I was napping this afternoon and had one of those long involved dreams that isn't particularly nice and seems to just go on and on. Parts of it were clearly from some current events in my life, parts from a book I was reading when I fell asleep. Not a good combination.
I don't ordinarily remember my dreams, and most of them are trivial when I do. And I'm seldom completely in the first person in a dream; I'm almost always a watcher, often able to direct parts of the dream. And in that state, I sometimes remember other dreams, and on occasions, wake up with that knowledge.
I can see why some people believe in a dream world.
Anyway, part of this dream incorporated what I'll call "the trail." It has been in a great many of my dreams, probably for decades. It changes form from time to time, but it's still the same trail.
It's a primarily a motorcycle trail. In a couple of dreams I've run the trail on foot. It's always at night; parts are underground. It usually starts in a basement, a cave, deep woods, once one end was in a warehouse. It's maybe two or three miles long; twisting, turning, negotiating narrow underground tunnels, threading between trees, running levees in swampland. There are sometimes other people on the trail, moving in either direction. I'm usually by myself; occasionally in a small group. Once or twice I rode it as part of a time-speed-distance rally with checkpoints.
The trail is always different, but it has its own internal logic. It's twisty and dark, and it is seldom possible to go much more than walking pace, though there are some faster spots. The basic route is always similar, and I know it in the dream - downhill, turn left, negotiate some shallow water, uphill to the right, across the narrow ridge.
It's not difficult in the ISDT sense; in my dreams I've taken touring bikes and sportbikes through slowly and carefully, and enduro bikes much faster. It's just dark and complex.
Though I sometimes run the trail for fun, most often I'm using it to go somewhere; thinking about it, it's a lot like the Pattern in Zelazny's Amber stories, except nobody walked the Pattern for fun. And the trail's endpoints are always fixed; they just they wind up in different places from dream to dream.
It's dark, and there are things that live along the trail; giant spiders and snakes, things out of horror movies. But they're not dangerous, at least to travelers, and there's one place where I sometimes stop to take a break; a nonhuman thing lives in a hut nearby. Sometimes I'll walk over and we'll chat a bit. It's odd; while the trail *looks* like something out of a horror writer's imagination, it's not dangerous; in fact, in some dreams, it is the safe place I escape to.
There are some side forks along the trail that are... if not dangerous, then not a good idea to go down. One winds up in a housing project, all the houses are identical, the people are identical, and they emphatically don't want me there. I think that came out of one of Madeline L'Engle's books that I read when I was a kid. Other offshoots... most of them are signposted; I either can't read them or don't care; at least, I don't remember even considering going down them
I used to do a fair amount of trail riding as a teenager; part of the trail
incorporates some areas I used to ride, like a stretch along a six-inch-wide
dam top with a lake on one side and a slick rocky drop on the other. Some
looks like the inside of tourist caves I've been in. Some looks like some
woods trails I used to ride at night.