I’ve mused to myself for a while that some of my most bizarre and unsettling nightmares could likely be used to create another supernatural horror flick like The Conjuring. For many years now, especially when I started going to college, I’ve been beset with disturbing dreams involving evil entities that feel too sentient to be just a creation of my subconscious. The most vivid and memorable of these nightmares leave me feeling haunted when I wake up because I have to shake off the creeping feeling that I’m not alone in the darkness of my bedroom.

Recalling the things I saw in this dream served as an unusual form of Halloween night entertainment for me. I figured there was no better night than tonight to interpret this.

The Mansion

In the dream, I found myself in a massive red-colored mansion with a high ceiling towering far over my head. In the living room, seated around a wide rectangular wood table was a group of kids playing cards, paying no heed to me.

On the other side of the mansion was what must’ve been the living quarters, with a hallway dotted left and right with multiple bedrooms. From this hallway came a boy wrapped up in what seemed like a bear snuggie. I greeted him and assumed that he was with the other kids playing cards.

Right after I made that assumption, I somehow managed to intuitively realize that this boy was a wandering spirit living in the mansion. Don’t know how that knowledge came to me, but it did. I immediately told him that I’d pray for him, and he replied with gratitude.

The Mirror

After I encountered that boy, I floated up towards the top of the ceiling, either by my own will or the path of the dream. When I reached the top, I was in front of a wide, rectangular mirror fastened into the wooden rafts. I didn’t have a bloody clue what was supposed to happen next until a wise-looking old man randomly appeared next to me, floating in midair like I was.

I turned to talk to him, and he ominously told me something like this (I can’t remember the exact words, unfortunately):

“The devil lives on the other side of this mirror, and should he escape, the world will be doomed.”
The wise man from the dream

He disappeared, and when I moved forward, I went through the mirror, appearing on the other side in what looked like an overly lavish version of the mansion.

In the Other Side

None of the children were in sight when I crossed over into the mirror world. I had the sense that this reverse side of the mansion was a restaurant of a sort. I could see adults walking around what was previously the living room, traversing the hallways lining a larger room that turned out to be the main dining hall.

For some reason, I had been shrunken down immediately after passing through the mirror, and as I floated through the hallways, nobody seemed to notice me. Before I slipped into the dining hall, I saw one of the most frequent customers from my old food service job standing around aimlessly. It was unnerving, to say the least, and I still wonder why he randomly showed up here.

When I entered the dining hall, I saw people seated at tables being served ridiculously enormous amounts of food by wandering waiters. The people there wouldn’t stop eating; it was gluttony incarnate.

I got the idea in my head that if I prayed for them (an intercessory prayer that they would stop being gluttonous), it would change the scene before me. Well, it did.

Right when I started praying, everybody in the restaurant (besides the waiters) started screaming in horrible agony, and one man, from what I remember, began to burn with fire covering his body, and I had to say a desperate prayer for his pain to subside. Suddenly, the denizens of this mirror world were on high alert, and I fled the dining hall, trying to find a way out.

When I walked back into the hallway, I saw people frantically moving about, no longer standing around or eating massive amounts of food. Nobody noticed me still, which was likely a good thing, considering my prayer had been taken as a threat.

During the madness that ensued after the people there freaked out, I saw a girl tied to a yellow balloon float up all the way to the ceiling. When it popped, she instantly disappeared, and I have no idea what exactly happened to her.

I kept floating towards what would’ve been the living room, where there was only one girl left standing underneath what looked like a sealed glass case, suspended in midair between a wooden structure jutting down from the ceiling. I hadn’t noticed the contraption when I had floated down from the mirror, and the sight before me was more unnerving than anything else I had seen.

The Devil in His Cage

When I glanced inside the glass case, I saw what must’ve been the devil. Whatever was sealed inside the case looked…reptilian, in a way. Like he had once been human but was now utterly twisted and deformed. The creature had mismatched green and yellow eyes, along with scabby, scaly skin, which was a putrid shade of yellow from what I remember.

Underneath that thing was a blackened, burnt husk of what looked like its previous form. The husk looked almost entirely human and looked reminiscent of a snake shedding its skin. The burnt husk’s mouth was open in a permanent silent scream.

The thing in the case hadn’t noticed me, but when that girl wandered too close to him, I said another desperate prayer for her to be safe, and just as I did, it tried to grab at her. He failed, and she escaped, either by disappearing into the depths of the mansion or fading away like the other girl had.

At this point or soon afterward, the devil finally noticed me, but before he could do anything, I flew away into the opposite side of the mansion, where the living quarters had previously been. It was at this point that the dream ended.

Analysis

I still have so many questions about what happened in this dream, the biggest ones being:

Who was the old man who warned me about the mirror world? Was he God, an angel, or a saint?
Why the heck was that customer of mine in the mirror world?
For that matter, what was the mirror world exactly? A lavishly disguised, faux affable Hell for people consumed with gluttony?
Were those waiters actually demons in disguise?
Where did that girl with the yellow balloon go?
Was the devil trying to somehow keep those people trapped in their gluttony? And also, were they even aware he was observing them from within that case?

One of the theories I have is that the balloon girl was somehow able to escape the mirror world because of the yellow balloon. After a bit of online research, I found some interpretation of the color yellow as symbolic of hope and happiness. Maybe then, that girl was able to escape that world, and serve as a symbol of hope for the other people there.

Personally, seeing that burnt husk underneath the devil in this dream doesn’t actually shock me for a number of reasons:

Jesus Himself once said that he saw Satan fall like lightning from Heaven, when the devil was kicked out of Heaven (Luke 10:18).
Roughly a week before this dream occurred, I had a different dream about the devil confronting me disguised as a benevolent angel, ranting about his wings being burnt off.

I suppose then that, one way or another, in the dream only or as a spiritual fact, what I saw in the glass case is what the devil really looks like after falling from Heaven.

This is one of the weirdest, most symbolic dreams I’ve ever had, and to this day, I still wonder about what else lay within the walls of the mirror-world mansion.

Featured Image by Batelsk/Pixabay

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