What?

Spiritual retardation begins with the misunderstanding of what dreams are and where they take place. Dreamland is not an entirely separate place at all. Instead, it is a layer of existence superimposed upon our physical world. You are in dreamland right now; the only difference between your waking and sleeping life is that when you sleep, you aren’t as easily able to perceive the physical layer and you are more able to perceive the layers accessible to the mind and consciousness. I refer to this layer of existence as the astral plane in many of my essays. Dreams are a kind of temporary blindness to the physical that enhances all of the other senses and unleashes them on the more subtle strata of existence. The physical is still there and you are still attached to it. Only death can sever the bond. Sleep, as I say in my soon-to-be-published book, Sacred Homemaking: A Magical Approach to a Tidier Home, is a kind of little death.

Dreams are collective and personal

Just as your normal life takes place in both collective and personal realms, dreams are at once uniquely oriented towards you as an individual and representative of other dreamers. Another crazy aspect of dreams is that human beings are not the only beings who dream, not by a long shot. Everything that exists dreams, and that includes animals, the computer speakers on my desk, the chair under my butt, the house in which I live, the town that encapsulates the house, trees, rocks, tiny little amoebas, single atoms, and what we call the Universe. My book, Sacred Homemaking, is about unleashing the transformative power of allying oneself to these various consciousnesses by tiny and seemingly innocuous acts of recognizing them and thanking them for their help. You don’t have to get my book to see if this works. The next time you leave your residence, thank the door for keeping you safe and wind, weather, and burglars out. You can do this mentally or out loud. Thank your bed for your night’s sleep no matter how poorly you slept. Clean and thank your toilet each night. Do all of these things every day and then come back to this essay in a year. Has your life improved? What do your finances look like? How about your relationships? In my own case, everything across the board started to improve once I acknowledged the consciousness all around me. I think you will be astonished at how well it works.

The Mall

For whatever reason, Reddit has been the hot spot for discussing the collective dreamworld over the last decade or so. TikTok is gaining ground. Before the advent of online spaces, there were not many ways for people around the world to discuss the collective dream space, and we should thank the higher powers for the gift of being able to chat about these liminal concepts in international, online forums. Perhaps you are familiar with Mall World, which is a dream of a large 1990s-era shopping center with piped in Muzak, towering escalators, a massive food court, and endless retail stores in various states of openness and hospitality. In my own case, I dream of Mall World about once a month. In my case, the mall can be the endangered, rambling, indoor type that dominated American culture from the 1970s-1990s or it can be a more rustic, improvised, downtown setting where chain stores occupy several floors of decrepit, decaying buildings and one floor connects to another via an old fashioned, fire escape stairway.

In 1975, a deluxe shopping mall opened in a suburb all of a hop, skip, and a jump away from where I grew up. This mall was called Old Chicago, and it was a magical place inspired by the architecture of Louis Sullivan (and the Chicago Colombian Expedition in general) that combined an entire indoor amusement park with retail shopping. My mother took me there once or twice, and though I was only four or five years old, it remains indelibly imprinted upon my memory. A circus performer named Jimmy Troy fell to his death the year the mall opened during a trapeze performance. This did not bode well. By 1980, it was mostly shut down, because those who built it had not completed construction upon it even as it began to fail. Old Chicago was torn down in 1986.In my dreams, I often go to Old Chicago, where it still very much exists along with the hopefulness and naivete of the late 70s and early 1980s. It was a magical and wonderful place, truly bizarre and only possible in a brief window of an equally brief period of civilization. In my shopping mall dreams, the malls are almost always on the verge of closing. Clearance sales and Everything Must Go signs litter picked over clothing racks and merchandise. It is always about ten minutes before the stores close. I believe that this part of my mall dreams has to do with my awareness that the retail shopping era is on its way out.

Entire maps have been made of Mall World, but in my case, I don’t find they are accurate. Some Redditors agree that their worlds and maps match; mine seem to be mine alone.

The Bathrooms

The collective Mall World and the School (I will discuss this one in a minute) has public bathrooms, and most dreamers agree they are disgusting. One Redditor complains:

“I want to use the bathroom, but it’s either filthy or there’s no door or even a toilet. Just an empty stall. It’s one of my many recurring dreams where I find myself in a place that I can’t escape, and when I run out, I find myself in another identical place. I hate it.”

I have dreamed of the Bathrooms. They are huge, usually equipped with locker areas, showers, and large sinks designed to serve a stadium. The sinks, floor drains, and toilet areas are clogged with all manner of wet toilet paper and paper towels. Hair and heaven knows what else cause flooding on the floor and around the drains. Privacy is a no go and so is actually going to the bathroom; I will often wake up during the bathroom dream because my physical plane body genuinely has to pee and all the dreamworld has to offer is a massive, useless community labyrinth of a bathroom.

Freud would probably say dreams of the Bathroom are about sex. I would probably say he was a simple-minded, coke-addled moron. The Bathroom exists because it is actually there, and it is what each of us see in our mind’s eye when we use a public bathroom. Someday when the world is less populous and stadium style indoor plumbing is a phenomenon of the distant past, people will no longer dream of the Bathrooms. Maybe they will dream of the Outhouses, or That Hole at the Edge of the Forest. I don’t know.

The School

I love the original Silent Hill film because it revealed so many of my own nightmare spaces and reassured me I was not alone in having them. In Silent Hill, a little adopted girl disappears into a liminal mining town called Silent Hill. Her adoptive mother, Rose, goes on a quest to save her and ends up trapped in the dream world, albeit after rescuing her child, Sharon. Sharon has a dream alter-ego named Alessa who runs around and generally haunts an abandoned school. The school is a maze of winding rooms and passageways. Just as it happens in my nightmares, Sharon/Alessa and Rose are chased into various school rooms by menacing monsters from which they must hide. Occasionally they are forced out of their hiding spots to battle the monsters.

Another film that closely resembles my school dreams and nightmares is the Thai production ReCycle, which is the story of a young woman writer who travels through the dream and nightmare world while guided by a little girl. We later find out that the writer is connected by blood to the dream characters and that she must conquer parts of her own shadow in order to escape.

My husband and I both dreamed about high school well beyond being forced to attend high school. In my own case, I was spooked with high school dreams until I was 40 years old. My husband suffered a similar fate. In my dreams, I could either not find my locker or my classroom, and I often had to walk home in a severe thunderstorm or at night and then could not figure out where I lived. My husband reports dreams of having all of one year left and feeling incredibly demoralized at being stuck. I have had the same sort of dream about both high school and the college dreams that took over once I had passed the age of 40.

The Elevators

One particularly icky liminal space that shows up over and over in my dreams is the Elevator. People must crowd to get in it. The floor one lands upon is a form of Russian roulette — it could be safe and empty, or it could be a passageway to a monster maze of being chased through and endless parade of scary rooms.

The Old Mansion

In my case, the Elevators can occur in Mall World or they can be part of a sinister old mansion. In my dreams, I have often inherited or bought a decrepit, hulking property, half of which has been boarded up and abandoned. The lower floors of the property are mysterious and full of potential dangers, including monsters or endless hallways in which to disappear and be eaten. Bathrooms in the Mansion are often disgusting and old, but instead of stadium size lavatories, they are gross pink, green, and blue porcelain holdovers from the 60s and 70s. Bathtubs with whirlpool jets spew dead spiders and earwigs if the water is turned on full blast. Dripping, mostly empty shampoo bottles and wet toothbrushes occupy mildewy tile corners and sit atop rusty, dusty fan units.

The Hotel

In more recent times, I find myself dreaming of a large hotel in which I rent a cozy room. This dream is seldom sinister. The Hotel seems to be connected to Mall World and is often in a desert setting such as Las Vegas. Going outside involves unbearable heat, so I find myself retreating to the inner sanctum with its heavy, white curtains and bay windows. I feel lucky to be in such a nice space.

Apartments and houses

I will often carve out living spaces for myself or for my husband and I in hidden apartments. One of these exists within the School or College setting and from the outside looks like a utility door underneath some stairs. On the inside is a windowless, cavernous, warehouse-like space where I have some bookshelves, a kitchen, and sitting areas among the stacked boxes.

I have dreams that my parents (my father is no longer alive) have moved to an octagonal or round house designed like a non-spinning carousel. It is a place of excessive luxury and expensive furniture.

The house where I grew up also figures prominently in my dreams. I dream of it so often that I am intimately familiar with a variety of dreams that concern it.

Animal dreams

I am sure this is the case with other pet owners, but there is no end to the dreams I have about animals, and in my case it is almost always my current pets, which happen to be cats. I dream of cats almost every night, and frustratingly, I often lose cats or am saddled with cats I cannot care for in those dreams. I take very good care of my cats on the physical plane, so when I dream of a cat being abducted, hurt, lost, or killed in a dream, I will wake up angry at the unfairness of it. Obviously I feel I can never do enough for my cats.

Another dream I tend to have is the Menacing Animals in the Yard dream. I will be in the yard or trying to get to the house where I grew up and some large, wild animal will pop up such as a tiger and will stalk me and attack me as I try to escape to safety. I am not afraid of snakes in real life, but masses of giant snakes converge to prevent me from re-entering the side door. I have no idea what these dreams are about or why they happen.

Other people

If you dream of someone, most of the time it is a bad idea to speak to them or anyone else about it unless the dream was entirely positive. People who have erotic dreams about someone often make the mistake in thinking their dream affections are returned on the physical plane — I have had more than one woman make a pass at me based on lesbian dreams they had about me. I was kind about it but I was grossed out.

Before I did a great deal of spiritual work, I had terrible dreams about other people. Many of these dreams involved being attacked by hordes of strangers who would force themselves into my house. I had to physically attack them. Nowadays, I rarely have dreams of strangers trying to enter my house, and when I do have those dreams, it is far less defensive and they are not trying to force their way in. I believe this relatively new barrier is a result of a near decade of doing a daily banishing ritual. The strangers and the consciousness of strangers may still want to mess with me in my “house”, but their bad intentions have far less power than they did before I erected the formidable barrier of the Sphere of Protection.

There is a nasty class of spirit called a Mimic that likes to impersonate loved ones and humans in general. Often these beings will have human features that are warped, like deformed arms, overlarge or over-small heads, and skewed eyes. If you encounter one, invoke the name of a god or an angel and it will either burn up, melt, or disappear.

The Hat Man and the Hag

These two characters have been around since the beginning of human dreams. Even in ancient Sumeria, people reported being harassed during sleep by entities called Lilu and Lilitu, who were what we would call incubi and succubi. The Lilu would impregnate women with children, and that certainly raises questions about modern tales of alien abduction and more ancient folklore about fairies and changelings. The Hat Man and the Hag also used to reoccur in my dreams and astral travels until my daily banishing squelched them. People around the world report encounters with these two asshole entities, and anyone who doubts they exist is the one who should get his head examined. I am not sure how much more evidence anyone could possibly need to figure out the Hat Man and the Hag are real and dangerous, despite them both existing on the astral level of existence and not the physical one.

The Road, the Flying Bridge, and the Parking Lot

Much like the Mall World dream, the Road dream is one that won’t be dreamed in future, less-industrialized epochs when cars and planes are confined to the distant past. In my own case, I hate driving, I have always hated driving, and I sincerely hope that I can fulfill my plan to quit driving forever when I reach the age of 70 in 18 short years. I don’t drive on the highway — I outright refuse to do so. Nevertheless, I dream about the highway and usually this highway is punctuated by bridges that go nearly straight up into the air. I often drive my car off these bridges and die after a long fall. Cars are my personal hell and I am living that hell every day, having chosen to drive as a condition of living near my family. For reasons I will never understand, the city of Plainfield is a place I am often forced to drive to in dreams and it is always a terrifying drive full of flying bridges. I am not sure why I associate Plainfield specifically with bad juju in the dreamworld.

Many people have the flying bridge dream and even more dream of the Parking Lot. Nobody can find their car in the Parking Lot. The car, which in my case was parked in a sea of other cars, has disappeared, usually with a few cats in it who will starve to death as a result. Because I have lost my car in the Parking Lot, I must now walk home, a feat of endurance that could take a damn month of sleeping on the street.

The City and the Train Depot

The City in my case tends to be Chicago as I have always lived near Chicago. Just as it is in Meatworld, Chicago is a dreary, gray, intimidating place built more for vehicles than people. I often go to Chicago for schooling just as I did for my undergrad years. Getting back home is fraught with danger. I am often trapped in a terrible neighborhood that is thick with predatory human beings and I have no way of reaching the trains home except on foot. The sun is rapidly setting and with it, danger exponentially increases. Each unfamiliar alleyway looms with scary characters. Intersections are crazy, often bisected by electrified train rails or underneath busy, impassable bridges with no pedestrian walkways.

Once I make it to the train (if I make it at all), the train depot is crowded and dangerous. It is a dark, hellish, red-lit space with illogical platforms and confused queues of others who are both sure and unsure of where they are going. It is also the only way home.

Dream relief

I complain a great deal about my dreams but they are not all bad. I have wonderful dreams about friends and family, fun flying dreams where I meander about in the air, and college dreams that are about learning where I believe I actually am legitimately learning new skills. The problem with dreams and with human wiring is that we are biologically designed to remember the negative more than the positive. This is an evolutionary feature and without it, our species would never have survived. That is why it is so important to relentlessly focus upon and build the positive instead of wallowing in the negative. You’ll be hearing more about that from me in my next few essays.