Blue_Opossum

Morning of May 16, 2018. Wednesday.



In my dream, I find myself looking at Facebook. The technology is not rendered correctly. There is a monitor at first, but this dream becomes of the usual “paper technology” type.

I notice a comment on my timeline. It reads, “Stop posting fake pictures” - in reference to real photographs that Zsuzsanna and I had posted of our youngest daughter. This annoys me. I respond by writing, in handwriting with a pen, on a page in a spiral notebook, though somehow also going to my Facebook page, “You are a moron” and “That is our daughter, you moron”. I eventually write a number of longer sentences. He is from another site (a music site for musicians) that I used to post on that no longer exists, though in my dream, there is also a vague composite association with a classmate from the 1970s and who is also on my friend’s list.

In actuality, the poster is fictitious and not realistically based on a real person on my friend’s list. His username in my dream is “beasts” (written exactly as such in lowercase and plural for some reason), which I see written clearly several times (even though print is most often not consistent in the dream state). There is a vague association with a real poster by a different name, but he has never been confrontational in this way.

By the end of my dream, it continues to follow the same typical association with computer technology being rendered on paper, yet somehow working with the Internet. I flip through the pages of my spiral notebook, looking at other instances of when he made comments on other people’s posts, and which the paper somehow “refreshes” the comments without my dream self discerning the impossible erroneous association. It also has the usual “activation” by sweeping or pressing my finger on the page as if on an iPhone.

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This is the usual thinking skills correlation as waking process autosymbolism. I even had a carryover to my dream of the next day (“Pet Brontosaurus and Fake Mad Magazine?”), where my subconscious self perceives a Mad Magazine as fake, which, because it is the dream state, is indeed “fake” when compared with the consistent validity of waking life. The influence may also come from the rough association with a real poster calling Facebook “Fakebook”.

Curiously enough, I was, as is often the case, vaguely aware while in my dream of the RAS factor and its personification as the otherwise fictitious Facebook user “beasts” (as the RAS function is often also rendered as a wild animal depending on the dream, its core form being a snake). Somehow though, this unusual type of synaptic gating did not entail lucidity of any kind. In dreams, I am often aware of the presence of RAS or the preconscious (and even the meaning of a dream’s autosymbolism while still in the dream, as distinct from hypnopompic disclosure) and it almost always has the same mood and essence as in early childhood. Yet curiously, this is often not enough to trigger in-dream awareness of the dreaming status itself (though does sometimes serve as such).

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Morning of June 11, 2017. Sunday.



My wife Zsuzsanna and our children as we are now are at a carnival, though curiously, a group of people are in our house at one point (mostly in our lounge room) who are apparently waiting to enter another area. I do not see them as imposers and even consider how there are not that many people around. There is the typical ambiguity of the setting being an unlikely essence of indoors and outdoors at the same time, a common factor of my dreams since early childhood.

A photographer is present in a few different scenes. He reminds me of Al, the Italian manager of a pawn shop in La Crosse, who I have not seen in nearly twenty-five years.

Although some of the photographs he takes seem okay, many are very poorly done, often cutting off the person’s face below the nose. I have the strong impression that the photographs he takes that turn out well are the result of random coincidence.

Zsuzsanna and I sit to the right of an unknown family. I sit to Zsuzsanna’s right. I assume the photographer is going to take a few good photographs of the scene. However, when I look at them later, I see that my face is only visible above the mouth and in one photograph, the one I look at the longest, both my eyes are closed. I show Zsuzsanna and relate my opinion of this photographer as not being very good. I notice in the last photograph, my right eye is closed and my left eye is open.

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The photographer is of course this dream’s personified preconscious. He is not really confrontational here as in many other dreams. The purpose of the personified preconscious is to initiate the waking transition and in some cases, as here, to give evidence that the dreamer is dreaming. The subliminal anticipation of the hypnopompic jerk is only one of several factors in this waking symbolism. The preconscious is more of a biological necessity, though not always personified (for example, is sometimes an animal, sometimes an event or feature of a setting, but always fairly obvious if one understands dreams). The nature of how the preconscious waking factor is rendered, and what character plays the role in a particular dream, sometimes seems completely random. However, looking more deeply, there is usually more than one layer.

In this case, the photographer is played by a man who worked at a checkout. A checkout is a form of liminal space waking symbolism. (The analogy is that a person is done shopping and ready to return home as akin to leaving the dream state, or “checking out of the dream state”.) This type of hybrid characterization, though always unique, has occurred in thousands of my dreams, with the same waking symbolism and implications.

It is not that common for me as my personified subconscious (temporary fictional dream self) to be The Sleeper. This element is typically projected as something else, even faulty technology. In the last photograph, one of my eyes is open, which is an emergent consciousness factor. (My mouth is not visible in the photographs as I cannot speak coherently while sleeping.) Zsuzsanna and I are oriented in my dream as we are in bed in reality (that is, she is to my left). There seem to be a few types of instinctual dreaming (non-lucid dream control). In addition to the state where the dreamer knows he is making the dream (and yet does not even remember or know what a dream is), there is the state as here, where the dreamer is more passive to events, yet where there is the subliminal knowledge of being asleep but not direct or creating viable lucidity. There is also a sort of halfway point when I am next to Zsuzsanna, my dream attaining real environmental orientation while still within the dream state (more common and sustained in my childhood dreams).

Of course, a carnival symbolizes the dream state itself (that is, a place not relevant to the usual day-to-day reality, though my family had been to one recently).

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Morning of May 2, 2013. Thursday.

My family and I as we are now are living in a composite house which seems to be a mix of my Cubitis home in Florida, my sister Marilyn’s Loomis Street house in Wisconsin, and Gellibrand and Stadcor Streets here in Australia where my wife Zsuzsanna and our children and I have lived. Our house has two storeys like the Loomis Street house. Presently, it seems to be nighttime. I become aware that an unknown man in a car had been looking up at our house towards our second floor for several minutes. He seems to be a suspicious character. However, he turns out to be a pest control professional. He tells us that our house is being eaten by some sort of worm called a “millimau”, which is possibly a distortion of “millipede” (which is what they resemble), and “maw” for mouth. The male shows me pictures of them in a book he brought.

My wife Zsuzsanna is apparently going to take care of the payment for the removal, and a large machine of some sort is left in our house. I am curious, so I push a couple buttons on this unfamiliar machine and it turns out that it is (or serves as) some sort of very large cash register that automatically adds up supposed pest control services. The very long list of costs comes out showing something like $890.00 total. There seem to be three different printers in the device that all print out duplicates copies of the bill on a long receipt, which is like a grocery store receipt. Zsuzsanna seems a little sad and expresses that she feels cheated over it all. The price of printing the three dockets is also added to the bill, including rental of the machine. We are also annoyed as It turns out that our house has no bugs or worms of any kind at all.

Later, the man comes back in with his co-workers to talk about the removal of the millimau, which now seems to be a trick to stealthily rob our house while pretending to get rid of vermin. I clearly say, “Eh, none of that here”. I throw up my right arm, and they fall back, shrink, and merge into a stack of older photographs (mostly of open city areas) sitting on a corner of a box near our kitchen, with some of the photographs flying across the room and going under furniture and appliances, such as our refrigerator, mostly upside-down. Zsuzsanna is concerned about the mess, but we can “stack” the trapped people later but maybe just toss them into our fireplace or hold them over a candle. We become romantic and I make loving comments.