Dream: The Order

January 30, 2014

This dream was highly unsettling. While in England or some other European town, I was chosen to become part of a secret order. The order was highly secretive, and I had to either accept and join forever, or decline and never hear from them again. After some thought I decided to join. I went there to the secret location. The place seemed to be crafted out of stone. There were lots of people there, all in uniforms. A girl I knew happened to belong to the order, and I felt comfort in seeing her there. But she looked at me wistfully, almost like she wished I hadn’t joined the order.

The place seemed pretty good at first. The rules were extremely strict, but if they were obeyed, the people there were taken care of. The meals were good, everyone had their own safe where they could keep things, and certain behavioral things were required too. In time I got to know a boy my age with dark hair named Jacob. He seemed extremely sad, and I always saw him inside a stone cage inside the wall when I went into the Haven. I asked him once whether he had to stay in that cage temporarily or forever, to which he replied the latter. He told me to obey the rules now that I was stuck here, or else I would regret it as he did. One day he gave me 100 reais (I guess that was the currency in that party of Europe) as a gift. Eventually Jacob was gone, and I was told that once you were imprisoned like that, you could press a button to get a lethal injection anytime you wanted, and he had done so to end his life.

The master of the Haven was a strange man. I remember wondering if he had been this Dr. Who guy everyone was brooding about in real life. He was dressed in that manner, and he had an assistant who was portly and old with white hair and a mustache. Kind of like Wilford Brimley. One of the conditions of living at the order (I say living, but we only spent most of our days there. Then we would report what we learned that day, and would go home to be with our families) was that we could not tell others about it. There were people watching all the time, and if we spoke a word about what our lives were like, we could be imprisoned like Jacob. Another thing we had to do was pay $10 a day to the order’s coffers. I remember I had plenty of money, and I needed change, so I asked the assistant if he could give me change for the 100-real bill. He looked at it, then placed the bill on the floor. When I reached for it, confused, the doors in the room locked and I couldn’t get in. “Where did you get this?” he demanded. “Someone gave it to me!” I insisted. “Ha, someone imprisoned then? You know you’re not allowed to have this much money.” He took it and left. I was furious. 100 reais down the drain. I discussed it with my friends at the order, but they seemed reluctant to talk about any of the leadership in secret.

I wish I could remember more about the master. He was a sinister man, sickly sweet like a family man, but clearly deranged and creepy. This utopia he had built for himself worked perfectly. He had assassins to cleanly kill us and make it look like an accident if we did not follow directions, and the whole purpose of the order itself was unclear. I remember toward the end we were trying to form some sort of rebellion, though, and my brother joined the order to my dismay. That girl I knew, she never stopped looking at me sadly when I saw her. Almost like she wished I could have saved her from the outside instead of getting tangled in the same web as she.