…The woman was wildly insane…
(Male, 40’s) This was a nightmare just last night. In the dream, my son came to me quite terrified and said “The woman from my dream is in the basement.” My son is 22 and not scared by much so this was rather disturbing just on its own. I went to investigate.
We were in the house where I grew up. The stairs to the basement came off the kitchen. In my childhood home, there was a door and a normal set of normally sized steps leading to the basement. In this nightmare, however, there was NO door, just a gaping archway leading downward. The archway now took up at least half the room. I looked down the passage and saw just five or six steps, long steps that ran the whole length of the archway. The basement was much closer to the surface than it had been in my childhood. The steps were gray stone, like they were black marble originally but that something had rotted them and taken any firm color out of them. There was no light switch. I descended the steps without hesitation. There was still enough light coming down the stairs to see a little. The walls and the floor were bare, raw concrete. Furthermore, the floor was rotting away exposing the reinforcement bars just like in an abandoned building. There was a sub-basement in this dream and a sense that the basement snaked around curving on itself like a corkscrew going deeper and deeper. Something huge lived down there. I could get just a brief sense of it through the rotted holes in the concrete floor. It was at least ten feet by ten feet, pink and grey, glistening skin, without bone or face.
Then I became aware of the woman. She was standing just at the very most edge of where the light from above made a circle of illumination and where the deep velvety darkness obscured everything. I ran over to her and pulled her back into the light. Her blond hair was finger length, filthy and disheveled. She wore a one-piece gray jumpsuit that was also filthy. From top to bottom she was covered in a fine gray dust, like concrete dust but with the texture of finely shredded rubber. The woman was wildly insane. She kept saying something very specific about the work she did down there about art… and I know this must have been incredibly important but I just can’t remember it at all right now.
The next scene of the dream, the woman is all scrubbed up and dressed in nice clothes. She and I are sitting on the floor in a circle of high school students. One of them asks the woman “How can you tell if it’s art?”
She replied “I would never ask that question. You should listen better.” The woman then looked at me and gave me a scolding glance, like I should know better, like I was somehow responsible for the children.