Haunted Houses and the Pure White

I had a strange dream.

I dreamed that I was in a semi-rural area.  Quite a few scattered houses.  What used to be called ‘suburban’ before that came to  mean tract housing.  But the houses were all haunted.  No actual ghosts, I think, but there was a malign influence that settled in these houses and would damage the inhabitants and in time would spread outside the house.  Consequently, they had all been abandoned.  The whole area had been abandoned.  Everyone had retreated to the town.  I was one of the last holdouts, perhaps even the very last.

And I was not living in a house.

The House I was not Living In

There was a house (it was never mine and I don’t think I ever lived in it).  It was the last house before a cleared belt of a mile or two around the town that had been cleared for protection.   I had retreated to it.

The house was vivid in my dream.

It was something of a mansion in a modern mediterranean style.  The front had circular stairs leading to a landing with part of the house projecting out to the left of the stairs.  To the right of the landing was a small garden one story up.  To the left and left diagonal was another small flight of stairs that ended in a mostly covered landing.  There was  the main entrance and another entrance to the home off this landing, and then the home itself was two stories up from the landing.  I had gone through it a few times in the daylight–it had lots of tile and rich, dark wood.  The exterior was a light, tan stucco with some few windows but not a lot.

I lived out back where there was an almost entirely blank wall, three stories high, with a 20 foot wide strip of stone pavings at the base.  That is where I lived.  I had a row of tables set up parallel to the wall and my worldly goods on and under them.  Every few days or so a man employed by the town came out in a horse-drawn wagon to check on me and bring me supplies.

I had more understanding of the malign influences than any and was better at identifying, resisting, and combatting than any, but even I had been forced to retreat to this last house.

I Leave

When the dream began, it was early evening and the man from town was there.  He and I were loading most of my things into his wagon.    Everything I just wrote above I already ‘knew’ when the dream began or was revealed as I sat and reminisced/reflected after the man left.  The reason were were loading my stuff was he and I had talked it over and decided that even this house and now its environs  were growing too dangerous.  I had to stay one last night for some kind of spiritual reason that was never addressed in the dream, so we agreed he would haul most  of my stuff this evening and then come back the next day for me and the few necessities I had kept with me.

Then I spent some time wandering around the house and reminiscing, and then there was a fade to black and it was the next day and I was getting into the wagon.  He asked me how it was.  I said it had been pretty rough and it seems it had been.

The Town

I expected a few people to come out to see me arrive for curiosity–the last of the holdouts!–but there was more than I expected and there was an air of muted hostility.  Call it wariness.  From the comments I could hear it became clear they they worried I was infected.

Completing the System

Then someone approached me and tried to complete the system.

Completing the system was the final stage in the malign influence’s control over somebody.  You would be attacked by the influences in various ways for days or even years and then suddenly exposed to a shape or an image that would perform a kind of hostile reboot shock on you, allowing you to be possessed.

This was even more of a shock attack then normal because I was not expected it in the town and from an apparently functioning person.

However, I understood more about the  malign than anyone else from my long time as a hold out–I don’t think anyone else in the town really even understood the concept of completing the system very well–and my understanding was not just theoretical.  I had combat-grade understanding.  I instantly reacted to the shock attack with my own mental and physical symbols, the attack failed, the possessed individual just stood there frustrated and then I cleansed them and raised the alarm.

I demanded to be taken to the Town Council at once, which my wagon driver official obligingly did.  A large and increasingly hostile crowd followed me.  They were convinced that I was possessed and had done something to possess the individual who attacked me.  My claims about completing the system were taken as evidence that I had stayed out too long and had finally succumbed.

Along the way I had two other completing the system attacks.

The Town Council

I warned the Town Council.  They were not receptive.  They barely had a notion of system completion and like the townsfolk they suspected me.  The confused babble they got from the crowd made it worse.

Now, it turns out that part of my spiritual warfare over the years had developed something like a third eye or an inner eye for me.  I had opened it instantly when attacked and that sight had been critical in warding off the attack.  On the trip to the council I had opened it again and had perceived that there were multiple possessed people in town, as if the additional attacks along the way were not enough to confirm it.  The inner eye gave me something like a map with flashing dots wherever there was a possession.

Reluctantly, I told the Council this.  I thought I had to though I thought it would do no good.  They did not take it well.  It was  more evidence that I was possessed, or at least crazy.

But they didn’t know what to do about it so ultimately they let me go with a lot of warnings.

Cleaning the Town

For the next years I set about fighting the infection.  Unlike in the rural, it was mostly in people.  I didn’t have any grand scheme–it was desperation and survival.  I lived on the periphery where there seemed to be less of it and started cleaning threats when they got close to me.  Waiting until completing the system had started was too  high risk.    I got better and better at keeping my inner eye on until I had it activated basically all the time.  When I had my immediate area cleared I saw that threats kept pushing in from beyond it, so I started cleaning a bit farther on, better to be acting instead of responding.  Frustratingly the concentration of threats inward in the town was too high to take my chances, so I ultimately fell into a pattern of living as an itinerant doing long week-longs laps around the periphery of the town.  I would clean my area, move a little farther along the circle, clean, move and so on, until by the time I got back around the area I had started in needed cleaned again.  This went on.  But without any intention on my part the constant spiritual warfare on my part gradually reduced the threat until I was able to broaden my circle inward.  This went on, I got closer and closer to the center of the town, until the day when I cleaned the last threat.

In that moment, to my inner eye the map of the town flashed pure white.

That was the dream.

The most spiritual lesson I got from the dream was not anything that happened in the dream.  The dream happened exactly as I described and in my dream I accepted it as was.  But writing it up, I felt a strong impulse to do a counter reading–to ask, what if I were really possessed and what I called cleaning the possession out was actually me completing the system.  If this were a fiction, that would be the “surprise” ending.   The story seems to demand it.   You, dear reader, no doubt felt the same impulse.

But it is not the story that demands it.  The dream is exactly as described.  It is something broken in ourselves.