When dreams become so realistic

The hand of Atlas in Final Fantasy XIII-2

Have you ever had a dream that seemed so realistic that you have you actually think as to whether it really happened? I personally have had many of those. One time recently. I had a dream about a giant hand in the sky. The hand somehow had a name. It was called Atlus. That hand had symbols etched all over it. Those symbols seemed to glow at about sunset everyday. In the dream, I was with my brother. We were at the bottom of my street trying to save little kids' basketballs from rolling down the hill and into the water. What was strange about it was that my street look almost identical to the real one. Only thing was that the bottom of the street had a shoreline like a beach. Very sandy and rocky. When I threw a ball back up the hill to a kid, I walked up the hill with them and then I noticed the hand in the background. It was daytime so it wasn't glowing. The moment I reached halfway up the hill It started to glow an orange hue around the circle on the back of the hand and what seemed like circles around the fingers. All of a sudden, it started moving slowing up further in the sky as if it was mobilizing. It even seemed to be causing what felt like magnitude 2 earthquakes. When I walked up the hill, I immediately yelled to the top of my lungs "Everybody get inside now!" Of course all of the kids didn't want to listen but once I pointed as to why, they began dropping everything and sprinting indoors. When I got indoors with my brother, it seemed as if the house was "safe zone". We stopped feeling the earthquakes but as we would look out the windows the hand was still moving closer to the house. Another strange thing about that was that as soon as we saw it moving, I woke up and a new day broke dawn.

Statue of the Greek Titan Atlas

As you may have noticed, I was somehow able to give a vast amount of detail for a dream I had 3 days ago. But that was because it felt so real until I woke up. When I woke up, my immediate thought was to do some research on the various things that happened in it. First, I looked up Atlus. My findings were astounding to me. Atlas (yes, it can be spelled different ways) is actually a Greek Titan. He had 3 brothers, one of which was named Prometheus. What's even more interesting about that is that I watched Prometheus the movie that very day earlier. So it's no wonder the name and sheer size was a match. But that wouldn't explain the hand shape. The hand actually derives from a boss in a game called Final Fantasy XIII-2. In it, the boss is named Atlas, and when you first encounter it, it seems like a dormant hand colossal in size. Until it mobilizes and starts to move.

It is true that dreams derive from past actions, sights, smells, and thoughts. So me having this dream was no random coincidence. It seems my brain/mind tried to connect my movie, with a game I had played a year earlier to form this titan-like figure. When I told my sister about it, she brought up a good point that I hadn't thought about. She said that the symbolism between me having these types of dreams could be related to how I feel like I have to constantly be protecting someone. So again, that would make sense because I had to protect those people by telling them to stay indoors so they wouldn't get hurt. But another question follows. What do dreams mean? Are they a sign for something? I delve deeper in the next post.

"Atlas (mythology)." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 13 Apr. 2013. Web. 10 Apr. 2013.

"Atlas (Final Fantasy XIII-2)." Final Fantasy Wiki. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Apr. 2013. <http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Atlas_(Final_Fantasy_XIII-2)>.