Dreams of a Lofty Tower

I've had this dream three different times over the past few years, and each time it has been a bit different. In it, there is a lush green forest dotted with ponds and creeks, and a tower whose top floor must be reached.

The first time I had the dream (when I was about 15), I started in the tower. Despite not knowing what was going on I was able to make it quite far up before I woke up. The second time (I was about 18 or so), I was in the woods and had a wonderful view of the seemingly endless tower.

The third, most recent time, is where things got serious. With a pair of people with me, my group followed a small path through the woods. In my hand was a small slip of paper that had some sort of instructions printed on it, but what they said exactly slips my mind. All I knew is that I'd done this before, so I knew where to go. The path that we followed took us out of the forest and we passed through a field into a massive expanse of a parking lot that almost stretched to the horizon. Amidst the sea of parked cars and bustling customers rose the tower, though it looked a bit different.

At the base, it looked like a Target department store that was silver instead of red. Atop that was a large section that looked like it was simply corrugated steel. Finally, there was an office building that rose up towards the sky, with no end in sight. As we walked towards the mismatched building, a man in a blue (not red) employee outfit walked up to us and asked us if there was anything we needed. The two people who were with me, a girl with long-ish hair and a guy with a maroon shirt, stopped to talk to the worker; I noticed that another worker was watching us from a short distance away, so I walked over to him.

"I'm looking for something," I spoke, making a shape like a box with my hands. "Something neat."

The man nodded and pointed to the store.

"Go to the back of the store and take the stairs to the third flight."

I nodded and went back to tell my group what needed to be done, and we entered the store with little delay. Inside, the store looked completely normal with the exception of the red decorations being silver. We found the stairs through an employee access door at the back of the store and went up. The second flight was filled with cardboard boxes and nothing else. Up we went to the third flight.

We found a lobby. There were lots of people, all split up into groups of three or four that were talking amongst themselves, and nobody really paid any attention to us. On the wall was a large painting of a night sky with bright stars. This is when I became lucid, and I motioned my group to follow me up to the second floor, which was several halls lined with offices. I immediately took the first hall to the left and went into the first office. Inside was an elderly man who was busying himself with some paperwork.

He looked at me and asked if I was here to get to the top, and I nodded. He continued, and said that I'd still need to visit all the relevant employees on the way up and to avoid the people in the halls that would get me disqualified. The memories of my past two dreams were fresh in my mind, so I knew what needed to be done.

"Mr. A," I said. "I've been here before. There are a lot more people here this time, but the situation isn't any different. Don't you remember me? Six years ago we sat and talked, and you assured me that there wasn't any danger if I was careful." I walked to his window and looked out at the view of the woods and lakes.

Mr. A looked at me with a slightly surprised smile. I can no longer remember his voice or exactly what he told me, but it was basically that things were going to be okay. We sat and talked for a minute before I realized that my group wasn't in the room with me. Excusing myself, I went back out into the hallway. The girl who was following me was standing by the door; she told me that my other partner had gotten sent back to the lobby after he tried to find the bathroom. I took out my cell phone to do a reality check and the screen was white.

On the lobby floor, everybody was still standing around. It was almost like they didn't want to go up. We sat near the landing of the stairs, and I looked at my phone again. This time it seemed to be working correctly, but the signal kept switching between roaming and almost no coverage. We leaned against the wall and tried to get some sleep before trying to go up again.

When I woke up, I was really awake.

Back in class?

I was in a classroom (this happens a lot, is probably a dream sign) and it seemed to be a literature class.

An older lady that was apparently the teacher passed out graded assignments; I got roughly twice the amount of papers that everybody else did, including sheets of construction paper decorated with a small boy dressed in blue clothes that looked a bit like robes. A lot of the papers featuring this boy looked like they were designed to be book covers.

Looking around the class I saw that I was sitting in front of a guy dressed like a typical gangster, who was furiously scribbling something into a spiral notebook. A closer look showed that he was writing in Korean. 

“Yeah, Korean is my jam,” he replied to my inquiries about this curious event. He then proceeded to show me sketches of Aztec-styled dragons and serpents that he had drawn on other pages in a spiral. One drawing in particular caught my eye; one that almost looked like it was a fractal, a quartet of dragons made of squares that emerged from a single square and formed a Buddhist manji.

Soon after, the bell rang and I left the room. The building outside of the classroom was a massive complex filled with stairs and students and I did what I always do when I see stairs: I slide down them. So I slid and slid. I looked down at my feet and watched them skip over the steps. I leaned back and slid down the stairs more slowly.

The walk to the exit was fairly uneventful and I broke out into a run as soon as I stepped out of the front door. Running was extremely easy in this dream; within seconds my feet were hardly touching the ground and I jumped over a large hedge, landing on all fours in a field of freshly cut grass.

I couldn’t help but smile at how clearly I saw the grass.

Sections of Sky

There was a field.

It wasn't anything special, just some short grass with small buildings and trees in the distance. What really stole the show was the sky; it looked patched together, like many skies laid over onto each other.

The first section was a normal sky. Thin wispy clouds and a purple backdrop, with just a hint of light pollution. It was nice but it wasn't anything special, either.

The second was illuminated sky. This section looked like falsely colored images of space. Rather than seeing individual stars, I saw entire galaxies shining in various colors. This piece was quite beautiful.

The final piece was a symbolic sky, in a literal sense. Massive letters and symbols made of light dominated this area, flying about. The only symbol that I can clearly recall was a Greek letter Ψ.

Replacing the moon was what I can only describe as a large stone skull. Thick smoke hung around it, obscuring the majority of it's details but I could clearly make out the mouth and eyes. For whatever reason, I immediately assumed that this skull was the oldest object in the universe.

For the entire dream, I sat and stared at the sections of sky.

An Office Tour

Job interviews are always a pain. This dream started at the end of one such interview.

I left the room I was just interviewed in and passed through the waiting room, which was filled with men in business suits. I felt a bit out of place because I was wearing casual clothes, but so far everything was going smoothly.

 The hallway outside looked completely normal. People in suits buzzing around between offices and all that, none of whom payed any attention to me. Suddenly, one of the workers stopped down the hall from me and put his hands up to his face. Thin pieces of bone poked out of his mouth; more bone followed as a skeletal arm reached out. Soon it was followed by another, then a head and a long and thin body. Then it happened again.

Not one, but two pale white things stood in the hallway next to a crumpled suit with a wrinkled mass of skin inside of it. I'd say that they were skeletons but they weren't made of conjoined pieces. They were more like pliable white bone. Though they certainly looked odd, the creatures didn't seem hostile and didn't even really appear to notice me.

I almost thought it was going to turn into a bad dream, but it went back to being fairly normal. One of the beings picked up its suitcase and went to a photocopier to make copies of some documents that it held. It also faxed some things away. Meanwhile, the second being was casually drinking water down the hall. When the two of them were through they gathered up their skin and went into a bathroom, soon coming back out in their "disguise". Throughout this entire event not one person besides myself thought that something strange was going on.

Shopping

I was in a department store. Something that looked like a department store, at least. Everything had a feeling of being very open, like there were lots of windows on one side of the room.

A man in pinstripe pants and a lavender shirt came up to me and said he knew exactly what I would look good in. He recommended that I wear a red shirt under a red button-up with gray slacks; apparently looking like a doorman or a valet look good in dreams and passes for acceptable fashion. As I was leaving I was stopped by a manager (or who I'm assuming was a manager) who asked if I was looking for a job, but he immediately retracted his offer as soon as I said yes.

Disappointed, I decided to go outside. Everything that I could find outside of this one store was under construction, with crews of people constantly operating machinery and laying down bricks and cement. The only cars on the road, for example, were construction trucks hauling rebar around. I think a worker yelled at me about not wearing a hard hat in a construction zone, but it was too loud to make anything out for sure.

A Dark Place

This dream was a bit disorienting.

Everything was so dark that I could hardly tell what was going on. The buildings (if they even were buildings) were shades of dark gray, black, and blue. In fact, everything I could see was shaded dark gray, black, and blue. Even the “people” were.

They were barely visible in the dim light because they blended in so well with everything else. To be honest, just being there was depressing. I walked up to one of these people and asked for some information about where I was and it answered me. Though it answered me, I couldn’t hear it. I could see a slightly darker part of its face moving slightly yet no sound came out. I leaned against a wall and looked up at a vast blackness where a sky should have been and felt a hazy feeling wash over me. This hazy feeling hung over me for a while after I woke up.

A Nice Place

I was sitting on a large, rounded platform carved out of polished red granite that floated  in a clear blue sky. I was high above an empty sea with not a speck of land in sight; I was totally isolated on my granite platform, and I loved it. 

There was no sound save for the faint traces of churning water below and the hum of a soft but constant breeze. Maybe I was moving, maybe I wasn’t; there weren’t any real landmarks to be able to say for sure.  After enjoying the seclusion for a while I decided to test my personal limits of lucid dreaming. Starting small, I brought out a wooden stool to sit on and a beat-up guitar to play. 

The guitar wasn’t supposed to be old and worn down, so that’s probably something I need to work on. When I actually got around to playing it, the sound was off and I realized that the strings weren’t even in the positions that an actual guitar would place them in. It still sounded nice, however, so I left it as is and tooled around playing some tunes for a good long while.