“…I stood ankle deep in the dead shells and bones of these creatures. I was trapped…”
(Male, 40’s) While I was dreaming and when I woke up from this dream, I was certain it was a night mare but now I have a chance to think about it…
There was an outbuilding on my property. A big one, the size of a barn or a house. It was very old, decrepit, an eye sore but there was nothing that could be done about it, really. To get to the second story, I had to crawl across this scaffolding made of wooden doors. These were old wooden doors with raised panels but they’d been left out in the sun and rain for so long they were stripped to the bare wood and the grain was raised. I think they were made of oak, that ashy sort of color oak gets when it’s outside. But this time as I was crawling across them, I felt, maybe I heard maybe I just knew that they had lost their strength. They started to crack. I shifted my weight over to a ladder just as the scaffolding collapsed. There was a twisted sense of accomplishment in this.
But now I found myself trapped in an interior room of that building. The walls were were black with rot. The room was built from thick wooden beams but I could just look at them and tell that rats had burrowed down the length of them. They were all for show with no strength. The walls too had been eaten by bugs – black bugs, cockroaches, maybe? – I stood ankle deep in the dead shells and bones of these creatures. I was trapped but I wasn’t panicking.
I pushed my arms through the closest wall. Easy. The wall had no strength. It was like compressed saw dust. Then I tried cracking through the two by fours and I found they snapped nearly as easily. I tried to be diligent, not think about the terrifying situation I was in, just keep working to poke out a hole, to tear out an escape.
I woke up because my wife shook me. I had been thrashing my arms around in bed as if I was really tearing down a wall. I was scared… perhaps a better word is thrilled, now I think about it. The trap I’d fallen into wasn’t filled with live rats and bugs. It was unpleasant – extremely so – but not dangerous. And I had this amazing sense of power because I was able to dismantle the thing, piece by piece.