Dreams: The Dungeon

NOTE: Below is a description of a dream. Text within the parenthesis are exact notes I took upon waking in the middle of the night.

I’ve had nightmares for most of my life. My wife has had to wake me from dreams where ghosts are slowly lifting her and my two kids into the air, or creatures running towards me from dark doorways.

One series of dreams I had over the course of several nights. I started in what seemed like an antique or pawn shop. (They start by entering on old store. Really weird. Things for sale.) I was with other people, but didn’t know who.

Behind a shelf was an elevator. I took this elevator down, leading to massive concrete hallways that echoed with dripping water. These hallways were infinitely long, and in this dream, I remember having a sense that there were thousands of floors to this underground substructure both above and below me. (Long hallway with empty elevators. Bottom floor thousands of feet below.) The walls were gray concrete, lined with cracks where dying green plants pushed themselves through. The hall had huge ceilings, perhaps a hundred feet. I felt tiny, feeling the mass of the entire Earth around me. Old elevators lined the walls on both sides with huge horizontal bars closing off the shaft, rusted in place. Some shafts were empty. Others had platforms that resembled the first elevators ever made. Huge gears and chains hold them in place, keeping them from falling into the eternal darkness below. (Walking the hallways. Tall ceilings. Each elevator is an old broken technology. Huge gears. Massive bars holding up the doors closed. Gray green.)

As I walked the hallway, there was a voice coming from somewhere, a memory from the store where someone told me to stay away from the elevators. (“Stay away from the elevators. If you go in, you don’t come back.”) Though one of these shafts caught my attention, distracting me from the ominous warning. There was a woman on this particular platform, her face hidden beneath a mat of wet black hair. In my dream, I tap her shoulder. She lifts her head, looking at me with eyes empty of irises and a face with no mouth or nose. Just huge white eyes like cue balls.

It’s strange how in dreams I can have the same awareness of things I have when I’m awake. For example, I can often tell if someone is having an emotional moment, perhaps seeking help or support. In this dream, I knew this woman needed help. That she was trying to show me something. Something that only I could see. Needed to see. It’s because of this awareness that I wasn’t frightened – though I should have been terrified. It’s moments like this in dreams where I often am half awake – both in the dream and in reality – that I’m trying to scream but nothing comes out. A nightmarish juxtaposition where the manifestation of my deepest terror has a grip on me, keeping me from breathing or moving, while my body is too asleep to wake itself up.

I grab one of the chains, hanging from darkness above as black as the dark matter between the stars. I pull, and the platform lowers. The woman makes a terrible sound, tries getting up to stop me but falls as the weight of the platform becomes too much for me to hold. We start falling, faster and faster. The walls become lined with black text, numbers blurring together like lines of compiling computer code. (Numbers in different fonts. Different symbols, as if these were the first numbers written, the first forms. Each a different size. Spread out across the wall, but becoming less dense towards the bottom.)

Suddenly the platform stops, jerking, almost knocking me off. The woman falls as the platform shifts, angling. I grab a chain, wrapping it around my arm just as the platform tips, going full vertical. The woman falls, grabbing a rusted beam protruding from the wall.

Below is the bottom of the elevator shaft. Debris litters the floor, perhaps fifty feet down. Broken beams of varying length reach into the shaft, black and brown with decay. Things hang from some of the beams by thin lines. I can’t make out what they are in the darkness. (Chains hung above her. Other things did too. Appendages. Floating in open space. As if the flesh had rotten so long it was smooth and brown. Like there was no gravity.)

The pile of debris catches my attention again. It seemed to move and churn like water. (A pool of liquid bubbled in one corner. Dark enough that i couldn’t tell what color, but a sick, dark green seemed to fit.) I focus on it in the eerie ambient light that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, illuminating only what I’m supposed to see. (Light came from everywhere and nowhere, illuminating only the corners of the wall with the numbers, reaching up.)

There were people – what were people – couched against the walls, knees pulled up to their chests, heads low. They weren’t fully formed bodies though, rather outlines, sketches of what would become more detailed beings, like an artist’s early depictions of the human body. The bodies that were closer to the bubbling pool resembled bodies less and less. (People – if they could be described that way – sat on the opposite wall, all looking up. Chains clanked, being the loudest sound. The shaft faded to blackness high above, the numbers and symbols just shaping into one number large enough to run the entire length of the wall. A few people were humming. They sat on beams reaching out from the wall. Some had faces of humans. Others just had the shape of humans. Faceless, bald and tinged skin as if in the sun too long. They didn’t move, but seemed to know I was there. No eyes, ears or mouths, just round broken spheres where heads should have been. Hands with no fingers. As if time took away one appendage at a time.)

The dream ended there.

I tried to draw what I remembered. My initial sketches are below. I had ChatGPT clean these up, and the results were haunting.

I dreamt this back in 2022. Of the dream, I wrote: This is the story of what our souls experience when we made decisions in reality.

Until the next nightmare. Thanks for reading.