The Mine

Dream Info: June, 2009
Realism Intensity: 8
Content: R

Accompanied by two friends, one male and one female, I climbed through the collapsed entrance and into the wide tunnel of an abandoned mine. Everything was ordinary enough until several hundred feet in. There, hewn rock walls were replaced by dingy metal. The rock ground descended into wide stairs. The mine suddenly felt like an old underground installation of some kind. Rooms lined the stairs as we proceeded. They were all rather small. Some had doors, some curtains, some nothing. Occasional there were chairs but usually the rooms were empty.

I ducked into a room and stopped. My heart leapt to my throat. The room had a table, a couple of tipped boxes whose contents had spilled out, and several chairs. One of the chairs was occupied.

The person was facing the wall. I could only see his back. He was slouching. His dark hair was matted and unkempt. His headed rested at an awkward angle and both arms hung down. Their flesh was dusty and a sickly gray. The fingers were black and curled.

He was dead.

I must have made a noise for my two friends appeared at my sides. The girl screamed. The guy grunted.

It was as if I was frozen. I couldn’t move. It was incredibly eerie to come across a dead body. I had never seen one before. And here I was deep underground in the dark, in a small room, with a corpse. My mind wasn’t sure how to respond and my heart was pounding.

Somehow I approached the man. I moved the opposite direction his head was titled so as to avoid his face for as long as possible. I was not sure I wanted to see his expression. His chest distracted me from thoughts of his face. The man’s ribcage had been burned and was sunken in which allowed a perfect view of the insides of his lower abdomen. There was nothing identifiable: no organs, or bone structure. Just a yellowish orange liquid pooled down inside the black opening. The smell hit me. It was of orange juice, alcohol, and the bitter twang of throw-up.

I covered my mouth and nose, jerked erect, and discovered the man staring eyelessly at me. The face was gray and still bloated. Stains had dried where fluid had run from his now empty eye sockets. The hair on my neck stood up. I realized his body was too well preserved. Too much of his soft tissue was still on him: his bloated and streaked face, his hanging arms…he appeared to have died rather recently. This was an exceedingly uncomfortable realization.

Clarity came to my mind as I realized we were deep underground in the dark, in a small room, with a fresh corpse; a corpse that had died in a gruesome and undoubtedly unnatural way.

My skin was crawling and I was terrified. And I woke up.

The Quarry

Dream Info: February 3, 2009
Realism Intensity: 6 (out of 10)
Content: PG

I stepped into the antechamber of a large stone mansion. Light spilled in from the wide doorway. There were no lights…no electricity of any kind, it appeared. The walls were bare stone, cold and solid.

I signaled my friend to follow me as I opened the next thick wooden door and stepped into the black chamber beyond. Cool light spilled into the room from several tall windows. My eyes quickly adjusted and I could see a large table with ornate chairs. Some large, soft, sitting chairs, a couch, and an enormous fireplace, empty but blackened. My friend closed the door behind us.

I walked around the room lifting objects here and there. There was no dust. My foot steps echoed until, in front of the fireplace, I came upon a thick, coarsely woven rug. High upon the walls were paintings. I stood below the nearest and tried to make out it in the dim light. It was a large oil painting and reminded me of something you would see in a catholic church.

Sudden light appeared in the corner. I jumped back. An old woman stood squinting at us with an oil lamp in her hand, raised slightly above her head.

“Eh, Mario, vieni qui. C’abbiamo dei ladri,” the woman croaked.

A tall skinny man promptly appeared in the hall doorway behind her. He had on an undershirt, worn pants, and sad slippers.

“Bah, Maria, non mi sembrano i ladri. Se non c’e di che, stai zitta e lasciami stare,” the man grumbled. He punctuated his sentence with a waved hand, dismissing us. Maria swatted his shoulder. He pushed her away and trundled back into the dark hall.

I assured the woman we were not thieves. We had no idea this mansion was inhabited and had come exploring.

She walked past me casually and mumbled, “Esploratori, son’ peggiore dei ladri.”

We befriended her and stayed for dinner. She and her husband were quite pleasant. I expressed how shocked I was to have found a structure such as their house in the United States. We don’t build with solid stone often. Maria recounted how their families had immigrated to the US and Mario’s father had started carving this house out of the cliff. It was carved from the living stone. No mortar, no seams; just one piece of stone, a sculpture of a house. They operated a quarry that Mario still ran. Maria’s father had come to the states and found work with Mario’s father. The two had met. The rest was history.

As she and her husband talked, I stared at the beautiful paintings in the flickering lamp light. The night grew late. They invited us to stay over.

The next morning, sitting in the back of Mario’s old pickup truck, my friend and I bounced as we pulled out of the mansion’s rocky driveway. We were headed up the canyon to the side of their house. Jolting back and forth I marveled and the large stone house buried deep with in the shadow of the cliff that surrounded it. Over the decades they had removed an impressive amount of stone. The sheer cliff rose for hundreds of feet. You could clearly see where Mario’s father and his brothers had started chiseling inward. They had removed the raw stone leaving their sculptured house.

The mountains pressed in around us. We drove under a high natural archway of stone. Vines dangled down. There were many strange rock formations. The trees were dense. Here and there we spied cracks and openings in the rocks; possible caves beckoning me to come explore.