A supplemental post for Louis' lovely Dreamlands; some offhand mentions, such as entering a nightmare or crossing a threshold, refer back to rules originally referenced in there.
Ever since I was a child I've been blessed with very vivid dreams. Not lucid, exactly, but very clear and elaborate, and (at least for a while, back when I more regularly recorded them in one place and before I chose the vice of dream-suppressing THC) very rarely fearful. I've hunted through the many places I've typed them up (and a few that I haven't, but simply remember) and collected them all in one place, here, to use as various transitional places while travelling through the Dreamlands.
A couple notes: this project is definitionally incomplete, and spans a range of time from dreams I've had as a child to ones I've had only a couple days ago as of writing. Outside of the aformentioned occasional insertion of mechanical referentia, I've tried to stick faithfully to the original contents of the dreams, presented with little embellishment. Unfortunately this means that many of my earlier dream journal entries are too sparsely detailed to now used for this, but such is the nature of this kind of project. I'll probably intermittently update this as I gain more materials for it, but to start I present you with a nice round 50.
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| Diane Arbus |
1. The halls of a school, walls painted blue and lined with rusty lockers. Everything is slimy and waterlogged and barnacles grow everywhere. Statues of the Madonna watch serenely from niches in the walls. There is a bright red light at the end of the hall.
2. A highway along the coast at night. Tall dark pines rise up on one side, and a sheer cliff drops down to the ocean on the other. Somewhere along the road is a diner with a huge neon heron sign. Inside the menus are covered with nonsensical dirty jokes.
3. Your bedroom, but something is off; there are a few too many windows, which all look out into darkness, and things aren't where they're supposed to be. You are half-naked, and the threshold is somewhere down the hall beyond where your roommate is walking around; you need to get dressed, and also to avoid looking at their face which is horrible and wrong and which you somehow feel you've seen many times before.
4. Humongous halls upholstered in warm, desaturated reds and purples. Like a movie theater complex for giants. Balconies and arcades look out into wide empty chambers. People in cartoonish technicolor armor bluster around. You could spend years here, although the feeling is comfortable and slow.
5. A swan-shaped house. The halls form a loop, and everything is cramped and angular and bangs on your head and elbows and shins - protruding cabinets, narrow door jambs.
6. A covered alley late at night. Your head swims, you are very tired and very intoxicated. What isn't in shadow is linoleum tile and lit by harsh fluorescent light. People are sitting here and talking quietly, stealing looks at you. Some of them have their heads and hands cast in oversized replicas made of dribbling wax or clay. If you linger it will become a nightmare.
7. A deep dark forest, tall trunks and a canopy blocking out sunlight. The forest floor is covered in a tangle of roots and stones. People and wolves hunt each other during the gloom. The boundaries between gender are slippery here.
8. Rolling fields and trees, bright blue sky, and a huge pit in the earth. Bridges crisscross within the pit. If you decide to descend down the pit, on one of the bridges, you see something small and fleshy shuffling. It has no distinct body, it's covered with cords of tissues and struggles to breathe. You are in a nightmare.
9. A bare concrete house with uncomfortable furniture. Someone in a cheap scary clown costume tries to jump out around from corners to startle you, but the effect is more unwelcome and obnoxious than frightening.
10. A small dining room with a table covered in disorganized papers. Sitting in the other chair is a corpse which whimpers and chokes. It grows louder and louder. If you do not silence it somehow, enter a nightmare.
11. A dim, low hallway which feels as if it's underwater. The walls are painted with luminous blue handprints, and strung up with lights of the same color. The air is filled with lovely, ethereal music.
12. A lush forest filled with low-hanging trees with green and red leaves. The path is made of tiered steps of polished green agate, gradually leading downhill. The margins are cluttered with kitschy marble statues.
13. You are in a nightmare. Your limbs are heavy, and there is something pale with a drawn face and long claws in the darkness below your floor and behind your wall. Pray.
14. A path upwards through the forest. The trees thin and break onto a field of dry, swaying grass.
15. An office building if it had the proportions of a cave; narrow squeezes, tight crawls and tall shafts. Plain ecru walls are painted with cave art. Windows and skylights look out onto an endless coniferous forest. Things like bright red gelatin dogs with spiny heads hunt intruders here.
16. Many people on one side of a door with you, and crying coming from the other side. You are now in a nightmare. There is crying coming from the other side of the door but you know you absolutely should not open it. Outside, through the windows you can see disembodied heads on the ground laughing, singing and jeering.
17. A shopping mall with nondescript storefronts ringing huge cylindrical shafts, in turn interlinked by various paths, catwalks, and bridges. There are no windows or indications of an exit anywhere.
18. Suddenly falling, falling, falling. Below are bright yellow autumn leaves, above a soothing purple sky. You reach the threshold when you hit the ground.
19. An endless grid of narrow, perfectly straight concrete corridors. A zoo, somehow. People and animals cross perpendicular to you in the distance. The occasional door opens up onto bare, empty concrete rooms with the floors covered in straw.
20. Dunes of smouldering grey ash, a dense cover of bleak black clouds above. Across a body of water a city skyline burns. Jets roar through the sky and do battle with a colossal beast among the wastes.
21. A flat, gently-curving concrete path with a steep, scrubby cliffside to the left and a railway to the right. Whitewashed, new and well-maintained. Beyond the rail and far below, a city stretches out and rolls to the bay. Blighting the otherwise pictureesque cityscape is a monumental, impossible huge bridge and tower of twisted black metal, construction still long unfinished.
22. A mazelike manor, hot and humid, with most of the walls constructed of semi-opaque glass. Potted plants sit on the floor, on tables, hang from the ceiling, and spill out everywhere. Dwelling among them are dozens of huge but perfectly docile snakes and lizards.
23. A large, sumptuously furnished room with red wallpapers and red hangings, and large framed paintings of greyscale biomechanical-psychosexual scenes. A party is going on here, or at least a salon. Figures all in black sip cocktails and look for muted, enriching conversation.
24. Narrow cobbled streets winding between tall and tightly-packed buildings, storefront-galleries with no signage save for the windows displaying their art and goods.
25. A long wooden house on a grassy knoll by the sea. Mist blows in and blankets everything. Before a copse of trees nearby, a depression in the ground ringed by graves. The graves are all for a moppet; dig them up and you'll find them none the worse for wear for their premature burial.
26. A desert split into strips by long parallel walls housing bars and factories for herky-jerky plastic automata. Every so often a meteor crashes down into the dunes and births nonsense chimera which the automata hunt.
27. A stone maze, walls slick and veined with glowing blue-green slime. Huge spiders with mammalian mouths and coated in said slime hunt wanderers within.
28. You are in a room. In another room there is a dog. The dog is able to perfectly perceive all your thoughts and influence them. The dog wants you to strip naked and run out dead dissociated into the night, because the dog wants you to be very very badly hurt.
29. A wide concrete plain shrouded in a fog so thick you can only see a couple feet in front of you. Somehow this is all inside an immense building. Wrought-iron lampposts with elaborate gothic motifs sprout up and cut through the gloom. Interspersed throughout the plain are some or another cooking stations; figures rush to and fro, delivering ingredients and food, always knowing exactly where to go next.
30. A filthy, miserable village square. The sky is slate grey, the ground is churned mud, the sagging houses are filled with black mold and heaps of rotting waterlogged wood.
31. A nondescript factory space rapidly filling with sand falling from the ceiling. Human-sized pillbugs hollow like jumpsuits run round and pursue intruders in the chaos.
32. Dreary rainy city streets. In the middle of the road is a massive skull wrapped in yellow silk; let it look at you, and lesions and sores begin to break out on your arms.
33. Heaps of gothic buildings caked in a thick layer of dust; at the apex of the pile sitting on a throne is an androgyne thickly swathed in red and silver cloth, who wishes now to leave dreaming but has no body to return to.
34. Concentric bands of lightly-forested grasslands and coastline, rising up in all directions towards the sky. Dilapidated farmlands still inhabited by cows and chickens, but no longer by people. The sky rumbles with the engines of bombers. Underground, in cellars and bunkers, furtive dwarves that creep out to steal words from your head.
35. A dome of concrete in a wasteland blasted by dust storms. Inside, a clown hangs a demon by its feet from the ceiling; she carves off long strips of its flesh with a knife to hang besides it and cure.
36. A large, well-appointed bathroom with walls made of clear glass. The floor below consists of parallel cloth strips with a vertiginous fall below.
37. A cave, but proportioned such that one can stand and walk comfortably within it. An ascending ramp that switches back on itself over and over. The lair of a child-thieving trogloraptor.
38. Huge factory on a dreary beachfront. Conveyor belts transport and process absurd amounts of used needles; other rooms hold rows of inorganic rods from which human organs grow like fruit. It's possible to catch a disease in here, even in dreams, one which is incapable of killing but instead leaves the sufferer catatonic.
39. An art noveau skyscraper, plant life spilling out of the walls, cats everywhere. In the middle of the lobby a huge spiny torus hovers; nearing it causes regression back down the evolutionary corridors of life.
40. A vast cistern-grid of white stone streaked and stained green by algae, dizzyingly vertical. The exits at the structure's various borders are large water intake pipes, sealed by metal grates.
41. A wedding and a funeral, held at once in a rolling grassy field. There's a ceiling but no walls, painted to look like the sky; light streams down through trellises of white roses. Music soars, everything is bright and strange and beautiful. If you're in a nightmare, it ends.
42. Twisted forest grove where nuns and monks tend to beehives and wailing agglomerations of nude flesh with baby bird heads larger than themselves. In the center, a hellmouth; ultradense minerals is degraded by the heat and pressure, turns soft and fluffy, and unleashes screaming poison fire.
43. Bunker built into a mountain's summit, rooms with one-way mirrors designed to observe isolated subjects. Notes dispassionately discuss biological experimentation on parents and children. Abandoned, dilapidated; none of the original subjects or experimenters are here anymore, just a giant dog with blue fur peacefully sleeping in a pool of milk.
44. Small square room, most of it taken up by a pool of deep, cold water with a ledge ringing it. The walls are painted with murals of whales swimming in arctic seas. Dive underwater, and stay there until your lungs are almost bursting, and one can almost imagine that they hear the voices of the dead conversing with them.
45. An empty, endless black void with a chrome obelisk floating within, a blinking red light at its center. It can speak, and try to coerce you by bringing up all your traumas and worst memories, but cannot do anything else besides. Cross the threshold when you turn from the obelisk and leave it to the darkness.
46. Carnival haunted house ride shoddily constructed of grey dryrotted wood. Men in wasp masks with finely-made pistols dart behind wooden boards daubed with faded paint and take potshots at intruders.
47. A bouncy castle the size of an actual castle, a grand and harmless gauntlet with giant nubbed rollers and other such playful obstacles.
48. Concert hall, the lower lever flooded knee-deep with water. Chains affixed to the wall from which the stage rises up slither underneath, trying to coil around legs and drag down people to drown, possessed by pained and vengeful ghosts.
49. A mall filled with dense fog. No ceiling, just endless grey mist above. Plague doctors with actuated metal legs and crossbows spring about, and giant centipedes made of ground meat crawl. A strange herald of nightmare; this place doesn't count as one, but the next area you enter becomes one unless it specifically counters nightmare.
50. You have to go to Phlox's house even though you don't want to. Enter a nightmare.
BONUS: Various misc dream entities slushpile:
Woman with kind face, multiple wings, lower body of a feathered serpent, white as snow and aglow with soft light. Appear when the sun is rising and setting at once
Sexy vampires with razor sharp tongues and katanas
"creature with wide triangular shoulders, long arms and a lower body that both taper into thin points. Eyeless, elongated face/head with a huge toothy mouth, a bit like the giant worm from beatlejuice. Swims around from behind mirrors. Takes things like laundry and big wads of wet toilet paper and throws them at peoples' heads to harrass them. Ultimately wants to trap more people inside mirrors like itself. Human intelligence, smug, resentful, and petty personality."
A timeman - with blue skin, representative of one of the 20 hours of night. He has two names; the blue one you can't say without reprisal, but the white one you can
"horrible blubbery white creature with red throatsac"
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