mafia boss looking man might have turned up and "helped" pack by throwing luggage through the windscreen, but the details of this part are a bit hazy.
Now, this is where it starts to get a bit strange. Or rather, where it transforms from a weird dream into one of my dreams.
At the end of the road, there was a library - or a building that I somehow knew to call a library. Inside the building was a round wood-panelled room, rather like the building on the island from Myst. When I went in, I was alone. Bookcases were strewn about the room, but there were no books - instead, on the empty shelves and on haphazardly placed pillars were wooden ornaments that looked like misshapen coconuts. I wandered around, hearing The Heart of the Unicorn playing from somewhere.
Several people, who looked like students, started coming in. As we all stepped in different places on the floor, some of the coconut ornaments fell off the shelves and split on the floor - nobody knocked into them, they just started shaking and falling on their own when a certain part of the room was moved into. The pieces from the shattered coconuts began to form an ugly book on a pedestal to the left of the room, a crude mass of blank pages that looked like they were made out of bark haphazardly hacked into shape.
As the people who had come into the library gathered around the book, I saw that each of the others had a smaller bark-book clasped to their chests, except two of them - one at the pedestal and another in the watching group. The girl at the pedestal shut the book and presented it to the other bookless girl, who took it and held it, saying out loud how happy she was that her friend had gifted this to her.
Suddenly she looked down and screamed as she realized that the book had fused to her hands. The others looked down at theirs as well, and a panic broke out as the others saw the same thing happening. After a few seconds of struggling, all of them - including the girl who wasn't holding a book - gradually faded out.
I went outside again and looked down at the beach. There was something wrong with the runway, but I can't remember what it was - perhaps a tear at the end, or something blocking it. Whatever it was, I saw a passenger plane land with some difficulty, putting the brakes on hard, and struggling to a halt at the end.
Another, much bigger, plane, flew in behind it, and tried to brake as well, but wobbled crazily as it got halfway down and veered off to the left of the runway, still going at a huge speed. Its wing hit the back of the first plane and ripped right through it, slicing the whole plane perfectly lengthways at the height of the row of windows. Finally it stopped, leaning on its side.
Still two more planes came in - both little two-seater planes. The first of them put its brakes on hard and slithered to a halt after performing an out of control half circle and rested against the ruins of the first plane. The second bounced on the runway, cartwheeling over the plane that had just landed and only just avoiding the people inside with its wing, then exploded as it hit the ground again.
By this time I was running back along the road, away from the carnage, and shouting at the people milling about to get inside, or lie down and cover their heads. I ran with them, back to the other end of the beach, and turned around to watch the final huge fireball as the wrecks finally went up all together, jumping from side to side to get away from the flaming sharp pieces that were blasted towards us.
I went back to the library, and something told me - or I just realized - that the events in there were upsetting the balance of nature. I'm not sure if going back there reset time and I was trying again, or anything like that, but still... I watched the scene that I described above play out again, with the uncomfortable meaningless parody of a book being formed from the coconut shards, and the struggle as the people were... taken out of existence... by them, and went outside once more.
This time the world had changed differently. Everything that I had done up to the point I had arrived in the town in the dream (that I hadn't been aware of before) had been undone, or twisted and reversed... tornadoes blew around the sea, and a fisherman (or something) told me that he had been able to make the journey home in ten hours thanks to me before, but now it took him one hundred hours.
An angry face rose out of the sea (was it upset that I had brought the storms back, as well?) I remember some sort of conversation with it, then I was hurled away out to sea and towards the monster that the dream had opened with. And... that's all that I can remember.
What does any of this mean? Apart from giving me a suspicion that the Book of Revelation was just John's livejournal's dream tag.
Though this place was almost irrelevant to the rest of the dream, it opened on the inside of a gloomy tower - there was a man standing on a rickety wooden platform in its centre, and the walls of the tower dropped down into seeming eternity. A monster (which I called "the monster", even though it took the form of a large blue stuffed-looking dinosaur) dropped a woman down the pit and he dived down after her, catching her in mid-air and speeding down the way. After a long fall, the walls turned into prison bars, and he reached out and tapped his free hand on them, trying to slow himself somehow, eventually catching them in a good way and slowing them both down enough to collapse on to the floor at the bottom of the pit. Suddenly, instead of a nameless man and woman, it was me and Whitney, and as we lay on the stone floor looking up at the spiral stairs that led back to the top of the tower, we decided that it was time to go home.
We were staying with her family, somewhere. It could have been meant to be their actual house, but people never live anywhere like where they actually live when they're in dreams. I remember that there was a long driveway over a number of hills, and that it eventually led to a beachside town - a road with a lot of shopfronts on it, and then a sharp slope down to a beach that stretched off into the distance about six feet below. On the beach was a runway for incoming planes - it seemed that this was an island and the people who lived there used personal planes to get anywhere, which makes me wonder where the long driveway led to.
As I mentioned, it was time for Whitney to go home (not me - just her, for some reason) so her dad brought out his little plane and began to pack it. Throughout me watching this scene the thing he was packing actually varied between a biplane and a white Lotus of some sort, and a mafia boss looking man might have turned up and "helped" pack by throwing luggage through the windscreen, but the details of this part are a bit hazy.
Now, this is where it starts to get a bit strange. Or rather, where it transforms from a weird dream into one of my dreams.
At the end of the road, there was a library - or a building that I somehow knew to call a library. Inside the building was a round wood-panelled room, rather like the building on the island from Myst. When I went in, I was alone. Bookcases were strewn about the room, but there were no books - instead, on the empty shelves and on haphazardly placed pillars were wooden ornaments that looked like misshapen coconuts. I wandered around, hearing The Heart of the Unicorn playing from somewhere.
Several people, who looked like students, started coming in. As we all stepped in different places on the floor, some of the coconut ornaments fell off the shelves and split on the floor - nobody knocked into them, they just started shaking and falling on their own when a certain part of the room was moved into. The pieces from the shattered coconuts began to form an ugly book on a pedestal to the left of the room, a crude mass of blank pages that looked like they were made out of bark haphazardly hacked into shape.
As the people who had come into the library gathered around the book, I saw that each of the others had a smaller bark-book clasped to their chests, except two of them - one at the pedestal and another in the watching group. The girl at the pedestal shut the book and presented it to the other bookless girl, who took it and held it, saying out loud how happy she was that her friend had gifted this to her.
Suddenly she looked down and screamed as she realized that the book had fused to her hands. The others looked down at theirs as well, and a panic broke out as the others saw the same thing happening. After a few seconds of struggling, all of them - including the girl who wasn't holding a book - gradually faded out.
I went outside again and looked down at the beach. There was something wrong with the runway, but I can't remember what it was - perhaps a tear at the end, or something blocking it. Whatever it was, I saw a passenger plane land with some difficulty, putting the brakes on hard, and struggling to a halt at the end.
Another, much bigger, plane, flew in behind it, and tried to brake as well, but wobbled crazily as it got halfway down and veered off to the left of the runway, still going at a huge speed. Its wing hit the back of the first plane and ripped right through it, slicing the whole plane perfectly lengthways at the height of the row of windows. Finally it stopped, leaning on its side.
Still two more planes came in - both little two-seater planes. The first of them put its brakes on hard and slithered to a halt after performing an out of control half circle and rested against the ruins of the first plane. The second bounced on the runway, cartwheeling over the plane that had just landed and only just avoiding the people inside with its wing, then exploded as it hit the ground again.
By this time I was running back along the road, away from the carnage, and shouting at the people milling about to get inside, or lie down and cover their heads. I ran with them, back to the other end of the beach, and turned around to watch the final huge fireball as the wrecks finally went up all together, jumping from side to side to get away from the flaming sharp pieces that were blasted towards us.
I went back to the library, and something told me - or I just realized - that the events in there were upsetting the balance of nature. I'm not sure if going back there reset time and I was trying again, or anything like that, but still... I watched the scene that I described above play out again, with the uncomfortable meaningless parody of a book being formed from the coconut shards, and the struggle as the people were... taken out of existence... by them, and went outside once more.
This time the world had changed differently. Everything that I had done up to the point I had arrived in the town in the dream (that I hadn't been aware of before) had been undone, or twisted and reversed... tornadoes blew around the sea, and a fisherman (or something) told me that he had been able to make the journey home in ten hours thanks to me before, but now it took him one hundred hours.
An angry face rose out of the sea (was it upset that I had brought the storms back, as well?) I remember some sort of conversation with it, then I was hurled away out to sea and towards the monster that the dream had opened with. And... that's all that I can remember.
What does any of this mean? Apart from giving me a suspicion that the Book of Revelation was just John's livejournal's dream tag.
