Accompanied by no other dreams I could remember, this happened every night for a two months.
I was five years old.
.
Seen in third person, I was encased in a scaled-down, child-sized shipping cargo container with dimensions 2 inches longer than my height, and 2 inches wider than the back of my skull to my nose. The gap just emphasized the space, because I could move, but only barely. The container had no way of opening, as if it had been cast as a solid piece around me.
I simultaneously perceived myself inside a box, saw a sort of cut-away diagram of myself inside a rectangle, and felt what the self trapped inside was feeling. Recursively, the self inside the box witnessed what the observer saw. An iterative mixture of helpless panic and panicked, angry empathy.
The scene was as noiseless as humanly possible (the overarching high pitch of the nervous system and my body’s bloodrush as the only audible elements, multiplied and just out of sync as heard by my self trapped and myself observing) I even thought of my third-person self as being incapable of emitting noise. I had silent thoughts.
The view panned out and a cargo crane was lowering my box into a seemingly endless, building expanse of such boxes. The machines operated themselves, and the stack of rigel-sized boxes extended downwards and away from the view, receding into the nebulous absence of light (more dark than darkness.)
As “my” box nearly lands in place, another few closing in to bury mine forever, I would sit straight up, heart pounding, gasping for air, feeling just as panicked as both victim and observer within the dream.