Blue_Opossum

Morning of December 19, 2019. Thursday.

Dream #: 19,358-02. Reading time (optimized): 2 min.



My dream results in reticular activating system sleep-wake mediation in a literal sense in this experience. Although I am in a bed, it is in a spacious unfamiliar business office. I am not tired or sleepy and had (in real life) gone to sleep earlier than usual.

The first sleep-wake mediation personification is an unfamiliar woman, about sixty years old, sitting at a desk to my right. (The process typically begins on my right, the side more exposed to environmental sounds as I sleep.) Her desk is a few feet from my bed and facing me. Over time, I become slightly puzzled by the situation, but my dream self does not register it as illogical or intrusive. Still, I instinctually initiate wall mediation by using clothespins to put up curtains between my bed and her desk. At first, one of my curtains falls on her, and she complains. Eventually, she puts up curtains as well, and there is a space of about three feet between my curtains and hers.

My waking-life identity is now more emergent (as it typically is as a result of wall mediation, which brings my dream self closer to liminality) and I realize that Zsuzsanna is sleeping in a canoe on the other side of the room to my left (as she sleeps on my left in reality, and most dreams render this factor correctly). I think I should be with her even though there may not be much space. (Despite the instinctual association with dream state reinduction with the canoe, there is no presence of water or wetness in this experience.)

I go over and get into the canoe. Another canoe is upside-down over the top of the first. I enjoy being with Zsuzsanna, and although there is an increase in my perception of imaginary physicality, there is no discomfort in the restricted space. (We are in the correct orientation, though our heads are in the opposite direction as mine was at the beginning of my dream.)

Later, an unfamiliar teenage boy gets into the canoe. After a short time, the secretary (still on the other side of the room), calls someone to come and get him. He is supposedly a juvenile delinquent, but I had not seen him as threatening.

Zsuzsanna and I are soon standing in the room. There is a sense of peace. I watch her go to the door that opens to outside. An unknown man, only in shadow, remaining in the doorway, calls her by the wrong name (Laura), but she responds with unknown information of some kind. (Wrong names occur in my dreams to signify how the dream self is not a viable model of waking-life; obvious, as my dreams never render valid memories.)

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The use of a virtual door into or out of the dream state in sleep-wake mediation is common, and this is mediated by cortical arousal personification by way of preconscious simulacra and the reticular activating system. However, Zsuzsanna responding to this process rather than my dream self is intriguing.

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Morning of October 31, 2018. Wednesday.

Dream #: 18,944-03. Reading time: 1 min 48 sec. Readability score: 72.



I lose my conscious self identity in a later water reinduction stage. I am still in a canoe that is floating through a marsh, probably Mink Slough. Two unfamiliar children are with me, a boy and a girl. I am young as well, though possibly about eighteen.

The water seems shallower at one point. There is much vegetation protruding from the water’s surface. The plants are multicolored, that is, different colors in different sections. Someone had coated all the dried-up leaves with a few different colors of spray paint, including blue, red, and yellow. I consider that it was a thoughtless act, as it will likely cause environmental problems.

Eventually, we reach the bank and leave the canoe. The King Street landlady has given the children a task to build what I first think is a rabbit cage. (This is an association with early childhood, as my father had a rabbit farm.) There are pieces of wood, screen, and wire to use to build the cage. They are in a pile near the south end of the King Street house. I decide that I will help, but the boy had already built a cage when I pick up a few random boards.

In the last scene, I am in the King Street mansion’s kitchen. There is a birdcage where the sink was in real life. The boy may have been cleaning the cage already, as when he leaves the room, there is birdseed stuck all over his face. He does not seem to care.

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Curiously, the last scene was from a minimal thought while watching “Cargo” (2017) last night, when the girl Thoomi was eating something and got seeds or crumbs stuck on her lips and face. I have always found it astounding how the non-lucid dream self can take one fleeting impersonal trivial thought and make it part of a dream scenario. The movie was about zombies, and yet I have never dreamt of zombies in the apocalyptic sense. (In a dream from 1981, they were based on the original usage of the term as slow-moving sleepwalking slaves, but were revealed to be actors.) I think it is because of how they move so unnaturally in such movies when my reticular formation and vestibular system mostly only create fluid movements in dreams. That, and it is difficult to imagine very sick people as being stronger or faster than healthy people.

The common melatonin mediation factor appears here (as occurs one or more times each sleep cycle). It starts with water induction and ends with vestibular system correlation (the boy in the kitchen as the vestibular simulacrum leaving the birdcage - and note how the birdcage was where the sink was in reality).

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Morning of April 8, 1998. Wednesday.



My wife Zsuzsanna and I own some sort of large game, which is as long as one side of the Gellibrand Street kitchen (the side with the internal door, the north wall), where a toy canoe goes across a conveyor-belt-like mechanism that simulates a journey by river where you have to gather a few things worth points as well as go around areas that come up from trapdoors in the “river” (playing field), such as (toy) alligators. I suppose in some ways it is like a real-life mechanical version of a computer game. The game seems mostly made of plastic with metal features. Gears cause different things to come up out of the simulated water imagery.

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Morning of October 1, 1967. Sunday.



I am on my own, possibly in late morning, in a drifting canoe, going southward over a river (the Hillsborough River) in a swamp in Florida that looks like a part of Lettuce Lake Park.

On the banks of the river are very tall cypress trees. There seem to be continuous tall vertically stretched faces of which are superimposed against the trees, but are likely not meant to be the trees themselves, more like a ghostly presence or a strange optical illusion, similar to a funhouse mirror effect.

A few of the faces seem wary of my presence, even though I am a young child, with mouths open, though there is no certainty at some points that they are aware of me. There is a bluish green hue on everything at times. The closely clustered faces, as well as being stretched from ground to treetop and very narrow in appearance, also seem to waver very slowly at times, or have a bend near the middle of the face. They are both male and female, mostly all adults. They are only to my right, near the bank of the river. The faces otherwise do not move much. Despite the eerie imagery, I feel no fear, especially as a few of the faces seem afraid of my presence at times.

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Variations of this dream, both lucid and non-lucid, occurred a number of times from earliest memory. The causes behind this dream are fully known. It developed over the autosymbolic rendering of “drifting into sleep” (spoken mainly by my mother in real life when she was describing my status when I was resting in bed) and mixing the association with drifting in a canoe into a recognized form of dream state induction, which of course has no waking life relevance due to it being a factor of the dream state itself. It is still a major factor of my dreams, water being autosymbolic of the essence of sleep. This dream’s setting was an area my family and I visited in real life when I was very young.

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Morning of July 8, 1973. Sunday.



[I willfully enter into what I consider may be my last dream of the morning. I maintain my lucidity, perhaps only losing a thread or two of my conscious self identity. The essence of my neural activity becomes the more tangible form of water, as it most often does, and the water expands to form a lake. I welcome the presence of female genitalia, and it is rendered as a canoe, which floats on the shimmering lake in mid-afternoon].

I look upon Lake Katherine. The area seems more rural than it is in reality. I gaze upon the beauty of the reflected trees, downwardly mirrored in the lake’s surface around its perimeter.

[I desire female company and physical pleasure, so I choose to become fully integrated within my dream self’s imaginary body.]

I am sitting in the canoe facing my dark-haired green-eyed gypsy dream girl. We begin to become intimate. My sense of touch is augmented. We mostly kiss for several minutes.

[I am enjoying my dream very much. My dream girl is passive and welcoming. I begin to become distracted by some sort of ambiance that extends beyond my will. It sounds somewhat like hissing.]

A large green sea serpent rises up out of the water on my left in somewhat of an “S” shape, hissing at us. It is not that close to the canoe but displaying at least ten feet of its body from the lake’s surface to the top of its head.

[The preconscious is warning me that I need to leave my dream even though I do not want to. Still, the preconscious’s lake denizen is rather silly-looking, modeled after the one in the Carl Barks “No Such Varmint” Donald Duck comic book story, though slightly more realistic and menacing, though I do not feel that threatened because I am lucid.]

I want to be more intimate with my dream girl but upon touching her, the tangibility of her forearm seems to dissipate. My dream world starts to dissolve.

[I float horizontally and upwards, my back downwards, in the higher mental realm of dissipating liminal space, annoyed by my dream being over. I can still hear the hissing to my left. The hissing turns out to be the real sound of the garden hose as my mother is watering the front flower box in real life at this time, some of the water spraying onto my closed jalousie windows.]

My spoiled dream is of no consequence. I married my dark-haired green-eyed gypsy dream girl on April 9, 1994.