Demon Dream

My wife and I were at some sort of art class, standing at big tables in a big room, many people bustling about or working at their projects. We had to make a false shirt front, a dicky, out of paper, and cut a few button holes and sew around them. We weren't sure why.

We came up with something, a kind of red sash false shirt front with a small crest of arms or badge of some sort lower down -- I remember thinking it would not be visible if I wore my jacket buttoned over it -- but it had only one button hole. A teacher said it had to have three and took scissors and stabbed our work, piercing it and going down into the table's wood. Noticing the teacher had once been a member of Monty Python, perhaps Michael Palin or Eric Idle but serious now, I remarked, "Yeah, the heck with the table, damned wood, growing all over the place."

There was no reaction to this mockery and we were told to get to work. I was quickly frustrated trying to sew around a button hole by hand, to reinforce it. I remember it kept resembling an eyeball and I was sewing around the lids, not to shut the eye, but to surround it with reinforcement so it wouldn't rip further when it opened. Failing at this, I was shooed away by some older women, who took over the sewing, and instead given a task.

I was to take to take a child of about 8 or 10 to fetch something in his apartment in the building across the street. The child was swarthy to the point of being burnished, and I was wary of him, but agreed to go along because the kid seemed to be okay with me. I got the impression he was somewhat hard to handle, maybe a trouble maker, but it seemed I was able to keep him generally reigned in.

We crossed a cobbled street, on a warm day, bright sun at the top of the buildings but us in shadow. I got the impression we were in Italy, probably Rome but not necessarily.

We entered an older but nice apartment building and climbed stairs. The lobby was old marble flooring and the stairs were mahogany and some creaked, but it was sturdy. The railings and corner pieces were carved nicely, again obviously old but still sturdy and serviceable.

At the third floor we paused and I unlocked the door with the key I'd been given, and in the boy scampered. I followed more slowly, wary of the place. It was big, with many rooms and halls, and the air was warm but not really stuffy. No scents of mildew or other older apartment smells. The boy proved to be demonic, making eerie statements far too creepy and mature for his age. He first alarmed, then scared me, and I remember humoring him to stay on his good side, not wanting to upset or anger him.

As we looked for what ever it was, he kept showing me things, like toys or various items in the apartment. All unsettled or alarmed me. Some gave me the willies, others dizzied me, and some just plain revolted me. The boy himself was matter-of-fact about most of the things. "We have one of these," or "look at this," or even, "how do you like my...?" I remember catching glimpses of a demon inside him; every now and then, for an instant, I spotted a kind of dark blur, or overlaid image, and his eyes and smile were terrifying. It was as if the demon in him was taunting me, knowingly drawing me deeper into some kind of trap.

He kept looking for something, and saying he had to get something, and I pretended to help him look while being nervous about entering the apartment deeper. Finally I'd had enough and tried to leave, only to discover the hallways were like a maze. I paused, calmed myself, and got my bearings, then tried again, and finally found the door.

It was closed and locked. I tried the key, and it did not work. I was locked in, and sensed with low key panic something coming up behind me.

It was the boy.

I cringed, wondering if he would grow claws or fangs and pounce, but he simply walked up and said, "Okay, we can go back now," and the key worked this time when I tried it. As I stepped out of the apartment he slipped past me and scampered down the stairs, while behind me all the lights and appliances and so on switched on and off rapidly, over and over, and things in the apartment moved as if in an ecstasy of dark delight.

Scooting forward, I slammed the door and hurried down the stairs with the feeling I'd narrowly escaped something. I followed the boy, who waited for me down in the lobby, where the light came through opaque white windows to give things a kind of aquarium glow. His eyes watching me come down the staircase looked huge and ancient.

We went out into the sunshine and warmth, crossed the cobbles, and I awoke feeling as if I'd dodged a demon of some kind. Am I haunted? Am I under demonic attack? Am I ridiculous to ask such questions?

Am I ever really awake?

/// /// ///

Birth Dream

A dozen people, me included, in an airport, were separated and herded into a holding room. We wondered what was going on; it was a motley mix, no pattern among us discernible. A door at the other corner of the room opened and we were confronted by a tall, naked person of a golden color, definitely Other, who held aloft a glowing wand. He waved us forward and no one moved, but then there were others like him among us, herding us again.

As each person passed through the doorway, the wand was waved over and around the person’s head a few times, then the person was pushed through. As a big, boisterous woman ducked through, she smiled and swung around to lower her head for more. “Oh, I can feel it,” she cried.

“What’s it doing?” we called.

“It’s shaving away our thoughts,” she said.

This terrified the rest of us, but we were forced through, as if we could not resist or were children too afraid to offer physical resistance.

As I passed through I felt nothing, and found myself shoved into another room pretty much the mirror of the first. We milled around, wondering what had just happened, feeling dazed, and once again, the door we’d entered through vanished and another door on the far end appeared, this time not open, but closed.

That was when we began noticing something horrible was happening to us. We were visibly getting younger, even as we watched. We aged backwards, and it was fast, as if each blink of the eye took off a decade or more. Soon we really were frightened children, and then I remember falling to the floor, a toddler unable to balance. My head bounced on the floor and I saw a baby in front of me, crying. I was bawling too, utterly abandoned, and bereft of anything but craving need, and then I saw the infant on the floor beside me deliquesce into protoplasmic jelly.

Even then, I felt my own body go, too.

After a blink of darkness I opened my eyes and I was again myself, but insubstantial, like a ghost. I saw others groaning and shaking heads, as if hung over. We each came to, pushing ourselves to our feet and staggering to collapse into chairs arranged as if on a bleachers, in rows one over the other. We sat gathering ourselves, no one talking.

Someone, a man I think, yelled, “I can’t stand this, I’m getting out of here,” and charged the door. It opened at his touch and he fell through, and we all gathered at it to see that it was gaping outer space out there. The cosmos, with stars, planets, galaxies, nebulae, and most of all a depth of nothingness.

A surge of emotions -- we can’t let him do that, we should join him, panic, desperation, despair, hope, even joy -- slammed through us and before I knew it I was deciding to join the others as one by one we leapt out of the room into space.

We free-fell, but could still breathe -- or did not need to -- and communicate -- perhaps mind-to-mind. We felt the need to stay together but also to get the hell away from out captors. As we fell away from the room we floated around and gazed back, seeing not only the doorway shining light at us, but a verdant green world of dense foliage, with minaret and breast-shaped domed structures with round windows, apparently our captors’ houses.

We shrieked denial and fear at this otherwise bucolic sight, and drifted around again, gazing at each other, and that was when a pair of us drifted close enough to touch. At once they combined, and the rest of us seemed drawn toward this new person.

Before I knew it I was joining with the others into one sexless golden being, very like our captors, and this one being maintained all our individual thoughts. We were able to converse freely, make suggestions, and discuss our plight. We experimented with this body, and found that we could drift faster if we thought about it. Then we found out how to take galaxy-spanning strides. All of our will focused on getting away from our captors.

When I asked where we might end up, everyone at once thought that we wanted to go back to Earth, to our lives. And as quick as thought we did it, seeing the blue globe approach in one glimpse, in the next standing on the ground.

And here we separated into our individual selves again, and each of us went to our distinct lives, only to find that we were as ghosts to them. We could not be seen or heard, not separately, and something drew us gradually back to becoming a single being again.

And this single being began its own life among people, lonely inside in too many ways to express but also alive on the outside, solid and real.

And then I woke up.

/// /// ///

Incubus Dream

So last night I had a very disturbing and weird dream, as follows:

I lived in a neighborhood of 5 storey brick apartments. I was cutting through among the buildings on grass, en route from fetching my mail. Even that had been frustrating because I kept dropping the mail in the breezes and had a hard time getting it all out of the box. So, between the apartments, I was intercepted by a bully. He was bigger than I am, and tormented me mercilessly, forcing me to drop my mail, walking on it, then forcing me to drop my pens, and claiming to have wiped them on his penis, and so on. Typical bully stuff, and I remember wondering why I couldn't rise above this twerp; in real life his type wouldn't have dared bother me at all. It seemed odd to me.

Incidentally, the pens were real ones I own and cherish.

So next thing I knew I was looking up at an aluminum extension ladder propped against one of the buildings, going all the way to the top.

In a blink, of course, I was at the top, and afraid to try getting back down. I feared it would either fall backwards, the feet being set too close to the building, or that it would slide to the left and off the building's wall. I told myself, it's just a dream, slide down, be bold.

Before I could do this, the ladder was flat, as if stretched from roof to roof and I was supposed to back across it. Well, this was worse, and I told myself, it's just a dream, roll off, float down, it's not real height, you can do anything you want.

So I actually brought myself to roll off, a rarity even in a lucid dream for me.

Sure enough, I came down lightly, and thought, wow, I could just float, and fly around, that would be fun.

I thought upward and sure enough bounded up, like a balloon, and so I floated, going up and down, barely making it over trees, as I left the apartments behind and entered a really nice neighborhood of tree-shaded sidewalks and big, beautiful houses. (Somewhat akin to the neighborhoods HOME ALONE moves use in Oak Park or Chicago.)

Here's where it got dark and terrifying for me, as usual. As always.

I bounded over a tree like a balloon and saw a young woman walking along, like a college age girl perhaps. I fell in behind her as she turned into a gate and up a walk to a porch, and I followed to the door, which shut in my face. I recall it was painted pumpkin orange. I actually bonked my head against the door, then thought, no, I can do as I wish, I'm invisible, so I pushed hard and managed to push through the door. And as I came through there was a younger girl than the one I'd followed, and she turned, saw me apparently, and opened her mouth to scream.

Oh no you don't, I thought, and grabbed her head with both hands, and then I put my forehead against hers and pushed, hard, and ENTERED HER HEAD AND BODY.

It terrified her and she danced around stiffly like a puppet in panic, dashing down the hall into a kitchen where the older girl I'd followed sat with a couple other girls; sisters, I gathered, with a couple friends.

And I slid out of the girl I'd possessed long enough to realize her terror had infused me as well, only it also had me sexually aroused now.

And I zapped over to the older girl, entered her via the head, and stayed only an instant. I then flowed out of her and into the hall, where I saw the staircase and went upstairs.

There I found the parents, two older people, laying on a king sized bed naked, obviously having just had sex, the man on the bed normal, head on pillows, the woman sprawled with one leg up and the other wide with her head facing the foot of the bed.

A younger girl yet, about 8 or 9, had been peeking into the room as I'd come up the stairs and was stepping back from the door's edge as I entered the room. I flowed over the bed and hovered for an instant, then lay down on the mother. Very distinct tactile sensations entered the dream here, and I essentially raped her the way an incubus might, remembering that as I did so I saw her both as she was and as the old woman she would become. Even the sensations followed this pattern; her skin was at once middle-aged and loosely old, tight yet velvety soft. Very creepy.

She lay unresisting, almost unaware but looking directly at me with a slight challenge in her eyes.

I left her, floated up, then flowed like smoke after the youngest girl, who by now had padded down the hall and had taken refuge in her room. She was standing by a low bookshelf in front of a bay window with a window seat in it when I entered through her closed door, and she turned, saw me, and made a move, but I pounced, and we both went dark in a very intense burst of sexuality.

Immediately after the blackness, like a blink, I was in the kitchen, and the girl I'd first possessed, perhaps 12, was lying on the kitchen floor, semi- or un-conscious, her sisters dithering around her. She lay ON her nightgown, even though she'd been in pants and shirt earlier. And she was naked, and I solidified, and the others backed off. I knelt and scooped her up, saying, "Well, little princess, we'll just see," and pressed her to me, face and body, in a harsh passionate kiss-and-grind. I entered her sexually and then awoke feeling horrified.

It was as if I'd become a rapist ghost or an incubus on a rampage.

It was vividly real, as if I were watching something really happen. And yes, part of me worries it might have been a psychic glimpse of a real crime or something. It was surreal, yet made some odd kind of sense.

It is the dark spot from which this otherwise bright day began.

Any ideas?






Liber Al II:3 "In the sphere I am
everywhere the centre, as she, the circumference, is nowhere found."
--Alistair Crowley