Sometimes They Come Back, Sometimes They Go

Em and I were in a mall, but I'm not sure where it was located.  I got the idea it was somewhere in Virginia, and it seemed that both Em and I worked there for the mall, at large, rather than a specific store.  It was also almost as if we even lived there, working in one part of the mall and living in another part.

I was walking through the busy shopping part of the mall, working on some task that required me to go from one store to another, and passed by a group of people that suddenly seemed very familiar.  It turned out that it was the family of an ex from high school, including the ex.

At first I worried that they'd spot me and recognize me, but I realized that I had changed a lot in my appearance since they last saw me, and I figured between the added weight, the buzz cut hair and the beard, I was safe.  I just walked quickly past, but wondered briefly what brought them there as I thought that they lived a lot farther away.

A short time later I was walking through another hallway past a music store on my right, and there was a line of people waiting to get in.  I quickly glanced over and saw my ex and her mom in line, and they immediately spotted me and recognized me and started calling out to me.  I turned away quickly and acted like I didn't know them and made my way towards the "dead" end of the mall where the living quarters were.  There were some divider screens that were up that I just walked around, and I hoped that if they decided to follow me, it would be enough to deter them from continuing to follow me.  I was hoping to be able to just wait it out for them to leave.

I made my way to one of the bathrooms in this living quarters area.  It was basically a giant public restroom that was huge, full of stalls, and very much like other bizarrely huge bathrooms that have shown up in other dreams.  I went in and and was looking for an empty stall to just go sit and hide out in, but so many were occupied or broken.  It was amazingly busy in there.  As I was walking around, a couple of my "coworkers" and "housemates" were asking what was up, and I told them about my situation.  They seemed sympathetic, but didn't have any good suggestions and basically just wished me luck.

While I was still wandering around this huge bathroom for somewhere to hide, my ex and her family came in and found me.  They started talking to me, asking me how I was doing, what I'd been up to, and things like that.  My ex, of course, started asking me why I ran away when they had called out to me.  I wound up telling her that I just didn't have any interest in talking to her.  She seemed slightly offended, but it also seemed to feed off of it in a way that meant that she was going to start needling me even more about why I didn't want to talk or something.  I remember feeling angry about that and feeling like I was ready to start yelling.

This part got kind of fuzzy, and the next bit was about being out in a fairly hilly area.  I think at first I was kind of disembodied, kind of like flying, and it was like as if this part was almost showing me background story of what was to come.  It kind of had the feel of Warwick, NY during the late summer or early fall.  

There were a number of small farms and farm houses around, but things seemed to be very close to the road.  I remember seeing one farmhouse on the right side that was only maybe 10 feet from the side of the road.  There was a very old blue pickup truck parked near by, and it had something on the license plate that made me realize it belonged to Em and me, and that this was supposed to be our house.  (I think I knew when I first woke up what the plate said, but now that it's several hours later, I only have a vague impression that was something cutesie like our current plates, alluding to my and Em's relationship.)  I had the feeling that I was on my way to see Em for a bit, but it ended quickly

The next thing I knew I was driving through the same area during the winter.  There was snow all around on the grass and trees, but the roads seems fairly clear.  Normally this would make me very happy, but I was feeling very sad.  It was strange because I wasn't actually 100% aware of why I was sad or where I was going.  I knew I wasn't going to my house, and when I got to it, I drove past it and kept going without slowing down.

A short way past the house, I saw the old blue pickup truck, this time on the left side of the road.  This area had a lot more trees, and while the truck was close to the road as before, this time it was among the trees near a cobblestone driveway with an open gate.  When I saw the truck, I knew I had to turn left and drive up the driveway.

It went back quite a ways from the road, and it was kind of a steep rise that seemed to wind around to the right and the back to the left.  I eventually came to an open area that was a large circle made of the same cobblestone and with short, knee-high walls on either side.  It appeared to be one of the parking areas for this residence, as there were a couple of cars there.  The driveway continued out to the left a short way and then hooked right into a garage that was under a gigantic stone house.  Another part of the driveway wrapped around the house to the right and continued up the hill where there was another parking area behind the house.  The house was huge and gray stone, about 4 or 5 stories tall, and it was almost castle-like in appearance.

I stopped my car in the middle of the first parking area and got out.  There were a few of people around, a couple of men an at least one woman, and I got the impression that they might have been expecting me they were talking in hushed tones as I walked in their direction.  They greeted me and I greeted them, and I suddenly realized who they were.  They were my exes family from the mall!  But that realization didn't come with the shock of surprise, and neither did the realization of why I was there.

Somehow, between the time that I had seen the farm house and truck in the first "fly by", and now, Em had passed away.  It was why I was feeling so sad while driving, but now I finally remembered why.

My ex and her mom came out of the house via a door to the left and above the garage.  There was a long set of stone steps that matched the house and came down to meet the cobblestone of the driveway, and as they were walking down, I was walking up.  I still wasn't sure exactly why I was there at their house.  My ex stopped about halfway down and held out an arm and made a "come on" motion with her hand and said, "Come on in.  I know exactly what you need."

Of all the things that could have meant, I somehow knew with every fiber of my being that it meant she was going to make me pancakes, and I started to follow her inside.

The Hole in the Earth

When the dream started, I was at the Miller farm in Weyers Cave, or somewhere close by.  I was in an open field, and there were mountains on the horizon, but everything had a very stylized, almost cartoonish quality to it.  Everything was very "clean" and sharp, almost simplified in appearance, and it all had this weird glow to it, almost as if it were supposed to be night time, but in a the middle of a city in a video game.  Saints Row 3 and 4 come to mind.  It was dark, it was late, yet everything was plainly visible.

Out in the middle of the field, there was a very large hole.  The hole was also cartoonish in that it was a perfect circle, and the edges of the circle were cut perfectly into the ground, and it was solid black.  There was a little bit of a hint of perfectly vertical walls at the edge that ran down into the ground, but it did not look like dirt.  It was just cut into blackness.  The hole was growing rapidly, and things were falling into it.  At first the hole looked like it was maybe several hundred feet wide, but then it looked like it was miles wide at the same time.  

I was with a group of people, some family and some from work, I think, and there was even someone that I think was kind of dressed like a medieval knight.  The knight was there to somehow help us fight the hole or something.  The rest of us were just scrambling to keep away from it so we didn't fall in.  There may have been a brief scene where we were with the knight in a setting kind of like a Robin Hood encampment.  There was a large wooden fence all around, and torches all over the place keeping everything lit, and lots of people running around.  I think we were trying to figure out either how to avoid the hole, what was in the hole, or where the hole eventually wound up.  What was on the other side of it?  Where did it lead?

I saw a brief view of the entire planet Earth from space, and I could see the hole on the surface, almost as if it were an overlaid image on top of the earth.  The hole was kind of up to the north-west of my point of view, but just like with seeing it on the ground, I could see the dark gray-to-black of the inner wall of the hole, perfectly perpendicular to the flatness of the top of the hole.  From here I could see it growing, too, going from taking over about one fifth of the surface, to one quarter, to one third, growing to the size of the Earth itself.

Back on the ground, the edge of the hole was coming towards us, and lots of things were still falling in.  We were running between the "Big Barn" towards the dairy barn on the farm, but even the big barn started to fall into the hole.  Somehow at this point we realized that the other end of this hole came out into something like an alternate dimension that resembled our current one, but was different and somehow more malicious.  I don't know if there were any specifics about that discovered, but somehow we knew.

Finally the hole got big enough and came fast enough that the dairy barn dropped into it, and we were going to be next.  I remember a very brief falling sensation, followed by a quick flip, and suddenly I was standing on new ground.  Everything in the new place had a reddish color to it, almost as if it were lit by lava.  It was as if the entirety of Mordor was inside of Mount Doom.  We knew we were stuck here, because within a few minutes the hole would have the whole Earth engulfed, but we still didn't know why this was all happening.  Unfortunately the dream ended before we found out.

The Matrix is Shutting Down

I started out in a large mall-like building that was supposed to be my work building.  I was talking to someone there about The Matrix 4 coming out, and as we were talking, it was supposed to be like we were starting to watch it.  Keanu Reeves was there, but he looked more like his Cyberpunk 2077 character, Johnny Silverhand, than Neo.  Pretty quickly it transitioned from watching a movie about it to being part of the story.

The inside of the mall-like building was very brightly lit and pretty much all white except for some black accents.  There were a lot of video screens around, too.  Big ones, like big video kiosks that would normally have a map of the mall or playing an ad, and others on the walls that were like giant multi-part displays.

Keanu (because he was Keanu in the dream, really not Neo) looked around and said that the Matrix was being turned off.  I looked around, too, and I didn't see anything at first, but when I tried to relax my mind and my eyes, I started seeing the Matrix code sliding around on everything, except that instead of being green, it was a bright, light blue.  As I looked in the direction he was looking, I could see where these screen like areas were going dark, and the Matrix code was disappearing from them.  It was starting from farther away, but was quickly coming towards the area we were standing in.  As it did, it also was turning out the lights in that direction, so it was getting darker.

There was a group of maybe about 10 or 15 of us around, all different ages, men and women, boys and girls.  It really was just a random selection of people.  We all took off after him.  We understood that if the Matrix shut down, our world and our existence would be wiped out.  It was more like we were programs rather than people injected into the Matrix, but at no point did anyone ever imply we were programs.  Keanu said, "We have to stop the Matrix from shutting down.  Come on!"  And he took off running in the opposite direction of where everything was turning off, and we all followed.

As we ran and watched the Matrix code around us, we could see it flickering in and out, and we could hear the "thunk" behind us, like a big switch being thrown in an empty warehouse, as things turned off.   It seemed to catch up to us, and Keanu egged us on to keep running and keep following him.  He kept telling us that we needed to get to "the center of the Matrix" before it all shut down.

There was a point where we came up to a really big area, kind of like a huge food court but without the tables and chairs.  The light was getting dimmer, and there were something like giant statues of heads around.  The Matrix code was getting sparse on everything and kept flickering in and out.  But even though this was the case, we were in this area for a bit longer.  There was some talking going on, and it kind of seemed like maybe Keanu was talking to... I don't know...  machines, maybe?  I think he was trying to convince them to stop the Matrix shutdown, but they were saying that this was the way it had to be, and eventually we moved on.

Soon after this we were running through more big white mall-like hallways, and the power outages seemed to be very close, and stuff was turning off all around us.  We had hit an area of the building where there seemed to be some strangeness in the structure of the building, going up in kind of a weird diagonal direction, and we were having to climb up over furniture, boxes, weird built-in structures, and such to get through a doorway sized opening that was about 10 feet up from us.  Everyone was helping each other climb up and through.  Once we got though there, the whole area where had just left turned off and went black.  The way forward went through a short hallway and then opened up to a very sunny and warm outside area with green grass and blue sky.

At this point my alarm went off and I woke up.  I wish I knew if we ever made it to the "center of the Matrix"...