I had a very elaborate dream last night, which I would love to be able to tell chronologically in all its glorious detail. But I unfortunately only remember certain aspects of it. Which I don’t so much mind, because I’m finding that I’m much more “present” in my dreams than I think I used to be. So it’s like, whether or not I can consciously carry them into my next day when I wake up does not seem as vitally important as it did.

In any event, the dream was one of those ones where you have all these different scenes which blend together, so it’s hard to really say where the dream stops, or where it started. Actually, no. I just mean where it started. Because it obviously stopped once I woke up. The earliest thing I can remember is my brother and I joining some kind of group or class or club or something, where you go to this room, and you fight people (a la Fight Club), but with certain rules. So we did that, and afterwards, we were outside, with some of the younger students/group members. They were having a sort of informal extension of the club, where they were doing a much more intense and dangerous sort of fighting in and around the back of this opened abandoned semi trailer. One person explained the points system to us. It was really brutal. I don’t know if we participated or not.

Flash forward a bit. I don’t know if I’m leaving a scene out, I think I may be. But next thing I recall, we’re going back into the building to wash up. All the bathrooms are full. We find this one weird bathroom, which has an attendant/guard in it. We ask him if it’s alright to use it. He smiles and waves us in knowingly. It turns into some kind of room where prisoners are washing dishes or something. We wash us over at this one sink with a girl prisoner, who I think was named Justine. She may have also been outside with us, and may have been the one who explained the point system they were using to fight with. She said a bunch of things I don’t remember.

Then there’s some point where my brother and I are outside, and he makes some kind of joke which I can’t quite remember about like someplace training men to be men, and training men to have cats or something. It seemed funny at the time. Then, all of a sudden, this weird part of the building we’re next to starts moving. It’s like this big spherical sort of tower on top of the building. It revolves and shifts and moves toward us, and out of an opening comes this strange imposing older woman.

She’s very angry, because she thinks that we were making fun of her, or of her weird spherical tower, or I don’t know. I try to explain to her that we were making a joke about “society” and not about her. But she won’t buy it, and she gets very angry and starts threatening us. I have the impression that my brother knows who she is, and kind of starts to back off over the whole thing. But I’m just not having it, so I yell at her, “Wait a second… don’t you try to pull rank on me - I don’t even know you.”

This, of course, infuriates her. Oh, I forgot to mention, that all the while, I realize that I have this scale model of the spherical tower that I am holding in my hand. As the building moves around, almost with an intelligence of its own, the model also moves around exactly the same way. I think there is also a part where I realize this correspondence, and begin testing it, and moving the model around, and seeing the building move according to it. Anyway, right, so this woman is now absolutely furious with me. I’m suddenly inside this building with her, inside of her weird office. The wall behind her rotates and this opening appears. Behind it is this elaborate outdoor night setting, with a sort of fancy tropical pool party atmosphere, with all kinds of weird dressed up people.

We walk through the opening with her. I realize, somehow, that I am being offered a job by this woman. And that this is a test. Because, it turns out, anyone who challenges her, she immediately offers them a chance to come work for her. It’s how she finds employees, but also how she overcomes and subordinates people who stand up to her. Ordinarily though, everyone who is offered such a position with her becomes both flattered and scared, because it is a huge prestigious honor. And they end up backing down from whatever the argument originally was, and becoming basically her loyal devotee.

But not me. I know all this information beforehand, and while the temptation is strong, I do not give in. I know she is testing me. I know that its some kind fo temptation that I must overcome. I am reminded of two things as I walk in. One is the Temptations of Christ in the desert by the Devil. The other is the Garden of Paradise (filled with virgins), which the medieval Arab cult of the Assassins used to initiate and control new members (doping them up on hash, and then exposing them to all kinds of wonders, letting them believe they’d visited Heaven, and would return upon their martyrdom). And that, the series of tests which this woman normally put people through turned them into sort of religious devotees of her.

Right, so the series of tests. She basically walked us around, and different things happened around all these different pool areas and stuff. The first one I forget, but I saw through it, or wasn’t scared, or something, I don’t know. The next one, we were walking, and then these strange patterns of shadow and light emanated from the floor. Invisible figures were fighting in front of me. All of a sudden, a rush of wind, and they disappear. The woman explains that an invisible warrior and a beast had just been fighting in that spot. And that a had appeared and slain them both.

The final test was the most difficult and elaborate. There was this swimming pool thing, and inside of it was this enormous unearthly aquatic monster with all these insane tentacles and eyes and things. Roughly like a giant squid, or one of those micoscopic hydras, but blown up to immense proportions. I realized that I had to kill it or remove it from this pool, or something. So I set about doing that. I’m kneeling by the end of this pool, with my hands in the water, trying to grab hold of this monster to fish it out of there. It instead grabs hold of me, and is pulling me in. I’m not scared though.

Suddenly, through touching it, I’m able to perceive some kind of deep mystery about its like consciousness or soul or something. And I exclaim aloud to the woman the words, “Jesus was never here!” And the words take on solid shape, and radiate outward from me. What I meant by that statement, was that this creature was some kind of extremely alien life form from the deeps of space or whatever. And that, it was so different from you or I, that it could not be reached or reasoned with according to any means we knew. When I say Jesus, in this sense, I meant not so much the man and savior, but the sort of symbolic center of pure consciousness which he represents. It was wholly absent from this beast, and as such, my tactics would necessarily have to change.

And so, I became nothing. Which is precisely as hard to describe as is that statement about Christ-consciousness above. But by “becoming nothing,” I became completely still. The place where the monster had seized my arm suddenly became a series of white fractal vortexes, spinning, and I saw my body disappear into it, from several paces back. As soon as I became nothing and disappeared into the monster’s vortexes, the monster had this violent and complex shift of itself. It was preparing so that it would be impossible to remove it from the pool. Somehow it’s identity or soul or consciousness or something shifted, transformed, so that it was no longer contained within this weird body, but within the water of the pool itself. It was as though it had changed from occupying the “positive space” or it’s body to the “negative space” around it. I remember thinking or hearing in my dream, “The water became its weight, and its skeleton.”

Nevertheless, I stood on the edge of the pool and began to pull its old alien body out of the water with all my strength. Bit by bit, piece by piece. It’s body consisted of these weird segments. Sort of like how seaweed comes in segments sometimes. Only the segments sometimes looked like these fucked up elongated bright green frogs, or frogmen. And they had appendages which connected them to one another and formed the whole. So I’m like pulling and pulling these things out of the pool, and they are just so damned disgusting and weird. I remember somebody else helping me towards the end, and finally getting them all out onto land, where they just like turn into disintegrating piles of squishy ooze, and as they do, the beast itself is finally vanquished (even though it had “transformed” itself into the water - I guess it was still somehow linked to its body, I don’t know).

And then, at the end of this, the old woman who’d cause me to go through all this, her features changed suddenly, once she had been defeated, along with all her temptations and trials. Her features became birdlike. She actually had a beak, and some feathers and things sprout out of her. And she sort of ran off or disappeared back to wherever it was she came. And then I remember hearing a voice (I forgot to mention that during most of this escapade in this strange land, information had been conveyed to me via a narrator, who shared my voice), which said something about how like some kind of intergalactic treaty was passed which forbade the use of alien entities like the one I’d just beaten, and that the woman was going to be punished accordingly, or something like that.

Anyway, yeah, it was weird.