The Vector and the Stationary Point

It was a mild summer day and I found myself outside walking in the woods with a friend. It happened this time that we came upon an old barn in a small clearing. We had walked these woods many times before and had never found this place. It had an eerie feeling. The barn was ancient and was built on a small embankment. It had strange architecture and it was overgrown along its sides and the roof was covered with moss. We briefly debated as to whether or not we should enter and eventually decided that we should at least try to peer inside. There was only one small side door that wasn't blocked by overgrowth and it was the only place that we could enter. We walked down what appeared to be a well worn path to the entry point. As we grew closer to the barn, a strange wind got stronger and stronger and shook the tall weeds back and forth. The sound of the birds, which hadn't been very remarkable at all, became frenzied and were distressing.

As soon as my fingers touched the latch and turned it to its opened position, everything went completely silent. The violent wind ceased, the call of the birds stopped. I withdrew my hand from the door and turned back to look at my friend for confirmation of what had just happened. There he stood, not one or two paces behind me, frozen fast in his tracks. His eyes were open and fixed on the door with a mixed expression of horror and expectation. I tried to shake him but he was like stone; I called out with my voice but nothing came out. I didn't even feel the vibration in my throat. I looked back and the door and it slowly opened under its own weight.

In life, I can say that I have never been overtly seduced, but in this dream, I was compelled to go into this dark building because, for some reason or another, when that door opened, I knew exactly what was waiting inside. It was no surprise to me that within a few steps I found a small, green trowel, laying on the dirt floor.

I knew this thing and it was precious to me. I was elated, then at once perplexed as to how it got there. It was an item that I had misplaced in real life when I was a young boy at the shore. I turned my gaze upward and found that I was standing at the entrance to another room within the building. It was filled with toys. They were all covered with a silt-like dust and I knew them all. Then, breaking the absolute silence, I heard whispering noises that came from the corners of the room in voices that I knew but hadn't heard in a long time. It slowly became clear to me that this room contained everything and everyone that I had ever lost.

When I began to understand what this place was, I felt horribly lonely and immediately felt like I shouldn't linger there. I had to keep moving. I turned back to leave the place altogether, when I realized that I wasn't physically able to progress backwards through the room. Whenever I tried to move in that direction, I froze, and would only be free if I tried to back-up further deeper into the barn. Moreover, the outside door had closed and it had become dark in the room and very difficult to see.

I eventually gave up trying to get back to where I came from and I made my way to the end of the room where there were two flights of steps. One went down and one went up. As I gazed upwards, I saw the door at the top of the stairs had a light behind it. It was a bright, bluish-white light. There was a great wind behind the door and it sounded like rain was falling. The wind carried these little drops through the slats in the door and they blew down the stairs and hit my face. I winced and brought up my sleeve to wipe them away, only to find that these drops were blood. I then heard the sound of a screaming animal and the sound of feet moving upstairs. The wind picked up and the door flew open and I saw a man facing away from me. He working away at a butcher's table. He wasn't wearing an apron and was drenched head to toe in blood. There was a cart to his left with dead piglets in it. He picked one up and flopped it on his bench. The poor creature had knives and cleavers stuck into it and was essentially dismembered. The man began to pull out the knives and with each one he removed, the pig became more and more alive. It began to scream as it became aware of the knives that were still in it, until the last was removed. It shook itself off and jumped down off the table and walked out of view.

I tried to walk upstairs to see what was happening more closely, but I again couldn't move forward; when I tried, the man at the top spun around surprised. I could not see his face because of the light. The door at the top of the stairs slammed shut and the light went out. I turned back and looked at the room and I felt an increasing anxiety about being trapped there. In fact, I couldn't bear it. The thought of living with these things that I had lost in this decrepit place made me realize how unimportant they were. I turned and rushed down the other flight of stairs. It was the only direction I could move in. When I reached the bottom, I immediately realized my mistake.

In the middle of this dark room was a deep pool and crouched next to it was a person in black with long hair, passing a baseball sized rock back and forth between her hands. I never saw this person's face, but I instantly perceived that I was in danger. My impression is that it was a woman, not a man. I felt a paralyzing recognition of the place, realizing that it was where I would die, and in that instant, the woman sprung into action. It was if she was waiting for my realization to occur. She jumped up and, lurching towards me, she grabbed me by the hand and flung me around like a schoolyard bully would. I spun around and around and fell over my own legs onto the dirt floor. Without any words and without any reason, she stooped over me and struck my face again and again with the rock in her other hand, knocking out my teeth. She dragged me over to the edge of the pool and held me under. As I was drowning and trying to pull my head above the surface, I heard my friend's voice calling for me, but I could not call back for him to come save me. I had known that this would happen. I drowned.

I began having this dream when I was 16 or 17 years old. Each time I had an impression of what was going to happen, but I was powerless to change it and each time I felt the horror anew. I only shared it with one person (my friend who was in the dream) at the time and it upset me greatly to even talk about it with him. It has come to my mind more recently because, with a lapse of almost 8 years, I found myself in that place again, though very briefly, and it flooded my brain with all the troublesome aspects of the dream.

I don't always know what one is supposed to make of a dream. I'm skeptical of their predictive powers, but I am fairly certain that they can be demonstrative.I have rarely (if ever) felt meaning upon waking; the meaning has always come some time after that. If you asked me what I thought this dream meant when I was younger and having it regularly, I would have pointed to the three levels of the barn, voicelessness, and loss.

In my most recent visit, everything changed. This time I didn't actually go inside. I was taken to that place and I immediately balked at the idea of going in there. I knew it was a lost cause because I had no chance of progression. As soon as that door opened I would be compelled to go after what I had lost only to be disappointed, I would not be able to get to the one place that I wanted to go from there, then I would go down into the darkness and be killed. I thought that it would be better to be frozen outside then to try to move around willfully in that place.

Some doors should remain closed.