Oooh, it’s been quite a while since I did a dream log! But I was reminded by a friend of how interesting dreams can be, and then last night I had a whopper of a stressful one that I thought was worth sharing.
I’m not sure exactly where the dream began, but the entire thing took place in an enormous mall. It was multiple levels, and had so many twists and turns in it that it was practically some kind of bizarre fun-house. It had plenty of stores and restaurants, but also unusual things like a full high school and a giant indoor zoo, which was designed in such a way that you could see it from almost any angle in the center of the building.
The first thing I remember is being in an upper level, looking down through a large window at the zoo, where some kind of show was going on. Zookeepers were in a huge enclosure with dozens of lions, tigers, and bears (oh my!), and were putting on some kind of strange play. Hundreds of people in the mall were gathered around the different viewpoints areas, watching the show. A lot of my family were there (cousins and aunts and uncles and the like), plus friends from school and random people I know.
Jason and I were watching, when we both noticed something unusual at the same time. A couple of the lions, who were supposed to have been trained to be part of this show, were slowly slinking away while their trainers were preoccupied with another part of the show. We examined the way they were going and realized that someone had left a gate slightly ajar, and that gate lead right out into the main area of the mall. We took off running, trying to alert someone, but we were pretty much as far away from that gate as we could have been and still been able to see it, so by the time we got down there animals were already escaping. It was a completely ridiculous number of animals too. Hoards of wildcats, bears, and other random vicious creatures were pouring out into the mall and attacking people. At first we tried to help people – I remember pushing a kid out of the way of a lion – and get the gate closed, but soon it was pandemonium and we just ended up running.
We ran through twists and turns, through the labyrinthine mall, with other people running and screaming around us, until we eventually found ourselves in a quiet corner that no one else seemed to have come to. It was a furniture shop, and we went right to the back where there was a large bed with a strange design; it was a bit like a bunk bed, but it only had the one actual bed, raised up a few feet, so that there was a nook underneath with blankets spread out on the floor. We climbed into this nook and had a lay down on the blankets. I remember that, despite what had just happened, we weren’t particularly scared. It was like we knew there was a disaster happening, but we were 100% confident that we two were going to be absolutely fine. The only little blip of worry I had was when I remembered that Adrianna had been in the mall with her great-aunt Nancy, and I started texting, asking if they were okay, but I was very confident that they were fine as well.
Eventually a worker and a customer appeared in the store, seemingly completely unaware of the animal attacks. Jason and I watched from under the bed as they roamed around, looking at different things, until they finally came to the bed we were under and we wiggled out and took off, giggling like schoolkids who’d been caught making out.
There were definite signs of the animal attacks as we roamed back through the mall – dead bodies and blood, for a start – but the emergency itself seemed to be over and everyone was just going about their mall business as though nothing had happened. Jason and I ended up finding the rest of our family hanging out on the top level of the mall, outside a large ice cream shop. We were asked to join them, and a waiter came out to take our orders.
I remember being very confused by this shop because, as near as I could see, almost none of the items on the menu were actually ice cream. There were weird pastries and mugs of things that looked like oatmeal, and strange “desserts” that basically just looked like bowls of some kind of cream. The only actual ice cream I could find was a banana split kind of thing that had chunks of waffle-cone instead of the banana. Jason and my father both ordered one of those, but I ordered some weird pastry thing. When everyone started getting their orders, they were even weirder than the menu implied. My mom’s was a bowl of powder that she had to add hot water to herself. Mine was basically a golf-ball-sized donut-hole-looking thing with cream inside. Only Jason’s and dad’s splits looked good, and they were digging into them so I assume they were good.
I’m not sure exactly what kicked off the second disaster, but I remember running in a crowd of people. None of my family was with me, but I kept noticing people I knew in the crowd as we ran. Old friends from school, new coworkers, etc. As we ran through the maze that was this weird mall, things started getting psychedelic and very, very creepy. The power went out, but there were still strange lights coming from here and there, flashing and making the atmosphere of the place feel like a haunted house. There was screaming and wailing and lots of weird shapes and colors that made me feel like I was on some kind of acid trip or something. I remember seeing my friend Krystle and her boyfriend, running but calling back to me with their hands out like it was imperative that I get to them. Then it got darker and more shadowy, with the occasional flash like lightning, but for the most part I felt like I was running in complete darkness. And as I ran, people around me began to disappear into the darkness, until there were only a few of us left.
The couple of strangers and I eventually found ourselves in something that looked like a daycare center, but in the middle of the room, facing each other in a circle, were four rectangular-shaped splits in reality that looked like portraits of other galaxies. Somehow or other we came to the conclusion that going through one of these portals was our only way to escape the present disaster, so we chose one, and one of the strangers went through. I followed without hesitation, and we found ourselves…
…in, like…a cartoon world. It was bright and colorful and bubbly, and the characters were super-happy to meet us. It was really, really odd, but within the dream I remember thinking that we couldn’t have picked a better portal, because surely nothing bad would happen here.
Any thoughts? Ideas? Concerns? Feel free to share in the comment section below, and also feel free to tell me what you think of dreams in general, what you think their purpose might be, and fell free to share some of your own! Cheers!
Tracey Tobin 