I dreamt that a woman with a child brought me to Libya in her small rickety car. It is unclear if she did it on purpose, i.e. abducted me, but I fell asleep and when I woke up we were in Libya. Part of it was what you’d expect: destroyed buildings, rubble, dusty dirt roads. Part of it was pleasant mid-to-low income residential areas (presumably walled).
It soon became clear that she came to this war-torn country because of some guru who had a compound here. I’m not a sect or guru type anyhow, and the fact they chose Libya, basically a failed state, to live in did not bode well in my mind.
I had no money, no way of going back home, so I settled in as well as I could and was on the look-out for potential solutions. The compound was somewhere in between the above mentioned pleasant areas and the rubble and poverty. There was plenty of people, families, everybody spoke English.
At first the boss man welcomed me with open arms and saw me as someone to bring into the fold.
So at least for now, I was safe.
I participated in everyday life, and it wasn’t so bad, although I could see restrictions everywhere, imposed both by the guru and the fact that we’re in fucking Libya. But me and the leader increasingly clashed about ethical topics and it was clear that it would escalate. In one of the last scenes of my dream I think he realised that I’m not going to become part of his brainwashing operation, could be actively harmful to it.
I sensed danger: it’s on.
Last night I dreamt a long vivid dream. At one point we (me and a woman) got into an elevator in a house somewhere. It was a rickety elevator, 70s style, smelled like it too (I don’t mean piss or anyhting, just the particular smell of an old elevator) and it had these particular round plastic buttons you had to push in deep. All the more surprise that the numbers went pretty high and for some reason we had to go to 69. But then, with a lurch, it started moving horizontally. I could look outside, and first it looked like an abandoned theme park. Like you would emerge from a closed ride, the wooden walls with peeling paint opening up around you, us going higher and higher, a slow rise.
Then it opened into a hilltop snowy landscape with People and skiing stuff, in perfect sunshine, but static. Our viewpoint was higher, further away from the scene. The pleasure of all this combined with another beautiful emotion: the woman besides me turned out to be an ex girlfriend of mine from long ago, just like she was then. Me touching her soft short hair, she turning towards me.
Exhilarating, just like it was back then, almost flying. In the dream it didn’t feel like nostalgia, more like timelessness. Like I was still that person.
I read somewhere that dreams of confined water (swimming pool, a flooded town etc) describe a juxtaposition of natural powers vs. the human power of order. Elevators could be something similar: flying, but still in a confined space.
The dream did not start like “being in love”, although it ended in that emotion, in its most personal sense. And the flying part had many less pleasant undercurrents, not just exhilaration. But that’s the hardest thing to bring across when describing your dreams: the emotional currents. Maybe that’s why I like the band Bongwater so much.