My first hypnopompic hallucination, I guess

Last night I dreamt that I was in a forest and encountered some sort of overwhelmingly powerful female presence. She seemed partly human and partly more visually complex and "psychedelic"-looking, somewhat reminiscent of Blake's The Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne.

I don't mean that I saw anything really resembling that picture, just like it in terms of its complexity and the lack of clear boundaries separating each Being from the rest of the scene. Sometimes she was physical enough that I could wrestle with her like Jacob with the angel, and other times she seemed to become vaporous or immaterial. (None of these descriptions can adequately convey what the dream was like, unfortunately.)

I'm used to experiencing a clear sense of either Good or evil when encountering paranormal Beings, but in this case the impression was simply one of immense supernatural power. I couldn't read her spiritually -- she could have been divine, demonic, or anything in between -- and didn't know whether I should see her as a friend or an enemy. I kept asking her, in imperfectly affected King James English, "Woman, who art thou? What wantest thou?" (In true King James English, want can only mean "lack," but I was using it in the modern sense of "What do you want?") She never spoke, whether vocally or telepathically, and my sense was that she was unable to communicate with me in that way. "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." And so my questions remained unanswered, and I remained uncertain as to her fundamental nature or valence, and yet she kept imposing on me her sheer overwhelming presence, causing great psychological stress.

When I woke up, it was like surfacing after a deep-sea dive. I was back in my bed, back in the familiar mundane world -- except, what on earth was that? The light fixture on the ceiling above my bed, which is normally quite simple, was now a very large structure -- broadly spherical but enormously complex and convoluted -- made of what looked like unlacquered brass. Its shape reminded me of Escher's knots and of certain "biblically accurate angel" memes, so I include those images below to give you some idea, but keep in mind that the new light fixture was much more complex than what these pictures depict.

Despite my comparing it to a "biblically accurate angel," there was no sense that this was an intelligent Being. It was just a very complex metal object attached to my bedroom ceiling -- a very complex object, so complex that it did not belong in this world, almost as if it were extended in more dimensions than three.

I lay there staring up at it about 30 seconds, still recovering from an emotionally intense dream and now having to deal with this intrusive bit of alien interior decorating. What was that thing? How on earth did it get onto my ceiling?

And then, with a feeling somewhat like that of a Magic Eye image coming into focus, the impossibly complex tangle of brass transformed back into my familiar light fixture. I had been staring at the brass thing for so long that a purplish afterimage of it persisted for several seconds after it was gone.

There was no sense that I had just woken up for real after previously dreaming that I had woken up. I was awake when I saw that thing on the ceiling, and my state of consciousness did not change in any perceptible way after that.