When I was eight years old I had a surreal dream where I was outside of my house and people were walking, kids were riding bikes etc and then a fog came down and time stopped. I wandered around my neighborhood for what felt like 45 minutes or so looking at everything frozen mid-motion. Birds stopped in flight without falling or even people who were just sitting on their porch smoking a cigarette with embers still glowing and even the smoke itself was staying in place. I began walking the sidewalk to my house and noticed movement. As I got closer I notices a man in white robes, with a long flowing beard with long white hair sitting there with all four of my pets (two cats and two dogs) around him and everyone was perfectly at peace. He waved to me to get my attention and then pointed out to the street. The wall of fog had in an instant engulfed all my neighbors houses across the street and then receded back to reveal several sets of stairs leading up further into the fog bank. I had the notion come over me that I could walk into that place and never come back but it came to me without fear or any sense of dread. I considered people I would leave behind and how they would react and waved my hand across the fog like closing a door and in that instant everything was back to normal. I sat straight up in bed and opened my eyes. It felt like my eyes had to adjust from being outside in the sunlight to the darkness of my bedroom in the earliest hours of morning. I've never had any kind of crystal clear explanation of it but all the imagery stayed fresh in my mind. It could have even been part of a kind of mental awakening I had gone through then. It was about then same time that I began to see the world differently than I had before and took some of my first steps to walking away from childhood.