“Oh Mother help me!!” I'm running, and have been for hours, trying to lead them away from her, and trying to make my own escape. But he's better at tracking than I am at not leaving track for him to follow. I hear them, just out of sight behind me. I cannot shake them. This is not my territory and I've run beyond what has become familiar to me.
Ho, a clearing! I break out of the trees, running across the open only to be brought up short. I've trapped myself. In front of me gapes a ravine with a sheer cliff, falling down sixty or seventy feet to a rocky stream bed. I look left. I look right, no bridge to the other side.
I hear my pursuers closing and turn to wage my final battle. With arrow nocked, I turn, draw and send an arrow his way, just as he releases his own string. I see my arrow strike him high in the chest as his buries it's head in my heart.
My body collapses backwards over the lip of the land, and falls.......
Into my bed as I jerk awake, lungs heaving, tangled in my sweat soaked sheets. God! How many times does this one make? I've experienced this nightmare for most of my adult life, there seems no resolution. I've talked to dream interpreters and therapists, all to no avail. To date, I have received not one satisfactory explanation
It feels so real when I'm in the midst, I can feel and hear the wind, in and around the forest through which I run. I don't recognize the land features as any that I am familiar with in this area.
I've lived in the mid-west my whole life, in and around Chatsworth, Illinois, prairie land, table flat all the way to the horizon. My Livingstone County home town is situated approximately half way between Chicago and Champagne Illinois. It's a quiet farming community where old men gather at the Sinclair station to argue politics and Cubs baseball.
A long defunct tile factory, once industriously produced terra cotta field tiles, pipes used to drain farm land, is falling into piles of moldering wood and rusty beams. It was always a mysterious playground when I was a child, a place of DANGER, our parents told us. BUT I was never chased through non-existent woods in fear of my life, while playing there.
I have not yet found the trigger that causes a rerun of this nightmare, though it plays at least once a month to my sleeping captive audience.
It “must” be a dream, as my Southern Baptist upbringing will not allow for any other explanation, which is not to say that I have no other thoughts harbored behind walls of self-protection.
I've become proficient with hypnosis, and have regressed several people. My experience leads me to believe that my “Dream” is something more than just randomly firing neurons.
The question foremost in my head is... “Why?” What has this to do with my daily life? Then, where? Where does this dream really take place? I'm not exactly well traveled but I have spent time on both coasts, in Oregon and Southern Cali and in Virginia and South Carolina.
When I'm in the dream place, there is no telling where “there” is, it's just “there”. It just doesn't feel like any place I'm familiar with when awake.
