Last night I had a really odd dream/nightmare. Everything was perfect. TOO perfect. Like Agent Smith said in The Matrix, my mind kept trying to wake up from it. Of course, I'd forgotten most things in my life (more than I'd known actually), but I was in bliss with the one I love while living on land with my favorite relatives, with the cat I always wanted named Gink, and there were many fun things to do, friends there (from Texas, California, etc), and all.
But flipping through some old pix, I felt that I should remember something. And I came to a pic that I somehow missed. People I used to know but had forgotten about in a place I'd forgotten about (and from a metadream state--ie, from the part of me that remembers but did not affect the dream or me in it--from actual memories). And powerful but vague impressions overwhelmed me. I found others and then showed them to others, and they were similarly affected. The memory wasn't perfect, like I pointed to one boy in a pic and said, "His name is..." and instead gave the name of the county that my granny lives in.
Others noted other things, too. Like how hard it was to read and write. (This, btw, is common for me in dreams for some reason.) Though perhaps ironically, my cousin (who really isn't that good at it) was the one to complain the most.
And then somehow we started remembering how we'd stood up to some evil demon that had invaded our world and it imprisoned us. It had hoped to slowly drive us all mad and as we came to realize that "it wasn't real," we'd turn on each other to end the "mockery" of what simply wasn't there. Having been a demon, it hadn't counted on us instead working together instead and finding solace in each other. And as it became aware that the gig was up (though we hadn't yet figured out how to escape), it came (without being seen, only felt and its malevolent will observable) for us. And at that point, I'll close as it got more gory than a Clive Barker story.
The gore was upsetting enough that I woke up. And while drifting between wake and sleep I had a powerful impression that I'd somehow seen this plot before in a movie, or possibly a story. Like where people who thought they knew their lives would look at pix or other things and recall things that shouldn't have happened, but did (because the life they thought they lived was a lie). And then they get into trouble as they start realizing their entire life is a lie and that they're more or less helplessly in thrall to some great evil. Did that happen in Dark City? Or any other movie like that?
Oddly, I meditated to know how our memories got wiped to begin with and I got the impression that "we were simulcrums (or sims, if you prefer)." That is, artificially created beings, made with some part of the ones we imitated, and so had very little in the way of our original memories. But I couldn't get what happened to our original selves. Maybe the world had been destroyed and the demon was simply staving off boredom by making simulcrums and trying to make us kill each other...