Okay got one. I just woke up and I remember a dream I had. I was traveling with two brothers. They were young, one was maybe 15 0r 16 and portly, the other was about 10. We were in a station wagon traveling through a huge mountainous area. Like the opening shot of the Shining. Now we stop at this series of cabins in the middle of the woods where there is some type of Neo-Christian retreat going on. There are a bunch of white people all dressed kind of Abercrombie and Fitch like. They are all ages. From kids to Tween to young adult to middle aged. All in shorts and tee-shirts and polos over waffle knits. All of the waffle knits have the name of some sort of Born Again Christian school on them. One was "Mt. Vernon." Others were like "Hope Springs," Or shit like that. There was also a congregation of very old wizened black people. All in formal Sunday dress. They had a hearse. There was an enormous wooden amphitheater. At it's base was a stage and a curtain. Everything had a pall of grey over it. Behind the curtain there was a dark shallow pool. You could wade through the pool to get to an enormous chalkboard or writing surface. I woke up late, ran down to the theatre but everyone was leaving en masse. I asked my two companions what had happened. I went behind the curtain and into the shallow water. I could not read what was on the board. I began to leave with the older of my two companions - they were brothers I think, and they had been asked to help with all sorts of strange duties that had to be performed throughout the camp. While we are climbing through the amphitheater to get to this weird communal space there are all of these little girls grinning at me. And everybody has like those big blocky college sweaters on with the names of different religious schools. I found another one of those blackboards. One of the duties was make cake, the other was clean-up. Both duties were to be done by R. Crumb. Even my subconscious is lousy at puns. I go through another door and I am on a beach.
It should be noted that this entire dream is grey. Like the color was drained. The sand was not yellow - it was grey. The water was not blue - grey. The dream wasn't black or white, but rather it was all grey. I am on the beach. I am pinned by a woman. I can't remember who she is or why I am pinned. Mick Jagger walks by. He looks forlorn. He shakes my hand. "Hello, Ben" he says. I tell him to have a Merry X-Mas. He smiles sadly and slowly trots off. Ron Wood follows him, sees me, but doesn't make eye contact. Rod Stewart follows Ron Wood. I say "Merry Christmas, Rod." He says something like "We'll see....." and walks off too. That part was really weird and ominous. Actually, it was all pretty ominous.
Then I am back at the retreat (still as grey as I left it) and I am sitting in some kind of cramped communal cabin with different nooks and crannies and discussing what the fuck all of this shit is about with the older brother and how we had better get the fuck out of dodge before something really twisted happens. Because the general consensus around the place was that something really bad was on it's way. Then there was like a manual, or a video manual or something where we watched this little blonde haired professor/outdoorsy type talk about these different interpretations of the apocolypse. Something about how in literature a physical handicap cannot be matched by a psychological one or else it equates to madness. It was really bizarre.. Then she shows this picture of this weird medieval tube. She talks about how it represents the ordering and then re-ordering of chaos and how people believed that that was how the end of the world would come about. The tube was about 4 feet long and had all of these die cast metal figures in it (hahaha metal figures) that were twisted and screaming and frozen. At the far end of the tube (at one end of the tube was a bolt, like the kind you could screw into a wall) there were visible figures, like three or four, who were obviously trying to resist the vacuum that pulled all the other souls? into the breach. the woman called it something with a really long name that i had never heard before. Like "Pendennennennedenoom." I know it sounds crazy. Then she says, when the great re-ordering occurs, and chaos has been ordered and then re-ordered everything will have it's place. The first three things ordered will be "blah, blah, and blah." Which I can't remember now. And the final three things ordered will be "Blah, tobacco, and paz." What the fuck is paz? And that was the end of her speech.. I turned to the older brother and said something. He replied. It was something like "What the fuck are we going to do?" And the dream ended.
There were some obvious apocalyptic overtones to this whole thing. I have these dreams more often than I would like. End of the world type stuff. Sometimes I am in a deserted cityscape other times in the middle of the woods. Sometimes it is right before some impending disaster, sometimes right after. A lot of the time there is a group of children involved. Young kids that need to be rescued. Sometimes I save them, sometimes not. I have fought incarnations of evil in some of the dreams. Some of them faceless, others are represented very clearly. When I was 13 I fought Freddy Krueger in an enormous decrepit skyscraper after racing to the top with a dozen small children. By the time I reached the penthouse suite he had managed to kill all but one child. I threw him out an enormous floor to ceiling window. Another dream had me fighting a 15' tall Marilyn Manson like Anti-Christ figure. It was in a nuclear wrecked junkyard in the middle of a desert. The damn thing was pale as snow, climbed down off of a barb-wire crucifix and everything. There was a yellow school bus behind me filled with children that the damn thing wanted to get at. I can't remember how that one ends. I just remember the monster's long bloody limps stretched out and it's long black greasy hair spilling over its shoulders (shudder).
I don't know why I have these dreams. They pop up every once in a while. I don't think that they are related to stress. At least I hope not. I have tried to look up dream interpretations for this sort of thing but there never seems to be any clear answers. I don't know. If there was a thematic tie to a lot of my dreams it would definitely have to be that. And what's strange is that I am always myself in them. In a lot of my dreams I am someone else. But in these weird fucking armageddon ones I am always Ben. Always just me.....