Dreamscapes: Flaming Torii Gate
I am a firm believer that despite the content of the dream, it is a dream unless very vividly stated otherwise. Dreams do not turn into potential nightmares unless I genuinely feel cold sweats and shiver awake, and subsequently knock my forehead on my coffin, or I can still somewhat feel uneasy to this day.
In my eyes, a dream is simply a story my mind wishes me to be a part of. The story might be a horror or a fantasy or contemporary, but it’s one I am a part of and can change if need be. Nightmares are forced participation with no chance of a shifted course. In a dream, your pain is primary. In a nightmare, your pain is secondary.
Which is why I categorize the dream I wanted to write about as a dream rather than a nightmare. Despite its variable content and how I opened my coffin afterwards to stare at the ceiling of my family house, it’s still a story I participated in.
I call this dream: “Flaming Torii Gate.”
— — —
I’m in a grocery store with my friend. The store itself is huge, fluctuating and shifting with the tides of my mind. I can’t pinpoint my friend’s face. It is also swaying. Everything in the store is slightly blurry, just slightly foggy, just slightly unseen. It feels like a microscope out of focus. Everything has form and shape, but no identity.
My friend gives me some chocolate and I courteously take it. I want to pay her back, so I grab a box of chocolate as well, the labels twirling, and nearly put it in my shopping cart. She looks at me and says, as if it’s an afterthought, “It’s nearly Ramadan.”
My brain stops and I go into overdrive. I ask if it’s okay, if I’m actually allowed to give her this unbranded chocolate, I begin to ramble into silence. I pause and think, wanting to give her the gift but not wanting her to accept it with tight lips. The conversation dissipates and in the hazy fog of the forms in the store, I don’t know if the chocolate is in the cart. I also don’t know if I realized that I am overreacting.
I go to the checkout when I look to my left. A crystal clear image breaks through the fog. A torii gate stands flaming, glowing in an empty environment. Cherry blossoms glowing hot pink float around the gate. The sight is intoxicating and addicting. It reaches out and grabs me, dragging me towards it subconsciously. I cross the torii gate.
Torii gates are meant to represent the crossing over from the normal, every day to the spiritual, hence their appearance in front of shrines in Tsunoqi. By crossing through this gate, I move from the normal mall to a cursed game of survival; the natural and mundane to the spiritual and unknown. Torii gates are also sometimes used to seal spirits away. By crossing this gate, I must’ve let a dangerous spirit go wild.
There’s a game master. She’s a woman in unidentifiable clothing killing and harming people for the very fun of it all. Everyone, unrecognized shapes, run around trying to save themselves and save others. The area where there was once an exit back to the normalcy of the mall has disappeared. The exit of the area leads to a staircase with a dead end.
In all the confusion and panic, I meet a human girl at the top of a blue-walled building. She wears a pink tracksuit, which is the only image of her I could perceive as static. The rest of her is foggy. She glares at me then asks where the balconies are. I don’t know; I tell her straight. She backs away, as though it were all a trick question, and jumps onto the ledge of a balcony that suddenly appears behind her. She throws a leg over the railing.
I beg her not to jump with both my mind and my lungs. I beg her to stay put and we’ll find a way out. She shakes her head.
“Don’t worry,” she starts, softly like a mother caressing their child, “it isn’t your fault. It isn’t your fault.”
When I go back downstairs, the pink tracksuit is crumpled to my right. I don’t have the time to dwell.
The game master is bored. She opens up a new set of staircases and exits. She begins to lure people down there to kill them. I almost go along with a group of friends, but as the game master laughs and waits for me to take the bait, I change my mind. I step away and leave. I find refuge amongst a part of the game area that looks more like a furniture store.
In that moment, I solve the riddle of it all. A dull answer resonates in my mind. It makes no sense, yet it’s the end point of it all. A race is playing on the TV in the stand nearby me. As I watch it, cars would occasionally fly out of the TV directly at me. I hide by a hollowed-out dresser and a night stand and the cars miss me, flying towards the torii gate.
When the cars stop flying at me, I left the grocery store. It’s an abandonment of my initial purpose, but there’s barely anyone there anyways.
Outside, I’m met with an outdoor carnival at night within the front parking lot. The air is a humid spring and the road is slick with a layer of fresh rain. A merry-go-round spins quickly and kids are screaming. As they fly around, they are being hosed, adding to the presence of water on the ground. Fire burns near the rides and it illuminates the reflective night. The fire glows like it did around the torii gate.
In the main parking lot, the road is like running on ice. I nearly get hit by some people trying to kill me. The second time I nearly get hit, I get onto the hood and decide to ride along. As we leave, I overhear a group of men speaking about wishing to kill not only me, but also the women in the car I am riding on. I tell the women to get down and drive fast. They’re going the same place I am, so I don’t worry about where they’re going.
We eventually get to my apartment complex. It looks much more like a mall with its vague indoor decorations, but the set-up of each house looking more like packed vendors at a convention. A group of my friends are waiting for me there but the men show up with guns. They want me dead.
They open fire on our group and everyone ducks and tries to push me to safety. They discuss amongst themselves how to survive when I decide to stick up for everyone. I scream at them, asking them who they are and why they’re trying to kill me. I also tell them to leave my friends out of it.
They get very offended. They are frightened that I don’t know them. It’s such a scare that they put down their guns and hold themselves. I’m taken aback by the sudden behavior.
The dream ends all at once. The image of the torii gate is burned into my mind, to this day, as I’m writing this. I hope the description (and my drawing) of it is enough to transfer the image properly into your minds, as it was an image that I don’t think words or pictures can do justice to.
After having the dream, I also thought a lot about the girl in the pink tracksuit. I thought about what she said and how she consoled me about her. I wondered what she meant when she said it wasn’t my fault. What wasn’t my fault, or what wouldn’t be my fault? I hope I took her advice not to blame myself.
It’s advice that can be taken much larger. Not everything bad in your life is your fault. It might’ve just happened or existed with or without you. Sometimes life happens all at once. It’s not your fault.
— Heleza
