The Lion Dream

Occasionally, I have incredibly intense dreams. They are extremely different from normal dreams with mixed up combinations of people from work, things I saw that day, or images of books I've just read. When I wake up from these intense dreams, my muscles are tense, as if I had been straining them all night. And all the sensations I experience while dreaming feel very real. I've actually looked into this a little and think some of these dreams might be experiences of mild hypnagogia, or sleep paralysis. They're never disruptive enough to do anything about them medically, but they do fascinate me. They don't happen often, but I'd like to keep a record of as many of them as I can.

I wrote the details to this dream on 9/26/2006 as a comment on a friend's blog. I'd had the dream recently, but I don't remember how recently.

Once I dreamt I was following a lion around an empty house into a closet with a light bulb that didn't work. I didn't know it didn't work until I closed the door. I couldn't see the lion anymore, but it told me to kneel in the corner in the dark and remain silent and still.

I heard a man try and get into the closet. The lion was gone, but I remembered (even though it never really told me) that I wasn't supposed to look at the door. The man started to chop the door down and I bent over, still kneeling. Like you do during a tornado drill.

It seemed like I was shrinking away from the door, or the door was shrinking away from me. The floor became dirt and suddenly my head was twisted completely backwards facing up towards the ceiling, instead of tucking in towards my chest. It was really weird.

Suddenly the chopping noise was gone and I didn't know where I was. I heard water dripping into a bowl. I felt really heavy, like I was full of water. I knew I wasn't supposed to move, because the lion told me not to, but I really wanted to move just a little bit to get some sense of my surroundings. I remembered going into the closet, but I couldn't even figure out how I was positioned--if I was still kneeling. I couldn't even tell if it was light or dark, though it seemed dark. All I felt was heavy and packed in tight.

I was still being...I guess the word would be "obedient" to the lion's orders to not move, so I tried to remember the sequence of events that led up to this point, rather than feel around to figure out how I got where I was. I started to panic a little when I realized that the last thing I remembered was chopping. So I moved a tiny bit. I instantly felt everything around me. My lungs were filled with dirt, which was why I was so heavy. My neck had been twisted completely around and my jaw broken. My mouth was open and water was dripping into it. I realized at this moment that the man had gotten into the closet, killed me, and buried me near the house. I didn't remember being murdered, though. I knew I hadn't died because I was with the lion who had somehow gone into my body and had been living inside my chest. When I started to breathe, the lion came out of my mouth, pulling me out of the ground, clearing the dirt from my lungs, and twisting my head around back to normal all at the same time.

Whenever I have these weird dreams, I usually have a moment where I fake wake-up and it was at that point that I thought I woke up. I got my Mormon imagery all mixed up with lion imagery and decided I needed to go on a mission and was rejuvenated and so excited about life. I was ecstatic, wanting to run around and bear my testimony of the truthfulness of the lion. Then my alarm went off and I woke up for real. When I realized it had all been one of my intense dreams, I was a little disappointed that my "spiritual experience" was so...creepy. And fake. And cliche. And so centered around the fact that I had recently seen the Narnia movie and that my bathroom ceiling had been dripping while I was asleep.