"Now Is The Time That Man Repents"

The sketches of the dream are very shitty, and done very quickly, but the colours are spot on, and I think it at least gives a good impression of what I saw in the dream. The skull ball, however, is basically spot-on. These things are exactly what I saw, to a tee.

Alright, it's not often that I have spectacular, narrative-like dreams. In face, I rarely ever have them, and when I do, I remember them for a long time. One of the last important dreams I had was all the way back in 2002, and I still remember it extremely vividly. Usually, dreams are isolated events, and they usually don't follow a coherent storyline it seems. It's all experience, usually without logic. At least, mine are. Typically, they are nonsensical, and the only important thing I can carry away from my dream is the sensory information -- how that particular event, strange or not, made me feel. Often times, I wonder if my reactions to dreams are how I might react in real life, more normally -- say, dreams where you may be in love, or you experience love in a different form than you expect it.

Not that this dream had anything like that to carry away. Oddly enough, it was a hugely epic, apocolyptic nightmare that scared the living hell out of me at some points. It WAS a dream, though, which means at points I'm going to have to explain thoroughly how certain things happened, or why I believe I may have just jumped in time to another place (which happened frequently, and I believe the dream was interrupted by something else).

The dream starts with a strange prologue, and the first thing I really remember is sitting in a bathtub back in my old house on Broad St., although the room is reversed --- the bathtub is next to the window, and the door is where the bathtub would be. It should be noted that the bath is about two feet deeper than it actually was, meaning I could sit up with the tub full and I would break the surface only at my shoulders. I remember the top pane of glass was down on the window, and it was raining. It was one of those days where nobody turns the lights on in the house, and in the evening, when it's cloudy and raining, everything gets this blue hue -- either in the morning or in the evening I guess. It's so depressing, and I usually think of sundays when I think of those moments. Anyways, as I'm sitting in the bath, depressed by the dankness of the day, my father comes into the bathroom, while fixing his tie to go out, and announces to me that the news reported the death of Seth Rogen. I'm not exactly sure why or even particularly how, but Seth Rogen died in my dream land, and, in dreamland, my apathy towards celebrity apparently doesn't exist, and this saddens me a great deal.

The news of Seth Rogen's death puts a damper on my already shitty day so far, and after my father leaves the bathroom, I shut the door and get out of the bath tub, drying off. Now, I could make up some elaborate excuse as to how I got to where I went next, and I think I'll fill it in with some sparse storytelling for the sake of continuity, so I'll say that I went downstairs, talked with my parents, and then we drove to the mall. We did some shopping, and then we left.

And this is where I actually jumped to in the dream, although these events did take place, they were only information in my mind -- even though I skipped ahead to this even in my dream, I had the memory pre-stored in my brain that those above events actually took place. I deny their existence, however, because the never actually took place in the dream.

So, consciously, I'm exiting the mall with my parents. Sandburg mall, to be exact. The entrance to the mall in my dream is much taller and the area surrounding us is more metropolitan. K-Mart does not exist to the north of the mall, though, but the Target across the street still exists. The parking lot is more expansive and is full of cars. As I'm exiting with my parents, the cloudy sky is now darker, and more forboding, although I personally pay it no heed. My mother shows concern, but I tell her not to be worried, and as we near the car, I peer over towards the Target and spy a tiny funnel cloud touching down behind it. My father and mother both panic, and, in real life, I would too. But in the dream, judging the size of the tornado, it looked smaller than an F0, which rendered it harmless in my brain (I guess), so I told them not to worry about it, and that it probably wouldn't even come over towards us. As I say this, however, I swallow my words, as my eyes stray back towards the tornado to catch six other tornadoes simultaneously forming around it, causing the wind in the parking lot to pick up significantly. This sight causes me to panic this time, and both my parents and I begin running back to the mall. As we do so, I catch the seven tornadoes swirling around each other, drawing closer over the Target and upon parking lot of the mall, where they merge to form one massive F3 (judging by it's size, it could've been an F4).

We take shelter in the mall, and as we and several others rush in through the doors, the dust kicked up by the tornado forms a thick mist/fog that immediately shrouds all vision of outside. If you've seen the movie posters for The Mist, it looked exactly like that. I should note that the entire front entrance to the mall was a high arch of paned glass, with two half arches on either sides of it. The interior of the mall was unlit as well, sort of blue like it was at home. Crowds of people stand and stare at the parking lot, and we can hear the tornado as it sounds like it's ripping through the parking lot. Then, through the mist that's formed, it suddenly becomes incredibly bright, but only for a moment, and then it dims. The sound of the tornado quits, and the dust it kicked up begins to settle.

There it is. As we in the mall watch the clouds subside, the shroud reveals within it a massive tortoise, perhaps three cars high, five or six long. It's made out of black steel, with red neon tubing rimming the shell and running up towards a hot, red spot on top of it, cutting the shell into quadrants. It's eyes are giant, magma-orange pits that burn incredibly brightly, and flames lick out from the sides of it's beak. It stands in the parking lot, staring through the giant glass arch at the crowd, and we're stunned. Everything around it appears untouched, as though a tornado was never there in the first place.



At this point in time, in the dream, a photo is composed in my head, and I cannot really explain it. As I stare at the tortoise, looking in over us, words appear before me in the dream, in white. They state "NOW IS THE TIME THAT MAN REPENTS." That's it. Word-for-word. At this point, the tortoise spits a huge burst of flame and lava at the crowd through the glass arch, and people begin screaming. We all take off through the mall, vanishing out through one of the back exists and into the farms. We leave everything behind -- our cars, our money, and our houses. I lose my parents in the process, either by them simply running off in another direction or by dying when the lava came pouring through the mallfront. A large group of us ends up running to the same lake I had visited in a prior dream, where a man who was actually the incarnation of a bear tried to kill me, although this didn't occur to me in the dream (only when I woke up).



I should have mentioned, I suppose, that through the entire dream, not one tree exists anywhere except for the lake, where all the trees are bare, like winter. All the grass is brown and yellow, and it's usually cloudy. If it's not cloudy, it's always dusk. I remember sitting at the lake, freezing my ass off. The entire forest was lit by the diffused glow of the light from town, make everything appear brown and murky at night.

I woke up in the dream, thinking that it had been another dream, when, in fact, I had just gathered more information about it, and had skipped ahead in time. This was the information I gained after going to sleep in the dream:

It was the apocalypse. In the dream, God did not exist. The only divine entity that I and everybody else was aware of, was Satan. There was only people, and Satan, and that day at the mall was that day that Satan had decided to remake the planet, so he decided to send minions to Earth in order to melt it down and start over again. At the same time that the tornadoes appeared over target, all over the world, giant metal animals (mainly tortoises I think) appeared simultaneously and began to destroy and murder everything. They could not be killed, they could not be stopped. After destroying cities, they would move onto the suburbs, and then the farms, and then they would hunt down and murder every last living thing, burning everything in their path. All you could do is run, spend the night somewhere, and continue to run. Everywhere you went, there was that eerie feeling you get when some place that was once teeming with life and full of people has just been recently evacuated due to an emergency. It was terrible, knowing that where ever you were, you could never feel safe, because you always had to move someplace else, to avoid being found and burned alive.

I remember, at one point, I had taken up refuge in a small cuban commune that had been made out of a water park. The parents used the water park to keep the kids happy while they planned and mapped where they could go next, before the tortoises would show up to kill everything. As I went up to the very top of this water slide, I had discovered, upon reaching the top, that there was a small nest of green, yellow, and bright red wasp-spiders that could move incredibly quick. They were about the size of toy poodle (Buffy's size, if I'm wrong about what a toy poodle is). Although I managed to get away, I saw a small Nigerian boy get bit by one and die. It was incredibly strange.

The dream, for a while, is a series of events that take place over the course of a few months, one of which involves my returning to a small suburban town that had been abandoned for some time. Driving at dusk, following a man in a tan Lincoln Town Car who had been sent to meet me, I was taken to a small, one story white house with bad siding. By the time I got there, it was night time, and the entire suburb was pitch black -- there were no stars anymore -- except for one open window, where a a weak shaft of lamp light marked my destination. It was a single lamp that had been left on by the owners, still burning. The house was creepy in it's own -- one of those odd suburban rented houses by an older couple, where all the walls are white, and the ceilings have that weird scrape-texture to them. The couch was a mix of bland pastel pinks and greens with beiges and tans, and the lamp that had been left on was a gold rimmed glass tank full of sea shells. The entire house's floor was covered in a beige tufted carpet, and there was not table or chairs in the kitchen, which was where I met Satan, who had decided to come to the planet to talk to the people he hadn't killed yet. Although the lamp was on in the living room, he preferred talking to me in the kitchen, where the weak, yellow lamp light could only light up the door way, causing the rest of the expansive kitchen to remain like a big, dark cave. I could barely even make Satan out, and I don't even remember the conversation I had with him. I do know that I ended up leaving prematurely, through a window, when I realized that the door had been locked, and that Satan intended on murdering my in a dark house. I knew that once I left the house, Satan wouldn't come looking for me -- for some reason, I knew in the dream that he just wouldn't kill me outside, even though the entire suburb was abandoned and there was nobody around for miles, and it was pitch black. I was nervous, still, that he'd send that man to find me, and I had to get away from the house as fast as I could, without making any noise. Plus, Satan's presence was unnerving as hell, and the further away from him you got, the better you felt, although after meeting him, you never felt completely good ever again, because you always knew he existed. And, well, he was slowly destroying Earth.

At some point, I and several other hundreds of human beings had to return to the city (Chicago, in my case, I'm assuming) in order to be air-lifted northward, where no tortoises had apparently been spotted. It became a disastrous affair, however, when people began crashing their cars through gates and trying to ramp them off of parking garage roofs to get into the airlift area (Jeff did this, although he ran his car into a diner at the top of the parking garage and ended up getting chased by the owner who wanted to kill him). I know that during my several-hour stay in the refugee camps that had to be set up outside the air lift field that I met a woman who was working on stopping the giant metal animals, and as she left me to go get on her helicopter out, she showed me a small palmed sized ball, half red plastic, half clear plastic, semi-full of small yellow beads (in certain medicines, where half the medicine is clear and you can see small balls inside of it, like that) and containing a little white, angry looking skull that appear to be claymation, except it was made out of that molding foam stuff you used to be able to buy on television back about ten years ago. The little skull would open and close his mouth rapidly, as if speaking, although the mouth opened at a set interval. She told me that if I were ever to find one of those, that I should never, ever break it. As she left and air lifted out, one of the tortoises showed up, and then I woke up.