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The Crypt Tunnels

This is not a dream but a dream "theme," akin to my "darkness falling" dreams. I felt like sharing it right now.

Another recurring theme in my dreams, aside from rapidly falling darkness, is tunnels. Not earthen tunnels like you usually think of when you hear the word, but rather stone cryptlike tunnels and hidden entryways. These pop up in my dreams frequently in many forms.

The most common scenario (combined from several different dreams) is I go into my basement, which in real life has about a foot aboveground (it has windows along the tops of the walls, that let a bit of light in), but the rest of it is underground. It's a horrible mess full of rotting junk, sewer, cat feces, and cobwebs. The sewer leak has since been fixed but the damage is done, and it may never be a nice clean basement again, if it was ever. I remember in my childhood that Dad painted road lines and stop lights on the floor and I would ride my Big Wheel around as if I were driving down a city street. Those lines are long since gone.

In real life, there are several rooms in the basement that I've given various names. There's the main room which is "interrupted" by the stairway, which cuts through the middle (you face the underside of the stairway, lined with shelves, when you stand in the main part of the room and face west). To the right of the stairway when you're coming down (facing west) is a little sideroom or storage room for preserves and such, but it's so full of old junk that it's never used and the door is falling off. Off to the other side of the room (opposite the storage room--east end) is another room called the wood room (since wood used to be stacked in here, when we used a wood furnace--we use gas now). A while back we fixed it up to look like an Egyptian tomb with thrones and shrines and even a giant pair of scales, but it's fallen into disrepair. It has a giant skull painted on the wall from when my brother used to skate in there, and a visitor once came out of it shaken, thinking we held some kind of Satanic rituals in there or something. ;) And there's one more room in the other wall of the main room (south wall), a very tiny opening behind the water tank, perhaps three feet high. This is just a tiny dirty room, perhaps for hiding in; I haven't been in there in years due to my OCD.

Last but not least, behind the sink and near the furnace (not far from the woodroom) is a sort of "manhole" in the floor. To this day I'm not sure what it is. It has a covering to avoid falling in, but it's filled with water and I don't know how deep it is. I've always had fears of that thing and what could lurk within.

Now that the place has been described, on to the dream.

The dream usually involves me going down into the basement and perhaps noticing that the sideroom (for storage) is lighter than usual, when in reality it has no windows. I open the door, if it's not open already, and look inside. Only there's no room anymore--or if there is, there are hallways leading away from it, sometimes more than one. It's not a dank dingy little room anymore, but a well-lit "crypt" with hallways/tunnels leading away. I say tunnels because they ARE still underground. Yet they have little arched windows along the tops, with cold white light coming in and lighting them perfectly. The stone the hallways are made out of is varying shades of palest brown/whitish-brown, ecru, etc., or pale terra cotta colors. The stones are small and rough, rectangular like small bricks. If there are other hallways leading off of the main ones, they all have arched doorways, but no doors. It's all very open and airy, but mysterious, almost Medieval looking. What ARE these tunnels, where did they come from, and where do they lead?

I usually start walking down one, away from the main part of the basement, and further away from my house, deeper into who knows where. I always have a feeling of slight anxiety, wondering if I'll get lost (perhaps in the wilderness?) as I'm going so far; the tunnels go on forever, it seems. Yet I'm more curious than anything--I want to find the end of these things! I wander around for a long time, finding more and more barren tunnelways to explore, but I never get anywhere. The dream always ends before I can. :( Sound familiar?

A variant deals with hidden rooms rather than cryptlike tunnels, though these rooms usually lead to tunnels themselves. The most common one I had when very young was I would find a hidden passageway in or near the bootbox in the utility room. (It's a box built into the cabinet; open the top and drop your boots inside. We haven't used it in years.) The hidden entrance is usually small, a couple of feet or so across, square/rectangular, and dark inside, yet curiosity always wins out and I creep in on hands and knees. In some dreams, others are with me and we explore together. We end up crawling down long dark square wooden(?) tunnels, further into the bowels of the house. We may never get anywhere.

OR...we may locate more mysterious places we never knew of. In one dream (recurring?) I would come upon regular-sized hallways with doors or other halls leading to other rooms. I think of a movie theater's lighting and atmosphere, with red velvet carpeting, dim lights, and lots of dark wood. (We may locate theater rooms as well.) In this particular variant we came to "Haunted Theater"-type rooms akin to those in the Haunted Theater on Mackinac Island, complete with scary people in costumes. It's like we'd stumbled into a bigger version of the Theater, in the tunnels within my house.

(I say "within" as I don't get the feeling these tunnels were BELOW the ground, unless they were under part of the house. I just feel that they went deeply into hidden areas of my house that I'd never known of before.)

A more recent example had me finding such a tunnel, only high up in the wall of another person's house (mansion), and exploring that via a bunch of scaffolding, to see where it might lead.

In another I went into the storage room and it had turned into a room in some big abandoned building out in the middle of the woods, and I went through it with a group of people, through another door to the immediate left, and we went walking through the rest of this concrete building. (This may have been my "A Field Trip With The Freemasons" dream, but it may not have been, either.)

And one particularly funny version had me wandering through the crypt tunnels within my basement, only to finally reach the end and come out near a river in wintertime. A giant swanboat was drifting past, and Vikings were sailing it. <;) Later on in the dream I joined some people near the corner of my house to find someone (a supposed Viking?) had fallen through the ice and couldn't get out. Thinking quickly, I grabbed a branch, lay down flat, and reached it out to him. He grabbed on and I RESCUED him from the water! o_o He seemed to be a kind of nerdy but nice computer guy (modern Vikings--they weren't primitive, or else they were playacting), like those who showed up to ask if things were all right. I was quite proud of myself for having saved his life, considering that I'm terrified of the water.

I'll leave it to any readers to try to figure out what the symbolism of all the tunnels and hidden passageways is, though I have my suspicions.



Early Dreams
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