According to dreammoods.com:

Epic dreams (or Great dreams) are so huge, so compelling, and so vivid that you cannot ignore them. The details of such dreams remain with you for years, as if your dreamt it last night. These dreams possess much beauty and contain many archetypal symbology.  When you wake up from such a dream, you feel that you have discovered something profound or amazing about yourself or about the world. It feels like a life-changing experience.

The last, most recent epic dream I experienced occurred in the mid-nineties. This is also one of my favorite dreams. At the time, there were some real-life circumstances that obviously contributed to some aspects of the dream. My friends Oliver, Stacy and Craig had just moved into one of the houses on Boone's famous "Hippie Hill", 2 doors down from mine. During the moving-in process, they had discovered a bunch of boxes filled with various items left behind by many of the previous tennants, dating back decades. I was over there with them, looking through these boxes and noting how one of the basement walls was simply earthen, part of the mountain itself. This is what inspired the setting of my dream.

The Ship in the Mountain

As the dream begins, I'm helping my friends move into their new house near mine. During the moving-in process, we wander down into the basement to explore what is there. While marvelling at the boxes filled with abandoned pieces of the lives of others, we noticed what appears to be a trickle of blood coming from the earthen wall of the basement. It is important to note that, in this dream, my friend moving into the house actually looks just like former NBA all-star Larry Johnson.

For the purposes of this story, I'll refer to him as "LJ".

After noticing the blood, we run upstairs and rush outside. We stop a police officer who was passing by and tell him of what we found. He follows us into the basement to investigate. Upon returning to the basement with the cop, we begin to probe and investigate the earthen wall that the blood seems to be coming from. At one point, something triggers a secret door, and the wall slides open, revealing a passageway. This wasn't just your run-of-the-mill hallway, or even a rough-hewn cave passage. No, this was an organic, seemingly living tube of of fleshy red, bleeding material. It was what a blood vessel may look like to a blood cell that is traveling through it. Against what may seem like better judgement, we decided to explore this passageway. Upon taking a few steps forward on the springy, spongy, bleedy floor, in true horror movie fashion, the doorway slammed shut behind us. Almost immediately, the police officer is sucked into the wall, seemingly absorbed by it. For some reason, LJ and I are not frightened by these events. It is common for me to not be frightened by things that seemingly should be frightening when I'm dreaming, so this is a common theme. Unable to exit back out the way we came in, LJ and I have little choice but to press on forward. After a short while, LJ suddenly is sucked into the floor, vanishing from sight. Now I am on my own. I continue forward, bolstered more by curiousity than fear. During the lengthy exploration that follows, I am constantly pricked by needle-like objects that extend from the wall, I'm hit with tiny darts, and they seem to have injected me with something. After several of these prickings, I notice my fingertips becoming sticky. When I press my fingers together, they stick, and when I force them apart, some skin falls away. It's as though my skin is being dissolved, digested perhaps. It isn't painful, and it again arouses more curiousity than fear. I also notice that where my skin was pulled away, tiny wires are protruding from my fingertips.

Eventually, I come to an opening. It seems to be a cavern, but once my eyes adjust to the light, I realize that it is far too vast to be any natural cavern. I'm in a vast chamber with a ceiling hundreds of feet above my head, that extends for hundreds of feet to the right and left, and further than I can see straight ahead of me. The doorway opens up to a large platform that spans the width of the cavern, but ends in an abrupt drop-off about 100 feet ahead of me. In awe, I wander out to the center of the platform. From either extreme edge of the platform, to the left and right, an immense bar extends out diagonally towards the center of the great opening beyond the drop-off. They come together several hundred feet in front of the platform, and support an immense silvery-yet-at-the-same-time-clear sphere. Its surface seems to swirl and rotate, but it also seems to be perfectly still. At this point, LJ reappears. "Where did you go?", I ask him. "I'm not sure, I blacked out. But when I woke back up, a voice told me that I was supposed to help you, and the next thing I know I'm here", he replied. At this point, we both look down and notice that we're standing in the center of a great circular seal-symbol on the floor. At that very moment, the symbol rotates slightly, and the circle of the floor within it begins to descend, us with it, like a huge elevator. When the descent is complete, we find ourselves in a large "control room". There are all sorts of windows, monitor-screens, and flashing lights. We then realize that this entire structure is an immense spaceship that is hidden beneath the mountain, and had to have been here for thousands, if not millions, of years.

At this point I hear a soothing female voice say to me, "This is a ship, and you have been chosen to be it's pilot."
"I don't understand", I replied, "I don't know anything about piloting a ship. Where are the controls?"
"The controls are within you." The voice replied.

At that moment, I looked at my hands. More of my skin had melted away, revealing more wires. Then, the wires started to extend out of my fingers, and more wires began to sprout from all over my body, enveloping me in a sort of cocoon of circuitry. Then the cavern's ceiling began to crack and fall away, revealing the sky above. The earth trembled, the mountain shook and crumbled, and the ship began to rise.

Then I woke up.

This is why I wish I could remember my dreams more often.