A battle repeated

Last night's dream is unusually fuzzy because I was awakened suddenly this morning by a loud noise.

*****

I and some allies are in a complicated building with several enemies. We are trying to accomplish some goal [what? rescuing someone maybe?] without being killed by the enemies. In one scene I am protecting some comrades in a dark, narrow hallway while an enemy man is coming toward me, firing a gun at me, but his bullets all either miss or are deflected by a piece of metal I am using as a shield. Somehow [was it a knife or did I get a gun somehow too?] I kill the enemy man.

The whole situation has resolved, but now it is repeating. I am in the same scene again with the enemy man. This time however, I have no fear, since I already know how it is going to come out.

The situation repeats again. However, this time it takes a turn, and I don't end up in the scene with the enemy man. Instead, I am in a mazelike room with blue walls. It is sort of like a library or an office; there are a lot of tables. I am trying to elude discovery by the enemies in this room. I hear others in nearby corridors and try to avoid them, but we come upon each other anyway. They turn out to be allies. There is a contingent of the allied group using this room as a base of operations. I am still unhappy to have been found by them, as it seems there is some competition among members of the total allied force, but still I am glad I've been found only by them and not by the enemies.

*****

The repetitive nature of this dream along with its adversarial scenario gave it the feeling of a video game. I don't actually play any video games. (Ok, I have played Silent Hill 2 a few times, but it was years ago.) I find it interesting that one of Friday night's dreams also involved an element of repetition. Having scenes replay within a dream is not something that generally happens to me-- I'm sure it's happened a few times in my life, but none that I specifically recall-- and now it happens on two consecutive nights. The nature of the repetition is not the same both dreams. In "A dangerous construction site," a scene plays out in front of me over again; it's as if I'm reviewing the same point in time on a cosmic DVR. In this dream, it's more of a Groundhog Day-like repetition; I am living out the same experience again and again.

The hallway setting of the repeated scene reminds me, upon waking reflection, of the climactic scene in David Lynch's Inland Empire where Nikki (Laura Dern) kills the Phantom. However, as I recall that scene (and I could be wrong about this), that hallway is quite bright; or if the hallway itself isn't bright, then when the Phantom distorts or when he is shot, I think it was a white background to the scene. David Lynch's work is itself so dreamlike that perhaps it doesn't make sense to try to interpret a personal dream symbol as referring to or derived from an image in a David Lynch movie; probably a more likely explanation for the similarity is a common psychological source for my dream and Lynch's movie imagery (if I may say so without coming off as too much of a Jung partisan, which I am not particularly).