I had a pretty trippy dream last night. In the dream, I was a kid. I was in a green field by a wood line, the sky was overcast. I found a stairway going down into a tunnel. It led me to a vast complex of tunnels in which a subterranean society was living and thriving. It all had a decidedly steampunk feel to it, very lively. The halls were well lit with warm, incandescent lights, and had a nice cheery ambiance. I met a friendly middle-aged man who showed me around the place. He had a pet bobcat and a dog. They were quite tame and let me pet them. He talked about his beautiful girlfriend, and when he talked about her I could see her in my mind. She looked like the girl from 'My Fair Lady', complete with jaunty hat and dress. I was having a pretty good time, but at some point I started to feel like something wasn't right. I started to notice that there were places in the network of tunnels that were neglected, decaying. Some tunnels were dark and strung with cobwebs, or even collapsed. Steampunky machinery that was no longer thrumming, but silent, broken, rusting. Corners strewn with dusty items. The longer I stayed there, the less cheery it seemed. The hustling bustling sounds of society began to fade until they could only be heard distantly, then only as echoes in the mind. The warm incandescents faded away, and were replaced by the cold light of bioluminescent moss and fungus, or pale sunlight shining through fissures from the surface. It was damp, and the only sounds were dripping water and a squeaking, clunking machine somewhere in the tunnels. I was alone with the man and his pets, lurking about in the cold dark tunnels. That's when everything started to become clear. The man wasn't middle-aged, but old. His hair and beard were long and gray. His clothes, which had seemed so clean and new when I had first entered the tunnels, were tattered and shabby. All the people I had seen, the lights, the steampunk, the society, were really just imaginings of a diseased mind. His girlfriend that he had talked about was only an old postcard with a drawing of a girl in a jaunty hat and dress, but when he looked at it, it came alive and was real to him. I was looking at it through his eyes, and the girl in the picture became somewhat 3D, and she smiled and her eyes twinkled. Then I realized that I was also just a figment of his imagination. My perspective changed, and I realized that I was actually the old man. The dog was a hairless, mutated freak. The bobcat was just that: a wild bobcat. When I tried to pet it, it bit me and ran away. My perspective shifted again, and I was looking at the old man from above. He sat there with his bleeding hand tucked into his armpit, the other hand holding the postcard. He was staring at it, eyes glazed over, body rocking back and forth. Then, my field of view began to retreat through a fissure in the ceiling of the tunnel. I passed through to the surface, then high into the air. The sky was dark and cloudy, everything was gray. Below me were the ruins of a city destroyed by nuclear fire, it's sole surviving resident a schizophrenic old man living in the subway tunnels below.
The imagination is a find place to play in, but I won't want to live there. That is the moral that I think your dream is telling you.
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Actually, as I was writing this I noticed a parallel between the dream and the House of Lords. Once the thriving online community, it will one day be populated only by Dark Elf and his sock puppets.
