"300 years have gone by here"

[Stillwater]

A particularly vivid dream from a bit ago, with quite a lot of elaborate symbolism and intensity:

Sept. 29, 2017

We are walking through a medium-sized Belgian city late at night; the buildings are around 3-4 stories tall, with an 18th / 19th century character, in modern day. I need to be at a particular place in the city, but there is no fast way to get there using only the streets. There is, however a way to get there which involves walking through back alleyways and cutting through buildings. After crossing a couple corner shops and a few piazza-like spaces, we come to the final leg. We enter a building which has half the feeling of a museum, and half the feeling of a department store. Displays are arranged in a maze-like fashion, so getting through this building quickly is dependent on prior knowledge of the spaces. Some of the spaces are moderately lit, others are a bit dimmer. We probably travel around 150 yards through these spaces when we emerge back into another courtyard, which then opens into a fairly large square, basilican-type space.

This space, as opposed to the contemporary design of the displays, feels more like the 1650's... Jacobean in character. The room is two levels, and we are located on the balcony level which over-looks a lower open level. At the head of the lower space sit two figures. The figure on the right is a young woman dressed as a harlequin. She has a heart-shaped paddle with some message scrawled across it in black script; she is fairly full of figure. The man beside her is dressed as a medieval catholic pardoner, with a crucifix-topped staff; he feels very grave in disposition. There is a full court before them, engaged in conversation amongst themselves. The entire space is lit by dim, flickering candlelight. The walls are composed of densely-packed wooden millwork, laden with cloth banners which draped down from the higher levels. The floor of the space is composed of masonic figures of checkers in black, white, and red patterns, but only barely discernable for color in the light. I walked around the perimeter of this room along the balcony, passing behind the two presiding figures, and gazing down at them. 

As I entered another room just beside this one, my sight blacked out briefly and then I faded back in immediately. I was staring at the same room, but now much darker, and in a hazier state of mind. I felt the room being pulled into a frame at the opposite end of the room. A bell beside the frame began to toll, and suddenly the frame seemed to contain a "hungry portal", that sucked the image of the back of the room into itself. I saw the bell stretching out to infinity as its tolls bent in tone, from full-sounding to something like muffled by water. Another figure beside me shouted to me, as he held onto a column engaged to a wall; his clothing was being whipped around, apparently by the winds created by the vortex ahead of us. He told me that this portal would "lead us to new lifetimes, if we chose it". He let go, and I saw him pulled into the portal, melting into infinity like an object accelerating to the speed of light...an ever-elongating line.

I black out again, and when I came to again, I was back in the same room, the storm over. I reason that I must have been through the portal a time or few... some indeterminate number? The room beside, where the harlequin and pardoner presided earlier was now lit by a bit of light entering from outside, rather than candlelight. It was completely empty. I saw the paddle of the harlequin to remind me they were once there. I passed through the open courtyards, and back through the building that previously held the displays... it was now rundown, and contained furniture from a much earlier age. I passed through a good portion of the city, now completely empty. Eventually a street opened up to a bigger boulevard, and I walked into a corner salon. A few people were there, sitting quietly together. Most of them exuded this feeling of having very little "life force"... like they were not whole people, with conscious experiences, but rather wooden beings. A woman sat with her back to the boulevard windows, with a little light streaming over her. I had the feeling that she in particular was a real, conscious being. She looked on with a stoic, unchanging expression, which none-the-less had a small note of serenity to it. I noted her hair was cut in a medium-length bob- fairly straight and without much extra volume. I asked her how long she had been there. I said... "it must be lifetimes?" She nodded, and said, "yes, 300 years have gone by here." I got the impression the people around her didn't change their situation very often, and that she had spent a good portion of that time sitting here in this same position, engaged in no activity. I asked her if she would like to come away and leave with me... telling her that there were other things to see and do out there, and that she could be happy enough, more than here. She made the smallest of smiles, and agreed to leave with me, and it felt like a massive gesture... like that miniscule emotion was multiplied many-fold by intent and depth of feeling. I remember feeling glad, and remarking that she had quite a pleasant face afterall.

The light from the corner salon seemed to come with her, and enter the spaces we passed through. It felt like she was seeing these places just outside her previous setting for the very first time, and was in awe that there were other places that existed that were so different from the salon.  I took her back to the harlequin's court, and she looked down at the space, seeing the same paddle there. We walked around again to the same room with the portal, and we both faded out again.