Dream #547 (January 10, 2017) - Con Artists and Cults

This dream was very long.  I've been told dreams only last an hour or two, but it's difficult to believe that sometimes.


I began this dream as a clean-shaven, brown-haired man married to a blonde gal.  We were con artists and traveled around the state of Oklahoma (I'm very unfamiliar with that state) and would con semi-wealthy folk into investing in pieces of real estate that we didn't own (I don't really know how this worked exactly).  We would take over property of people who were on vacation or deceased or whatever and bring in customers and make the transactions all in the matter of a couple of days, collect the money, and move on.

After a sort of montage of this behavior (that portion of the dream was pretty long, included a lot of hand-shaking with portly old men smoking cigars, and me dusting and arranging furniture), my wife and I accidentally broke into a home that was still occupied.  Inside this beautiful farm house were dozens of black-haired men with bowl cuts and white button-up shirts and black jeans.  It was apparently some sort of religious cult and they all stared at us without saying a word or looking particularly upset or angry with us.  They just had totally blank expressions.  For some reason they were scattered about the room arbitrarily, and they all were slightly leaning on something (a wall, a railing, etc.).  I was freaked out and wanted to escape.  Then I noticed that my wife had started to form the same expression on her face as she stared at one of the men.  I grabbed her arm and ran down a long glass hallway that led out into the backyard of the house.

A bunch of friends of ours were there with portable water-based entertainment (little pools, squirt guns, water bombs, water balloons, buckets, swimming suits, etc.).  They thought that we would have control of this property for a week, but I had to tell them they had to move their water party elsewhere.  My wife and I joined them (we followed their fleet of pickup trucks in our wood-paneled station wagon) to a remote grassy spot.  We set up all the pools and sprinklers and whatnot and the party commenced.

I couldn't stop thinking about the weird men we had seen; I wanted to know exactly what was wrong with them and if they could be helped.  I decided to leave the party (my wife stayed with them) and I returned to the farm house.  I hadn't noticed before, but there was a huge conference center built into the farmhouse (I wondered how I could miss such a thing).  The driveway and side door of the house, by the way, looked very similar to the driveway and side door of my family's old house that we lived in when I was very little.

I got out of my station wagon and walked through the glass hallway again, but this time taking a different turn that went deeper into the conference center.  The once empty hallway had since become nearly full of people.  It made me feel less conspicuous, though I felt weirded out by the masses.  They didn't all have the same bowl cut or clothing style as the men from earlier, but for some reason that didn't make me feel any more comfortable.

I entered the cult's gift shop, and there were all kinds of porcelain knickknacks and books with somehow stomach-churning graphic design.  A short elderly man with perfectly circular lensed glasses and simultaneously warm and eerie smile was at the cash register taking people's money.  He saw me and grabbed an angel figurine and offered it to me.  I refused it and continued walking.

Past the gift shop was a vast open space with a lot of windows and high ceilings, resembling an airport terminal.  All the decor was grey.  I saw my brother Mike talking with a group of his college friends, and I approached them.  They told me they thought this cult was hilarious and that they really wanted to see a service because of how ridiculous they hear it was.  I told them I would probably join them.  I was really curious.  I told them I would meet them in the sanctuary when the service started, and I left them and continued to explore the building.

I found a weird offshoot room that didn't resemble anything else.  It was a wooden, garage-like room with an insane amount of support beams connecting the floor, ceiling, walls, and other beams at varying angles.  There was a spinning wooden wheel in the center of the room with a trough of water below it.  The wheel was spinning without any sort of force propelling it.  I heard a choir singing in the distance and thought that the service was starting, so I headed for the sanctuary.

The sanctuary was blocked off by a huge concrete wall with four solid, windowless doors that led into it.  I saw my brother and his friends enter, and I starting speed-walking so that I could see where they were going to sit.  Then a boy started walking toward me from the sanctuary, causing me to pause.  He was a normal looking boy from his head to his knees, but his body ended there and his shins and feet were replaces by large metal forks that made an excruciating screech as he walked.  My heart was racing because this kid really freaked me out.  To top it off, he was wearing this green pair of goggles that had swirling black circles where his eyes should be.  I couldn't help but look into those goggles when he stood in front of me.

In the eyes of the goggles I was able to see inside the sanctuary.  I could see that my brother and his friends had all exchanged their regular clothes for white robes and were singing in the choir.  Their eyes looked dead.  I gathered that there was some sort of hypnotic quality to the service and decided I shouldn't enter.  Instead I headed to the nearest exit.

When I left the building, I discovered that my car was at the farthest corner of a vast parking lot and not in a driveway.  I wasn't sure if someone had moved my car or if there were something illusory about the whole place.  I began to see more and more people in the parking lot that at first looked empty to me.  They were all screaming and running about, flailing their limbs.  My car was the only car in the parking lot and some of the people were trying to get into it.  I also noticed that parts of the parking lot were burning and I was scared I would walk into a fire without seeing it.  I didn't know what things were real and what were illusions.

I managed to shove away the people around my car and I quickly got in and shut the door.  Then I heard someone pounding on my window and I saw Donald Glover (aka Childish Gambino - I called him "Childish" a couple times in the dream).  He was begging to get in, but I wasn't sure if I should open the door.

He appeared to be real, and in less of a panic (but still worried) than the other people in the parking lot, so I scooted over to the passenger seat and let him in.  I asked him if he knew the way out and he said he did and he booked it out of there.

I looked out the passenger window as the chaotic parking lot passed by.  When I looked at the driver's side, I saw that Donald was no longer there.  I called out for him, checking the back seat, but he was gone.  Then I realized that my left foot was stretched out over to the gas pedal and that I was in fact driving the car, and at a dangerous speed.  I looked through the windshield just in time to avoid crashing into a tree.  The car spun out and I climbed back into the driver's seat and continued driving. I had no idea where I was.


Then I awoke.

I tried to go back asleep because I wanted to keep that dream going, but that, of course, never works.

Dream #546 (January 9, 2017) Beach Firecrackers

Extra.

I was with Matt (older bro) on a hazy beach in a gloomy twilight (it felt like day, but didn't look like it).  We wandered through a series of locker rooms, past the navy lockers which looked like they could use a little touch-up.  Matt was wearing a grey hoodie and I had a blue Dashboard Confessional shirt (which once belonged to Matt in real life).  I was also carrying two awkwardly long (12 feet) firecrackers and I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do with them.

We made our way out to the beachfront and saw a college girls soccer game to our left and high school volleyball to our right.  Neither of us had much interest in watching either of them, so we walked right through the soccer field to the water (annoying spectators and players and referees).  The waves were tall, but gentle when they landed on the sand.  Matt and I walked away from the people for about a mile, as I tried to figure out the purpose of my firecrackers.  We didn't talk (my brother and I), but not because we were angry at each other or anything like that.

We encountered a large wall made from red sand bricks, on top of which we saw a dozen men pulling up a dozen stones using ropes attached to pulleys above the wall, all in unison.  They ignored us as we walked past the wall to a large rock face.  Matt decided to climb it, but I felt that it was important for me not to let go of my firecrackers, so I let him go and I walked back to the locker room alone.

I sat on a massage table in the middle of the room and decided it was at last time to take a rest from the firecrackers, so I set them outside the locker room building and relaxed on the massage table and fell asleep.

I woke up to a soccer player turning me over by the shoulder and diving in for a kiss.  I fought it off and ran outside.  Then I saw that the fuses on both of my firecrackers had been lit, and I sprinted away from them without much thought needed to consider the danger.

They exploded with a disappointing bang, but the flame produced was marvelous and horrifying.  The overhang above the locker room door caught on fire, followed by the whole building.  It was then that I realized the exteriors of all the buildings around me looked like something from Aladdin, and they all started to catch on fire.  A tiny firetruck (about the size of an electric car) pulled up to me and asked me the source of the fire.  I pointed to where the fireworks had exploded.  I knew we would all soon be engulfed in flames and didn't know why it mattered where the fire had begun.

Then I awoke.