Dream 20060702, 11:30 AM: Leaving Camp Gideon

Many of y’all who read this for the fiber arts stuff, may not know that it started out as a dreamwork journal. I’ve been in a different mental space for a while, and hadn’t been chronicling my dreams – but it’s clearly time again. I’ve been having the monumental epic dreams again, so I’ll be writing them down here.

I don’t censor or limit my descriptions, so they may be disturbing, sexual, graphic, etc. This one in particular has no sex, but some very explicit violence. It disturbed me, in the dreaming, although not enough to wake me. I do always put them behind cut-tags.

Dream 20060702, 11:30 AM:

This dream has a lot of day-residue from watching Sean of the Dead. I think that the zealots = zombies is amusing.

It started out like a big summer camp. We had a lot of people in a big building like a warehouse. We’re doing something involving organizing – like cataloging museum accessions or artifacts from an archaeological dig. Although it doesn’t have the geeky feel that a museum camp would have.

The dream shifts, and it’s all outside now. There are two groups – we are set up as if we were opposing armies. We have mock battles and drills where we engage in competitions with one another. The whole thing has a very conservative religious bent – it reminds me of Gideon in “The Handmaid’s Tale.” We’re all outside now, in big encampments. Somehow the camps seem to be at the back of the old Kingwood house – but also they seem to be out in acres of empty field. Each camp has about a quarter acre of big gardens, growing with big healthy crops. For some reason, I carry an onion sprout over to the other camp’s garden, which is behind the Mitchmore’s house, and realizing that I’m carrying it, I plant it among some tall bamboo-like plants which I think are rice. I look down where I’ve drilled the onion sprout into the ground, and there’s a severed copperhead snake’s head, with about four inches of the neck, in the hole with the sprout. I wonder to myself if I was carrying the snake’s head and hadn’t realized it. It’s dead, but fresh.

I go back to my own camp. I have to sneak out of the other army’s gardens – it seems like they’d hold me prisoner if they caught me. My method of locomotion throughout this whole dream is a sort of leaping half-run – it’s almost like the bouncing gait of small monkeys. I easily jump over fences, up onto buildings, into low tree branches.

When I get back to my camp, I talk to the man in charge. He’s one of us, although older than most of us. It’s not like they have counselors. We have our own organizational heirarchy. I tell him I want to leave – he seems incredulous, as if it’s not possible. I tell him we’re here of our own free will, and we can leave when we want, and I demand to see the Director. He laughs. There is furniture outside here, big dressers and armoires with mirrored fronts; I start throwing pieces of crockery and other dishes at the mirrors, thinking that will somehow get the attention of the Director. The mirrors don’t break, and I start pulling at them, because I know that there are viewing and listening devices behind some of them. I pull one off from a plastered surface, but there is only a hole behind it.

The Director shows up – a middle-aged woman with shoulder-length brown hair. I tell her that I want to leave – she tells me that it’s fine for me to leave, IF I can get out. I realize that it’s like the movie SAW – they will set it up so that I have lots of opportunitites to kill myself trying to escape. There are a number of us who want to leave – I’m standing on a piece of furniture, talking to them like a revolutionary leader. I don’t remember details of what I say, just that we organize to leave.

We all have the same bouncing, springing monkey gait. We scramble out of the camps, and realize that we are inside of a whole city that is owned by the Church group. It’s really more of a small town, with streets like a subdivision. We jump through tree-lined streets, climbing up and over fences and houses. I remember one woman who is with us, shouting something to the city at large, about how she used to be one of them, but has realized what they’re doing. We have a lot of narrow escapes – there are bombs, deadfalls, landmines, downed power lines, that kind of thing – nobody actually shooting at us or actively stopping us, just presenting us with lots of ways to die if we’re careless.

We end up inside a huge building. It reminds me somewhat of an old train station, or an old-fashioned bank – there are inner offices, connected by doors and windows to outer waiting areas. There are waiting areas on either side of the office area, though. We go through, collecting tools and things that we will need to make our escape. I remember some of the office people putting down pieces of folded paper, which would then begin to hiss- it was some sort of poison gas. We manage to avoid it. The Director is here at one point, and laughs at us – she says, “What, you don’t even have any volumes (meaning books)! How will you even know what to do, once you get out!” We start collecting books at a huge library/warehouse type building – but then I realize that if she’s suggesting them, they may be bombed or otherwise dangerous, so we leave them. We scamper over shelves and tables, grabbing all kinds of art supplies, tools, and materials.

At another point, there is a blond woman who reminds me of J. She is laughing at us too. I grab her and hold a broken bottle to her neck – she laughs. I have a sudden, distinct memory – this isn’t the first time we’ve attempted to escape. Our memories have been wiped, but I remember now. She’s laughing because I tried this same tactic before, and I didn’t have the guts to go through with it then, and she knows that I won’t have the guts to go through with it now. With a very grim determined manner, I slice her neck open with the bottle. It’s not nearly as bloody as it would be in real life – but I open her neck side to side all the way, and reach in and grab her spinal column. I sever the column, which is not protected by vertebrae – and pull out a short chunk of it and toss it aside. I turn to my companions, and say, “Well, she won’t be coming back this time.”

At one point, I remember being outside, and seeing the walls that surround the entire city. We’re on a high area, and the city is laid out in a valley below us. We’re not out yet. There are people jogging, in matching gray and white jogging suits; they’re like little ants. Several of our people have a vision, something about the offer of land – if they stay in the church’s city, they will get a plot of land that they can farm. There’s some big war coming, and it’s a very tempting offer. Several of them stop running and turn around and go back.

I don’t remember getting out, or any final resolution, before I woke up.