FB In My Dream

 I have been getting sucked in somewhat by the "reels" videos on FB. I feel this showed up in a dream quite dramatically!

I was in some kind of sports hall, gymnasium, the kind you get in schools. My body had been hideously transformed. I had a "space helmet" globe over my head. My body was built of metal rods like a camera "tripod". What a hideous hell scape existence.

I looked around and could see other people in this state too. At the edge of the gym I became aware of an elderly white man with his hand on a control button. Then next to me, someones head exploded inside their space globe helmet! Brains and blood sloshed inside the globe as the tripod body collapsed. And then another and another ...

I looked back to the old white man and realised the exploding heads had something to do with him. I waddled bambi like over to him with my awkward tripod body and could see the "internet" symbol used on laptops hidden behind a family portrait. I could see he was twiddling a dial, turning something up through this internet symbol that was making peoples heads explode!

I saw that some people were escaping this and their heads weren't exploring, even though they had the helmets on. I was curious about that for a moment. But then my partners turned up without helmets and struggled to unscrew the helmet on my head. My real body returned with and was there with their bodies. I was human again.

Wow, I must GET MYSELF OFF FB! This felt like such a reflection of how social media is being used to reshape peoples sense of self. It reflected something in my psyche in allowing myself to be drawn in by the "reels". Someones hand is on that dial manipulating the flows of information to their own ends. This is never more clear than in this era of the unholy Trump/Musk alliance (Trusk?)

A tragic dream ...

I am at a school or university, I seem to work there. I am moving around doing tasks independently - kind of doing my own thing rather than working as part of the team. I go to leave and recall some kind of message that I should stay safe by booking a bus rather than hopping on one randomly (it is late).

I run back in with my rucksack having forgotten something, for though I am at an institution, the dream also crosses over with a kind of "travel".

A man is there whom I fancy, he is a teacher. He is looking at something on my desk - some images including one I have made - I wonder if he will notice it. The one I have made I only see in a brief flash. I recall buxom thighs of a female body, a flash of intense scribble which could be pubic hair. A body very round - possibly no head.

He doesn't notice this, and instead comments on the one next to it which I didn't make. He says "now THIS is REAL art ..." and I am stung.

I look at the picture - it is a young slim woman with long hair who has "fallen outside of the city". She lies on the steep banks surrounding the city, like a fortress. The teacher waxes lyrical on how the land looks like the billowing sheets of a bed softly catching her (it is a black and white engraving).

As I stare at the picture, I slowly move into it. The woman begins to slide down the hill ...

She falls off a rocky precipice, but the rocks turn into a hand and catch her! I breathe a sigh of relief.

But then a big female snarling mouth opens in the rocks and says "I am going to crunch you up and eat you slowly" and begins to pull the young woman to her mouth.

The young woman says "no way!" (or something like that) and then takes a very deliberate and elegant dive, plunging out of the rocky hand. She lands with a sickening thud and a squeak another rocky outcrop. Then she pushes herself deliberately to fall again, and again, and again ...

It is too terrible to bear to watch ...

Even worse, a faithful companion dog - a springer spaniel - is running around and down the cliff desperately trying to reach her. The dog is quite young, like Rusty when he first came to us.

Finally the springer comes into contact with the by now bloody mess of a (still breathing) body and licks the woman.

I wonder if the rocks will scoop them both up to eat - but it seems now that they have found a place so low down, that they are out of its reach.

The Barbers Shop

[TW: contains description of violence]

In last nights dream I was back in my old home town of Wolverhampton. In the area around Victoria Street and Queen's Square - it seemed to be about the 1920's and I was at a barber shop.

I had seen briefly into the basement (psychically somehow) and down there was a man being staked out on the ground in the shape of a cross. The last wooden and rope stake was being put in place onto an old stone flagged floor. He was pleading to be killed saying "I can't bear this". I knew there were other men down there, and that they were each suffering the terrible fate of slowly being eaten alive.

Back up top in the Barber's shop ...

I am in the body of a man. I am talking with the barber who is giving an army style short back and sides to a man the chair. I quietly argue and plead with him, in horror at what he is doing to the men in his basement. He tells me coldly yes he has about seven men in the basement, in various states of being eaten alive. The oldest one I understand is hovering in a place of dead / non dead - like a zombie perhaps - almost no longer human.

I realise that he will not be persuaded and for the first time I begin to feel in fear for my own life. Till now I have felt in no danger, I am in an open fronted shop facing onto the street, life is going on as normal, people shopping etc - what could possibly happen here? I start to try to move away, but then men dressed in the barber shop uniform (black with a small white logo) start to close in around me. They are tall and threatening, I suddenly realise I am trapped.

I look to people in the street and wonder if I can mouth the word "help" silently without my captors seeing. There is a pause of some minutes helplessness, in this time I wonder about the guards supporting this crime. One has glossy black shoulder length hair with androgynous features that seem soft, beautiful and quiet incongruous with the abomination unfolding here. "What do they get out of this?" I wonder. "How does the barber afford to pay them all?" And "does he feed them in human meat, do they partake in this (I sense not) and if not, why do they support it?"

I have slowly edged towards and am sitting near the open front of the shop - free and civilised space is so close yet there is this looming wall of danger in front of me. Behind me is the man still having his hair cut by the barber, he is silent all this time. I lean backwards finding some comfort leaning against his chair - at least here I can find some sense of connection and camaraderie, even if I cannot see him.

Then something starts to happen down the street, people start to run. I don't know what it is, but the guards are distracted and move to look. I turn to the man in the chair behind me "quick, now is our chance, run!" but he is frozen and does not move. I get up willing my own frozen with fear muscles to move and slowly I begin to walk away. Turning the corner out of the shop, I catch sight of myself in a window, I have a flat cap on and a tweed jacket. Poking out from under the cap is a long thick braid of brown hair tucked as if to hide it from view. I see a version of my own face, only much younger and I am a definitely a man.

I weigh up whether to run all the way down the street and round a corner, but opt instead to duck into a bank a few doors down from the barbers. It's a risky win or loose strategy. There is a woman moving off from the cashiers desk for her lunch break, I say to her "please can you help me, I really need to hide, I am in terrible danger, please help!". She is voluptuously shaped - like the venus of Willendorf - with luscious long brown hair, red lipstick and a kindly face.

I think at first she will say no, but in actual fact she smiles and says "Yes I will help you, wait and I will come and let you in ..." She disappears though a door behind the cashiers; I see a door over on the other side of the lobby. I run and stand by it assuming the door will open from the other side and she will appear. I stand frozen and waiting for her with the key to save me, wishing only to see her round smiling face - looking out the window I dread seeing the barber and his men ...

The dream ends here.

NB I feel like this dream has been stirred by the metoo movement. It seems to convey how men have been dehumanised, "eaten alive" by the capitalist machine, their bodies given to be consumed for the benefit of the few and directly to be benefitted from by the one in power. it seems to convey the consequences of a world in which "the feminine" has no place and has to be hidden. She is there right in the beginning in the names - Victoria / Queens.

The opening horror in the basement also hints at the cannibalistic undertones of the transubstantiation ritual in my church of origin - Catholicism - the man is clearly staked out in a cross shape. Does the dream point at the consequences of a material order built around a spiritual life that holds to a mono masculine God, having entirely eradicated the feminine? At the heart of everyday life, normalised structures of power and violence holding everything in its place?

Interesting though that within that system is also a distraction that gives rise to a moment of liberation, and the liberation is not to be found by turning a corner into a new street, but by stepping into the bank within the existing one. I recall now as well, that I imagined the woman when she comes to open the door, would lead me down into another basement ...

Organic invasion of two teenage girls

I am an adolescent girl in this dream, maybe a little older, early twenties? Still with the flush of youth, not yet stepped into 'womanhood'.

I am with some other girl friends all of a similar age. We have been on the run, something has been chasing us. We have though arrived in a new flat, we think that maybe we are safe now. It is a bit of an adventure - perhaps like leaving home for the first time.

We are looking around the rooms of our new flat, it is empty, spacious, stylish - wooden floors, period features - an attractive shared apartment in which my friends and I can play and learn to be 'grown ups'.

We walk into one room, and a very strange site greets us. It is one of our friends, it looks as if she is asleep, but she is almost vertical? She is strangely suspended in the middle of the room, yet looks peaceful and at rest.

I have a sinking feeling in my gut, I have seen this somewhere before, I begin to back away and try to warn my friend....

But it is too late. Now I am out of my body and watching the two girls - this I now remember is the thing that we have been fleeing, but it is too late, it is upon us.

As I watch them, an organic growth sprouts from surprised mouths, from small pert nasal passages. It grows like a vine around their faces and they are bound together - upright, like their friend. They are cocooned by an invasive growth, whether it is animal or vegetable it is hard to tell, it seems to be a combination of both.

There seems to be some inevitability to this event, like it was something they could not escape no matter how far they ran.

The friends now are all 'sleeping' - in stasis - it seems that they will be killed by this invasion, yet I sense also they will wake up into a new and unrecognisable world with only a distant echo remaining of their lives before this event.

public toilets

I am in some kind of community college / adult education centre and need the toilet. I see the doors closing on a lift, I press the button and make them open again and step in with two girls in their late teens; they clearly don't want me sharing the lift with them but I don't really care.

I follow them to the toilets and we walk in to a horrific sight. Every toilet is brown, stained, full of shit, overflowing and the floors are all horrifically flooded with god knows what. In one cubicle that I dare not look into, I see that the floor is awash with congealing blood and maggots, I wonder to myself if perhaps someone had slashed their wrists in there and why no-one had bothered to clean it up.

I remember dimly that I had been to these toilets earlier in that same night / dream; on this first visit they were much cleaner. I wonder how it could have gotten so bad?

The girls are tiptoeing around, actually intending to USE these toilets but I realise that I simply cannot. I ask them if they know of any others elsewhere (I was a little intimidated by their teenage boisterousness at first but I have regained control and mastery over the situation now)...

The one girl turns to direct me to some other toilets. Her mouth is a gaping black cavern on her face (maybe she has been eating those sweets that children sometimes do, that dye the mouth black?), she has braces and her hair frizzes in an ungainly way. I feel slightly repelled by her 'ugliness' but try not to show it.

(That morning when I wake up my period has started).