warning: This post contains a lot of gruesome, violent details so sensitive readers may wish to avoid it.
Last night was one of the worst nightmares I've had in awhile. I dreamed about a friend of mine who organizes events where trauma-based mind control is a main topic of discussion, and for some reason I was reading her personal emails. Whether or not I had been given permission to do so or not was ambiguous. In the real world, reading a friend's personal emails without their permission is not something I would ever choose to do because it's a violation of trust, however that's what happened in the dream and it's probably absurd to apologize for dream activity(By the way, it's probably not a coincidence that email intrusions have been an issue in my personal life over the past couple months, an obvious example of my subconscious inserting itself into an otherwise "manufactured" dream). One email was written by a person in our network who wrote "We've been pretending to be friends, but now things are going to change". Then I was at a national park with a stocky brown-haired man with a moustache who had been buying me clothes. In reaction to noises coming from somewhere off the trail, the man began shooting his gun into the trees, at which point crowds near the parking lot went into a panic and people ran in every direction. He then told me that he was an operative who had been sent to kill me, and I was subsequently sequestered inside my house, trying to reason with the same sociopath for no good reason at all. I was having a hard time articulating my words and felt that I may have been drugged, that it was very important to stay awake and coherent even though it was hard to talk. It felt a lot like the sleep paralysis dreams I've had in the past. Then he said "Guess what? I'm right outside your window", and I woke up, right around 3 AM.
I didn't go back to sleep immediately because I knew I would go straight back to the dream like what usually happens with these epic nightmares that last the whole night. Instead I got online to check my blog stats only to see that someone was reading a previous blog post describing a different version of the same nightmare at the same time all this was happening. When I finally fell back asleep at 4 AM I indeed went straight back to the same dream. This time I was at a get-together hosted by the same friend mentioned above. The killer was there and he ran at me across the room with a syringe with a needle about a foot long pointed directly at me. I managed to grab his arm, wrench the needle out of his hand and plunge the needle deep into his chest, after which he seemed to have disappeared. Afterwards people were milling about, and some of them were even defending the man's character, stating that I was just "overreacting". I wasn't. The best part of all this is that the dream was abruptly interrupted by the sound of my dog whining, which is only the first or second time that he's done this in the nearly 6 months I've had him. Normally he waits for me to wake up before making these kind of requests. The first thing I saw upon awakening this morning was his snout pointed at my face from a few inches away, hooked over the edge of the bed. He sleeps on the floor because he's a growling bed hog and this behavior disturbs my sleep.
Last night was the third time now where I've had a dream about killing a contract/serial killer. All of these dreams have occurred over the past year and a half or so. In the last one, I was a shop employee for a serial killer who had been storing body parts in his fridge and freezer, like a stereotypical horror movie. I was responsible for routine maintenance tasks such as washing dishes and cleaning the floor. Basic janitorial stuff. One day I asked the killer a question that inadvertently revealed my hesitance to continue the work(It's been awhile so I don't remember it). Not too long afterwards he pulled the same move as the killer above, rushing at me from across the room, only this time he had a knife instead of a needle. In response I grabbed a meat cleaver from one of the racks and plunged it deep into his chest, again just like the other dream. This time, he would not stay dead (another horror movie cliche) and I had to keep stabbing him, eventually dismembering the killer completely before he was no longer a threat. Recurring serial killer dreams are a problem that have been with me since childhood, only up until the recent past I had always been helpless and immobilized in all of them. I've felt much more of a sense of resolution from the recent dreams, although, really, it would probably be for the best if they didn't exist at all. I'm looking forward to the day when they're gone for good.
This morning when I woke up I realized yesterday was Candlemas, also called Imbolc and Brigid, an astrological holiday that is supposed to be a potent time for divination and invocation work. Around 10 AM, I called my friend who organizes the events. She later told me that she was too groggy to respond, but upon seeing my phone number pop up, her first thought was that I had one of the dreams too. She called me a few hours later to tell me about her nightmare. It was so much like the post-apocalyptic dream I had this past December that I pulled the post I wrote about it up on my laptop to share it with her. As I was reading it, she said "What did you say about gangs?", and I had to inform her that this part was in the next sentence. Her dream was about the also stereotypical zombie apocalypse. Just like in mine, there had been a complete breakdown of civil society, with gangs and mafia organizations running rampant. All sporting events and holidays had been cancelled, and anyone wandering the streets was subjected to murder, beatings, rape and theft. The smell of urine and feces pervaded public buildings, and this contamination provided an avenue for spreading disease. Schooling was a right, not a privilege, so some people were able to maintain some semblance of order (probably within walled security compounds, although she didn't specify that part). Things got so bad that people were trying to get back into the prisons just to get away from the zombie hoards. She later sent me an email that included the following quotes: "they were unable to break down doors, unlock them, or break open windows, so once inside, one was relatively safe...Gangs took over camps and other places where people congregated. Having the street skills they have, they took full advantage of it and basically enslaved large groups of people, trading "protection" for all their valuables (which was now currency since regular money wasn't being used)...Cigarettes and similar things were used as currency. They kept people captive and controlled everything. Basically the lunatics taking over the asylum...People all over tried to migrate to find safer areas, and all over the country they were lugging suitcases and bags, many of which just got confiscated by the gangs who started taking control. With so many people so scared and confused, it created the perfect situation for them to do whatever they wanted, and there was no one to stop them. I saw no police (doesn't mean they weren't in some places, I know what I saw was by no means complete).
Sanitation became a real problem, with water being shut off in many places (even places where it should have remained working) and this really contributed to the contamination/infection spreading, but people seemed unaware that this was the case. Conflicts between gangs also became an issue, as they tried to grab power, build armies, get resources. To kill the zombies, decapitation was best. The ones I saw seemed more (bleah) "fresh", with discolored, blueish skin with some tearing of the skin." I randomly pulled up the legendary metal band Candlemass on Youtube to include a track in this post, and quite coincidentally, the first track that came up was an epic zombie video a la Michael Jackson's Thriller. Excuse the morbid humor, but...wow. I can't stop watching this. :-)
