Into the Woods

Photo Credit: Albert Dros on PetaPixel

See “The Dream Factory” for a full list of my shared dreams.

I had this cool dream last night. I don’t really recall what was going on; I was just doing my own thing with a friend or two, I think. We were in a city. Which city isn’t important, only that it was a city atmosphere. At random points, each of the friends I was with would say something about Afrika (and later in the dream I would find that it was spelled like that). Yes, and that was another weird thing, I have been told that usually one way you can determine if you’re dreaming or not is to find a book (in the dream) and open it. The pages will be blank or blurred or something to where you can’t read it. Yet, I remember a sign very clearly reading Meet O’Bamarama! And there was a line on the sidewalk leading into a store. O’Bamarama, I knew, was a famous TV personality. He also created cartoons, I recall.

But the dream wasn’t about O’Bamarama. I remember that my friends and I remarked about this but, again, throughout various casual conversations, my friends kept saying something about Afrika. Whenever I asked why they were bringing up Africa, they always looked at me funny and claim they didn’t say a thing about Africa. More and more, I began to realize that, while I could see their lips move when they said it, they weren’t actually saying it. It was in my head. It was a voice. And the more I comprehended this, the clearer the voice became and the more the voice said.

We passed by a tent along the city street – clearly the home of a transient. The voice instructed me to get into the tent, but I objected. My friends looked at me funny, but again the voice insisted, saying that I needed to rest to ensure the vision would come in clear (or something to that effect). So I did, barely hearing my friends protests – in fact, their objections sounded like cries made underwater.

In the tent, my surroundings started to become fuzzy, and I felt outside myself, in some sort of dreamlike trance. I came to in a rush, hearing my friends’ protests more clearly now. I exited the tent and tried to avert my eyes from my friends’ judgmental glares. We continued walking.

When they asked what that was all about, I couldn’t answer them. I didn’t know. Didn’t quite remember what the vision was about, only that I had had one.

A number of other things happened – I’m fuzzy on the details – but I was having more and more visions. These I remembered with a little more clarity. In one vision, I was seeing a long, sandy shore with a forest butting up to the sand. Across the water was a Cliffside, and the two walls of land led out into a vast ocean. Another vision I was seeing a point deeper into the forest. The water was still visible between the gaps in the trees, but a little walk away now. The ground was bare of many shrubs – compacted pine needles and other tree debris made up the ground in lieu of hard dirt. The evergreens seemed to reach the sky and their canopies provided ample shade in the midday sun. The lens through which I was looking carried its own voice, and frequently I could hear (hear but not feel) the rhythmic panting of weary breath. This vision was seen through the eyes of another. I was his passenger, and it was a he judging by the occasional grunt as he trudged through the woods. I didn’t know his purpose and didn’t see much to his progress, but once in the theater, I had a final vision.

The theater was packed. I sat at the end of the row, midway to the back. I was looking on my smart phone and came across a video. If I remember right, the image before hitting play was of a woman with a worried look on her face, but I never actually played the video at all. When I tried to put my finger on the “play” arrow, I was amazed to see that the arrow – while still in the same lateral area as before – was no longer on the screen, but on my hand that now blocked my view of that part of the screen. I moved my hand again and the arrow was back on screen.

The friend sitting next to me asked about what I was looking at and so I had her push the arrow to check and see if she was seeing what I was seeing. Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped.

“You see that?” I asked.

She was dumbfounded and simply asked, “How is it doing that?”

I explained to her about my other visions and as her eyes began to show understanding, they suddenly lit up.

“Hey! I can push the arrow no!” And before I could say anything else, she did, and suddenly disappeared. I picked up the phone and watched as another vision unfolded. The phone’s screen showed what another was seeing, another who was walking through a wooded area where the subtle waves of a bay could be seen through the trees. The host whose eyes I could see through was looking about frantically, shifting and twisting and turning so that I was beginning to feel sick by it. She was hyperventilating and then finally she spoke a rush of words all in one breath.

“WhereamI? Whatisthis? How…How is this real?”

It was my friend’s voice, and I tried to talk to her, tried to comfort her. At first, she didn’t seem to hear, but after a few more seconds she settled a little and answered my call.

“I’m here!” she said. “I’m here! What is this place?”

I said I didn’t know, but we could find out together, that I could see everything she was seeing.

And then I woke up. I have no idea what the point of that dream was, but it was pretty fun.