I am in a
university building, which in my dream holds the
geography department. I walk by the office of my
advisor, who is retiring this year. Though usually friendly and
mild, he begins to yell at me. He tells me, in essence, that I am not using my advising time
efficiently; that I am wasting time and not talking about what is truly important. I am shocked and feel
pointless. I move along down the hallway.
Soon I see another professor, apparently also of the geography department. She is talking on the telephone. On the other side of a glass wall that separates her office from a copy room sits Meg, who is the leader of the student Green Party organization, surrounded by various students. From her quaint wooden chair she throws suction cup darts towards the professor. It is clear that she intends to annoy, and is quite successful. Suddenly, full of anger, the professor arises, and starts to attack Meg. (The glass wall doesn't exist anymore.) She picks her up and drops her down into the basement, possibly down the elevator shaft, seriously injuring her. I follow, but Meg and the altercation have become irrelevant.
I wander the basement. It is made out of concrete bricks. It is very very old, perhaps thousands of years. It is dark, and plain, and musty.
I have a thing about basements in my dreams. They are old, they are the deep covered past. A few years ago I had a recurring dream where I would go down into a small basement, plain, with small windows around the top which let very little light in, and a few support columns. In one corner where I went, there were whales. That is to say, there were not actual physical whales, but rather the concept and essence of whales to be felt and intuited. I see the whales in this dream as derived from the popular mythology of whales as posessing a certain timeless wisdom.
Another time, I dreamed about going into the laundry room in my basement. Behind the washers was a concrete wall, presumably the outside wall of the house. But I crossed through it somehow, and there was another room behind there. I think there was old furniture in there or something, but that was not what was relevant. If the basement is the past, the hidden room, always to be found somewhere, is the unknown past, waiting to be uncovered.
Once, in Real Life, my mom found a veritable hidden room. Well, it wasn't blocked by a trap door or some other concealing device. But it was is the basement, in an area under the stairway that could be reached by going into the back of a storage closet. It had a lot of old paint and a few newspapers from the 1960s or so.
I've also dreamed about a secret pathway from the attic, which was then my playroom and now my bedroom, down to the basement. For years I was convinced that it actually exsisted, and it wasn't until high school when I could finally accept that it was nothing more than a dream. Sometimes my division between dream and reality becomes very tenuous or nonexistent. Just today, while napping, I dreamed that a friend of mine was asking me if I wanted to go to dinner at 5. I still don't know if it happened. I want to believe that it did.
Back to basements. When I am dreaming about a basement, it is as though I can feel mystery, I can feel eternity. Is there any difference? I am continually amazed at just how vast existence is; not only in size but in time. I am nothing but a short thread in this mad skein, tracing a short and limited path through ... through the Everything. I cannot know everything, I cannot even know a measurable fraction of everything. But when I am in a basement in my dream, I have stepped into a gateway to the gargantuan mountain of history. It is a nexus of past, present, future, and forever. I can feel mystery and eternity. It will flow through me.
I am in the basement of this academic building. I feel the age of the place. I think of pyramids. How old could this basement be? I move one of the bricks in a wall out of place, leaving a hole. A glow shines through.
I don't remember anything else.