Dreams: The Labyrinth

[kimberlysteele]

Stephen King's Rose Red  

When I was a kid, Dungeons & Dragons was all the rage. I didn't play it, but I was friends with kids who did play it. I believed that D&D was a kind of gate-opening for me despite not being a player. The structure of the role playing game (as far as I know) involves traipsing down hallways and opening doors to rooms where various monsters are found. I became aware of D&D and my own recurring dreams about hallways filled with monsters at approximately the same time. My young mind jumped towards a causal relationship between the two events, though now I believe it to be a matter of coincidence.

Recently I had a dream about leading a small group of people through a labyrinth of haunted rooms in an old, decrepit building. I cannot remember a time in my life when I have not dreamed of hallways punctuated by shabby hotel rooms, mammoth apartment buildings, endless warehouses, haunted mansions, and cavernous schools. These collections of rooms are often presented in dreams as a puzzle or a game, and not an easy one. They are full of dead ends. I frequently find myself digging out layers of drywall, plaster, and lathe in an effort to escape from one room to another. One particularly amusing dream featured a monster who I distracted by enticing her to use her big, pointy teeth to eat through a wall I was trying to demolish. Rooms in my dreams have cupboard sized escape doors. I am the only person competent enough in the dreams to find or excavate the doors. Every now and then I get lucky and they lead to a true escape to the open sky outside.

A random scene from one of the many Resident Evil video games.

I believe that the labyrinths I dream about are real insofar as they are actual places in the astral plane. For this reason, many others have dreams about similar labyrinths of endless rooms. The Jim Henson cult classic movie Labyrinth is a lighthearted spin on the theme, with an actual labyrinth made of hedges and a castle instead of a series of dingy buildings. Monsters are present but they are child-friendly and comical. Stephen King constantly returns to scenes of hallways and escape rooms in his fiction -- The Shining and Rose Red spring to mind, among others. Resident Evil is a zombie franchise with modernized, electronically booby-trapped hallways and the undead playing the part of monster. The Cube is another booby-trap/monster hallway movie, and in it the maze is presented as a deadly game. Silent Hill is about a haunted town with a haunted school. Of all the horror movies out there, Silent Hill resembles my dreams the most with its gray ash rain, its use of time intervals to terrorize its characters, and its faceless monsters who chase characters into dead end rooms. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is a stellar example of the labyrinth trope. Edgar Allan Poe may be credited with the invention of haunted mansions as a fiction genre, but H.P. Lovecraft deserves equal recognition for his contributions.

Dreams as Reality

A dream place such as a haunted hotel is real in its way, but it is also symbolic. The symbol precedes the place and gives rise to it. Mortality is fraught with dead ends and failed investments, and mortality during this particular era is especially full of both. I live in the far western suburbs of Chicago. All around me, I see failure and bad investment. A brief walk will take me to a forbidding, car-dominated landscape of half-empty retail complexes. If I get in my car, it's only a few minutes drive to a huge array of useless and under-occupied office parks and malls. In the "good" neighborhood twenty minutes away, there are hideous McMansions that stand as obscene edifices to mindless consumerism. A sensitive such as myself has a hard time shutting out the vacuous mental chatter bubbling from inside those unholy places, where Progressian believers wear their masks indoors while alone and deny-deny-DENY that their banquet of newly arrived health problems has anything to do with the MRNA shots they took at the advice of their doctor.

A scene from the Silent Hill 2 video game.

We are all trapped, horribly trapped, by the bad decisions of other people as well as our own guilt in having to participate in the mess we've made. How appropriate that I wander through ugly, badly lit and nonsensically built warehouses, schools, and hotels at night when by day I drive through streets filled with the same sort of collective mistake. When I have to run into a room because a monster is chasing me down the hall in a dream, it is a symbol for being forced down a path I would rather not take yet I have to because it is the lesser of two evils. I went to musical college when in truth I only wanted to compose and record music. Musical college was remarkably unproductive for those purposes and though the skills I gained there helped me later, I had precious little time for composition and even less for recording while in college.

Dreaming Their Own LARP

Lucid dreamers piss me off because dreams are not an escape for me. Lucid dreamers, in my opinion, tend to frame dreaming as a sort of mental vacation where they can play their dreams much like a virtual reality video game. Dreams are anything but a vacation in my case. I'm always facing off with darkness in my dreams, both the darkness of others and my own. Those who have fun lucid dreaming strike me as control freaks who are practicing avoidance which only leads to a pile of karmic hurt. To me, lucid dreamers are on the level of idiots who consort with demons evoked from the Goetia. Those who commandeer their own dreams to be universally pleasant or entertaining make a subconscious agreement to be tricked into believing the world is whatever they want it to be. The price may not arrive until later, but it is costly to the tune of several lifetimes. I suspect I may have made that deal myself a few lifetimes ago, and maybe that's why I wander endless halls during this one.