A dream journey

The question I will start with is; do you believe your unconscious mind can journey to other realities? Other places? String theory, if I understand some of it correctly, might say this is possible. Of course there are a great many physicists that say that string theory is garbage so who knows. Artists and writers and mystics have for centuries, also said that dream journeys are possible. Here is my experience.
A few months ago I was getting ready to sleep. My preparations on this particular night included meditating on taking a dream journey. I allowed my mind to accept that I was going to take a journey while slept that would help me write a horror novel I was working on. My mental process only accepted the journey as real with no possibility that it was not. The way you might look at a car driving at you and think, “I have to get out of the way”, never considering for a second that the car might not be real. If the mind can see a possibility that something may not exist then there is doubt. If there is doubt; the dream journey will not happen. So I slept with the understanding that some form of my consciousness was going to travel somewhere else and I would be safe while I was there. I would be invisible and incorporeal. And I would return safely.
I fell asleep.
There was a sense of my eyes coming into focus. I could see and I could hear. A soft dripping of water on concrete. The smell of a humid basement during a wet spring. Water stains running down flat cement walls. There is a light bulb hanging by a cord from the ceiling. A man, shirtless with his head drooping, is tied with his hands behind his back in a chair. I am experiencing this from an elevated position.
I watch this man tied into this chair and then I hear a door open. It is steel scraping on the hard surface of the floor. I look to my left, if that is possible in this incorporeal state. There is a man wearing a long rubber or vinyl apron that hangs to his shins. It is black and stained. He wears gloves of the same plastic material. He is carrying pliers, some sort of pliers. There is a stainless steel table next to the prisoner with stainless steel implements on it.
The thin man with the balding pate and the pliers approaches the man in the chair. He grabs the man’s hair with a “day at work” efficiency, pulls his head back and plunges the pliers into the man’s mouth.
The prisoner starts to scream. He sounds like a patient in a dentist’s chair. I can hear the cracking of the teeth as the aproned torturer works the tooth or teeth back and forth. The screaming is awful and the man with the pliers doesn’t hesitate. There is a crack and a pop and the metal tool is pulled from the screaming man’s mouth with the flourish of a conductor at the finish of a symphony. A long string of blood and spit stretches from the mouth to the teeth pinched in the tool’s metal jaws. It stretches and stretches till it snaps and sticks to the black shining apron. Blood is pouring down the bound man’s chin.
My astral body, or dream mind is terrified. Terrified that the man with the tools might turn and see me. Might have a way to keep me here. But he doesn’t. He is focused on his work. And somehow I know that my preparations before sleep will keep me safe in this place.
He picks up a long thick bladed knife off of the stainless steel tray. Again he takes the man by the hair and pulls his head up. Again there is the efficiency of a butcher working with a roast. He takes the knife to right corner of the prisoner’s mouth and makes a confident cut into the taught flesh. The cut runs back and back all the way to the hinge of the jaw. The bound man screams but it is all from his throat. He can’t work his mouth anymore. Can’t open it or close it. And the blood is pouring down his chin covering his chest. The butcher moves the blade to the other side of his victim’s mouth.
The other man is tied and his eyes are wide with pain and helpless terror. I don’t know why these men are in this relationship. I don’t know if they know. But the victim is screaming and staring and the dim light bulb light makes grey shadows on the grey and stained walls. And there is pain and fear in the man’s begging wide eyes.
The man with the apron and the rubber gloves cuts with his sharp knife into the other cheek. He slices a straight and even line through the prisoner’s flesh. There is screaming and the smell of blood and the crimson flow of it down his chin. The man with the knife puts his tool back on to his tray so that it lies parallel with the straight shining edge. He turns back to the screaming man.
I am watching with terror and I want to leave now. I want to return to my bed. To my reality. And I start to feel movement. But it is too late. The torturer has already turned back to the helpless prisoner tied in the chair with his screams and his blood rolling down his chin. The torturer reaches his right rubber gloved hand inside of the prisoner’s mouth. He grasps the back of the bound man’s head by the hair and tightens his grip on the grisly lower jaw. The tall thin aproned man snaps down on the jaw with a twist of his hips. The bottom jaw snaps down and with a twist of the wrist, off. The screaming is all from the throat now. There is no mouth left. The skull has been disassembled. The victim’s eyes are the last thing I see as I leave this place. His eyes that are filled with pain, so much pain. Leaving only enough room for the understanding that the aproned man isn’t done yet. There is more. And there is nothing he can do to stop it.
When I wake up I am sure that it was not a nightmare. I am sure I have been to another place. Another reality. A terrible place. I was not a hero. I wasn’t trying to think of how to save that man, only how to save myself. How to not see what was going to happen next. And I knew it was not a dream. How did I know? I just did. It was knowledge without any physical proof? So the question is, did I take a dream journey? I know I haven’t really tried since. Or was it just a nightmare? And if it was, what is a nightmare? What is consciousness? Have you ever taken a dream journey? Write about it here. We are all friends. Don’t be shy.