Following the Leader

I had an amazingly complex and vivid dream. I lived in another world that was similar to ours but far more advanced. There was a tribe, for lack of a better word, that was segregated from the rest of the world. A woman I work with (a project manager) was working on a project to try to integrate them, and a part of that plan was to somehow connect them with a legendary leader. However she hadn’t had any luck connecting with this leader. She didn’t want to listen to any of my ideas and was very hard to work with.

This leader had the ability to shape shift and change appearances but most commonly in recent times he appeared by some name with the word “white” in it that I can’t remember now. He was a large white man who wore a mask but had something weird about one jaw (like a fake gold jaw maybe?) He looked like a villain but wasn’t especially considered to be good or evil.

A new person came in to lead a project and was a lot more open to answering my questions and trying to brainstorm. She got really angry and stormed out saying she was doing more than just paying someone to come participate in a study. That was a jab at me but I wasn’t doing it for an incentive- I was just really interested.

The man explained to me that this leader could relate to the tribe because he might first come in with purple skin, but then if he noticed that blue eyes were especially admired, he could have vivid blue eyes on the next visit. He used the example of blue eyes several times throughout the discussion.

In our society, we clearly had technology because we could see this tribe and their village. I don’t know if it was a satellite image or a live feed but it was pretty clear imaging.

As the man and I started to leave, the leader appeared in the hallway. There was someone else with him but I was so focused on his appearance that I don’t remember who else was there. He began walking down the hall with us and planning how to go to the tribe. He shifted shapes a few times and at one point appeared as a younger version of the man I had been working with, holding a baby. The man became upset and yelled at him not to touch the child. This leader laughed and returned to his previous shape.

It didn’t occur to me to ask why he suddenly decided to work with us, but I felt as though the woman’s unwillingness to collaborate had something to do with it.

Contributing Editor to the Book of Life

I dreamed I was visiting a new place (or it may have been an extended stay.) When I arrived, I was shown my room, and then they were giving me a tour and showing me where to go. I came out of the bedroom, and they took me down the hall and turned the corner. Every few feet there were doors and stainless steel refrigerators turned sideways. They stopped at one of them and pushed the refrigerator to the side. That opened up a passageway and stairs. When we went downstairs, we were in a large corridor with tons of people in it. It felt like a cross between a shopping mall and a train station. People were all walking and going places. They took me back upstairs and I realized I was lost and didn’t know how to get back down there, so they showed me again. (Something interesting to note, I don’t know who “they” were. Men, women, etc?)

Then a woman I knew in my dream (not in real life) took me to a bar/restaurant area. We were sitting down near the front of the stage, but the funny thing was that the stage was extremely tall, so the front rows didn’t have a good view of the stage. A band came out and two men who looked like Crosby on Parenthood were in the band. One was the lead singer and the other was a guitar player. The lady I was with was dating one of them, and they were twin brothers whose family were either owners of the place we were in, or they were very influential.

After that, I went back to the area near my room. There were writing prompts, and everyone present had the opportunity to participate. Sometimes there was a question asked and people were asked to write a response. Other times, there was already a response, and people were asked to write the intro. If your response was selected, you were paid. It was almost $10 for a very short prompt, but I got the impression it was highly competitive. I got the impression that someone was writing a very huge, very detailed book. No one really knew the whole storyline, but everyone got to contribute to small parts of it.

As I was writing, someone important acknowledged what I had written, but they were being discouraged from calling me out because I was so new to the place. They felt I had to prove myself over time. Then they mentioned an inventor who lived there. I recognized the name, and he was someone who had invented a kitchen gadget. They laughed and said that yes, that’s all he was known for in our world, but in other universes he had created so many different things that weren’t possible with our technology. They said it must be so frustrating to have done so much elsewhere but not be able to in our world. I was star struck and felt very impressed to know that the man lived there. I’m not sure if I “knew” there were other universes but it seemed to make perfect, logical sense at the time I was being told.

Then a friend came up and she had a device that would let us travel through time. She said that she found out when the “gods” were going to come through. “Gods” wasn’t the word she used – it was a very specific word, but I can’t remember it now. They were not God the creator, nor were they traditional mythological gods. But they were supernatural beings that carried some celebrity status. Anytime they appeared, people were very exciting. So my friend transported us to where they were appearing, and suddenly they appeared out of nowhere. It was very exciting. They didn’t do anything but walk past, but everyone was excited. She used this tool a couple of time to see different sightings.

Afterward, I went back to my room. I was talking to my friend and shared something about a meme I had seen. It was something about people exchanging emails and Donald Trump. She said she’d never seen that one, and I realized that in this place, I was seeing new content that had never been seen in the world before. Eventually, some of it would trickle down to Earth, but as of then it was unseen.

I then realized that I was laying on the floor and I wasn’t wearing pants. I was just in underwear. I had started my period (which is odd, because IRL I had a hysterectomy years ago.) I was worried that I needed to change my pad because people would be able to see since I was in my underwear. The only bathroom I remembered seeing was past the refrigerator downstairs by the large corridor. I got to the area, and there were people standing around talking by the refrigerator. It was almost like a break room. But before I got to the bathroom, I realized I hadn’t brought my pad with me. So I went back to the room. I had my small, purple suitcase with me, and someone asked how I could have such a small suitcase. I told them that the shirts didn’t take up much space and I only wore one per day. Then I noticed that there was a bathroom connected to the room, so I didn’t even have to go back down to the corridor bathroom.

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This was an extremely vivid dream with a lot of detail. My first thought was that I needed to turn it into a novel. My second was that this is how I envision a small slice of heaven. I think I might have read somewhere once that all information is housed in heaven and it doesn’t always make it to Earth. I imagine this place in my dream as sort of the ‘grand central station’ of information, and that everyone there was contributing – storylines, music, invention — all of the creative forces in the universe. They were all doled out to different worlds. And people take turns staying there and then going out into the worlds (almost like “field work.”) It was really amazing.

For further review…

I dreamed that I had access to another world. I’m not sure if it was an alternate universe or an elite subculture…. it existed  in huge mall-like structures. It involves highly dangerous acts of climbing, swinging, jumping, etc at great heights. I was there with Brent and the power went out. I was sitting on a bench and had a giant screen I was carrying (like an iPad only huge). When I pointed the screen out in the dark, I saw white shadows of animals around me. I was an indoor storm with much darkness, thunder, etc. Someone came over and said that my friend was still here- they pointed and he was having sex with another man just out in the open. When they finished everyone clapped. He went in a room and took a shower and when he came back out, the power came back on. He was at a higher level in this alternate environment than I was but he was planning to take me on a more dangerous course the next time. As we left, I saw a big store-like entry that looked like a Bass Pro but with no merchandise. The sign just said “Outdoors”. We also stopped at a candy store on the way out and looked at candy we used to eat, but we didn’t get any.

When I left, I went to Chris and Stephanie Scott’s new home in Ridgeland. It was a condo, and in my dream they had torn down a high rise and built condos in lower buildings with around 8 floors each. When you entered the building you drove into a garage. There were three large escalators in the center- two that went up and one that went down. The down one was to the far left. Residents drove into a large escalator in the center but guests drove into one to the right that quickly took you to the fourth floor. The escalators were moving ramps that she likened to a vacuum that sucked your car to the correct level. Once we got to four, we were Walking to get to her condo. There were people everywhere- probably hundreds of people walking around. There were many different races (which is not that common here). We went around one corner and there was a naked white woman who called us to the side. She had a rather poochy belly- she wasn’t fat but she wasn’t fit either. She pointed out a vine on the wall and asked if we knew what it was. We said no, and she said it was poison oak. She was touching it and had rubbed it all over her exposed belly. As we walked away, I wondered how she was doing it without breaking out and we speculated that she would in a few minutes. Before we made it to Stephanie’s apartment, the scene changed. Michael and I were in Chattanooga at his parents’ old house. It was vacant though. As we walked up I asked if he was doing ok and he said yes. What’s strange is that Although it must have been Michael in the dream, it felt like a female presence I was with. I don’t remember faces clearly. Rather than walking in the front door, there was a door open to the left (there’s no door there irl.) In the first room, it appeared to be a sitting room or office of sorts. There were random papers strewn on the floor but there was no furniture. I kept checking in which Michael to see if he was ok- I believe this was the first time he had been back in the house since his parents had died. The next room was the living room and there was a tv that was on. It was an old time tv and was playing old music. I tried to turn it off but it  Wouldn’t turn off. This was especially odd because the electricity was turned off in the house. We were looking specifically for clues that we had missed before, but we weren’t sure what the clues were going to lead to. As the observer of the dream, I knew that these were clues to the alternate universe/subculture/etc. But my character in the dream had no knowledge consciously of this. I found his dads old laptop that I put in his laptop bag to take. Then we found some safes that Michael was ready to pass by, but I knew that my thumb print would unlock them. As I was opening the safes, I was wondering how I knew they would open that way and how my thumbprints would work. At that point I woke up.